Medical students’ educational strategies in an environment of prestige hierarchies of specialties and diseases

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this paper aims to understand whether and how a reproduction of the status hierarchy of medical specialties and diagnoses occurs within a medical school in a North European context as well as students’ educational strategies given the hierarchy. We report data from a cross-sectional survey conducted on a sample of Danish medical students. The 289 respondents ranked diseases and specialities, based on how they believed most health personnel would rank them. In addition, 18 in-depth interviews with medical students were conducted. Comparing the ranking responses of early, mid and late phase students, the analysis tracks the gradual convergence and broad agreement around a hierarchy. The paper concludes that medical school is a highly competitive field of higher education, where distinction is invested in and reproduced by curricular knowledge. This distinction is reinforced within wider structural elements such as governmental educational policies.