<p>Look, I'll believe anything where we can find an official source, but Internet board gossip should be sourced if external viewers are going to believe it, too.</p>
<p>I would have assumed that a hypothetical top five would HYP, Williams, and Amherst. Wouldn't have been surprised to see Davidson. To ask anybody to keep track of every university in the country -- and then adjust for quiet screening, since you get all kinds of ridiculous programs claiming 95%+ -- is a little much to accept, though.</p>
<p>I really don't understand all the hostility going on with this thread. It has been discussed ad nauseum that acceptance rates are a very poor measure of a school's premed program because of things like silent screens and intense weedout classes. Arguing whether one school or not is in the top-whatever for acceptance rate is just silly, and the numbers can be massaged by the school to say many different things, depending on the group of students included (rising seniors, alums, grad students, etc.).</p>
<p>Regarding Brown, I think it an excellent place for premed, but due to the open curriculum and LAC-feel rather than any claimed acceptance rate (which is likely to be inflated because they have a combined MD program and a relatively small premed population compared to peer schools). I find it hard to believe that Brown is even in the top 5 in published acceptance rate among peer schools, let alone nation wide. Harvard is at 93, Hopkins usually at 90-something; Penn, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale usually hover in the mid to high 80's, and that doesn't even mention some of the top LACs, which i'm sure are also incredibly high.</p>
<p>And yeah, any school claiming that 95% of their students get accepted into one of their top 3 choices is beyond insane, I don't think you'll find anyone who has actually applied to med school thinking that claim is legit. I would be utterly shocked if 95% even got an interview from one of their top 3 choices, even at Harvard.</p>
<p>The main point though, is that things like advising, research opportunities, hospital access, and campus organizations are much more important factors in determining what makes a school good for premed.</p>
<p>Stanford's acceptance rate into med schools is mid 70's; I believe it's not one of the top five (because its rate is inexplicably low). Duke's is around 85% (they told us at Blue Devil Days). Yale's is 94-96%, on average (I know this as a fact, because I attend and this is what they tell us). I don't think Penn is in the top 5, but that one I'm not so sure about. I know for a fact that Harvard, Yale, and Brown are in the top 5. The other two may include Princeton and/or liberal arts college(s).</p>
<p>I've been trying to explain that I don't think any such "top five" list exists. How on earth could you possibly travel across all 2500 schools and quantify this number? How do you correct for screening, both explicit and implicit? How do you adjust for highly self-selecting populations? I'd be shocked (and, I suppose, impressed) if anybody actually had such a list and could support it -- and I am still waiting for somebody to produce it.</p>
<p>All previous lists I have seen -- all propagated by Internet board gossip -- have included Stanford, which (as rd points out) means they cannot possibly be correct.</p>
<p>PSAS is also, of course, correct that such a list would not be meaningful anyway. So this rumored list is unverified, incorrect, impossible to construct, and not useful even if it existed and was correct. And yet I keep seeing allusions to it anyway.</p>
<p>There are plenty of LAC's that claim 82%+ acceptance rates so I don't think Brown or anyone can conclusively conclude that they are in the Top 5. This all goes back to how silly it is to argue about what's in the top 5 and what's not. 82% is good. Let's leave it at that.</p>
<p>I'd be interested in seeing if Stanford's acceptance rate is indeed in the mid-70's, as that does seem strangely low for a school that has a reputation as such a preprofessional powerhouse. My point was not to try and say which school's were or were not in the 'top five,' in fact I think it is pretty clear that my post was intended to cast aspersions on the idea of such a ranking. I only even mentioned names to demonstrate that it was pretty easy to come up with five well-known schools with rates above that claimed by Brown (again, not to take anything away from their claims, it's a great program), which holds true for all of the schools I mentioned with the possible exception of Stanford (Princeton makes their data publicly available, and as a Penn grad, I can say that their rate is generally between 85 and 89% from year to year).</p>
<p>I would be curious if GoldShadow could verify the Yale numbers, which seem very high for a school I have never heard of screening and is not known as a premed hot spot, regardless of the calibur of its students. My guess would be that it may have something to do with year to year variability and a relatively small number of applicant. Schools like Penn, Harvard, and Cornell, where 300 people per year apply to med school, are likely to have more stable numbers from year to year, whereas some of the more LAC-y or humanities-oriented schools with a smaller premed population. I don't know enough about Yale undergrad to definitively assert that this is a reason, but as an extreme example i remember a while ago there was talk about Swarthmore posting an absurdly high acceptance rate, but it turned out that less than 10 people applied to med school that year, and many of those were alumni who had taken time off.</p>
<p>I can confirm that Stanford's rate was 75% two years ago; numerous friends of mine who are Stanford undergrads as well as Celestial (a poster here) have confirmed that more recently. I believe GS is at UConn, though I could be wrong.[</p>
<p>Stanford's advising is not generally very popular, but the more important "problem" for Stanford is that so many of their students apply to UC medical schools. That's definitely not Stanford's fault.</p>
<p>phillySASer08, Yale's numbers are fairly consistent. The 94-96% is the average rate over the last few years. In 2006, 90-95% of first year applicants from Yale were accepted into a medical school (Yale Daily News article). I don't know why you suggest that Yale has a relatively small number of premeds, as premed is immensely popular at Yale (200+ applicants each year). The proportion of premeds at Yale is not significantly different than at Yale's peer institutions.</p>
<p>It's just that our advising is exceptionally strong. Undergraduate Career Services provides numerous advisers that meet with students individually as often as they'd like. Yale also provides binders and binders of statistics of all past med school acceptances, listing each undergrad's GPA (science and non science) and MCAT, as well as to what schools each student applied and to which schools each student was accepted. The advising really helps students when picking which schools to apply to, as well as how to prepare in terms of extracurriculars, obtaining LORs, and finding faculty to do research with.</p>