As a current premed student at Chicago, soon to apply to med schools, I will be biased and vouch for UChicago’s premed experience, which I feel receives a lot of undue criticism. I’ve looked up some data on other schools, which is referenced not to bash those schools but instead to highlight the quality of what UChicago has to offer. This doesn’t help resolve the cost issue or the to-be-or-not-to-be premed dilemma, but I hope to establish UChicago as a solid choice for anyone looking to be premed.
The premed career advising office, UChicago Careers in Health Professions (UCIHP), is solid gold. Several of the advisers are former admissions officers at top medical schools (Pritzker and Yale) and draw on a wealth of experience reading top-notch applications to properly advise students. One of the advisors currently sits as President of the National Association of Health Professions Advisors, which is no small honor. Additionally, we have 4 advisors dedicated full-time to premed advising, which combined with the slightly smaller premed population at Chicago means that students rarely have trouble scheduling appointments with their advisor. This is in marked contrast with several peer institutions - for reference, Harvard and Yale have only 2 and 1 premed advisors serving much larger premed populations. UCIHP has a huge budget, sponsoring several lecture series and numerous competitive summer internships. To keep things short, I’ve linked a UCIHP brochure here:
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/pdfs/uci_health_professions.pdf
Regarding coursework: yes, it is not easy, but the days of grade deflation are long gone. You will get A’s in your core courses with a modicum of effort, and science classes are very doable, especially the upper level electives. One thing most premed discussions fail to consider is the importance of rec letters, which play an outsize role in med school admissions once past the interview stage. Smaller class sizes in core HUM/SOSC and upper level science courses facilitate closer interactions with the professor and ultimately stronger letters of recommendation. To echo what has been said above, getting involved with research is extremely easy and the hospital is literally on the other side of the street, letting students shadow physicians and volunteer easily. There is a lot of institutional funding for more or less anything undergrads would like to do, from founding and running clubs to supporting summer research to making health-related internships accessible exclusively to UChicago students through the Jeff Metcalf program and the alumni network.
I can’t speak to anything about Berkeley but I would hazard that it doesn’t offer a similar degree of support for its premeds. I have several UChicago friends in medical school, and each of them say how easy med school is in comparison to undergrad, which is something I have never heard from students of any other university and is a testament to rigor of the undergrad curriculum. This may not be published, but I have confirmation from the UCIHP office that the med school admit rate last year was 80-85%, close to Ivy Peers and certainly higher than Berkeley according to their self-published data:
https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/MedStats/Annual-Acceptance-Rates-by-Year.pdf