Best Colleges for Getting into Med School

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
1

Hello. There are numerous threads on here about which college would give students the best chance of getting into medical school. I would like to address this topic with this post.

The most common way that people judge how good a college is at getting students accepted to medical school is to look at a college’s medical school admissions percentage (i.e. a higher percentage=better chances). However this is a flawed method for judging schools for three reasons (confounding variables):

  1. Different schools have smarter students than others which causes a higher admissions percentage.
  2. Some schools weed out applicants leading to a higher admissions percentage.
  3. Some claim that colleges that inflate GPAs leads to a better chance of admission.
    Therefore, adjusting for these factors I want to address in this post which colleges really improve a students chances of getting into medical school the most compared to peer institutions.

I will begin by making one critical assumption: THE SAME STUDENT would have THE SAME MCAT score whether he/she attended College X or College Y. I know that this is a controversial assumption (that the following argument will be predicated upon) but I think it holds relatively true.

The two main components of med school admission are MCAT score and college GPA. To adjust for different schools grading practices (i.e. grade inflation/deflation. I will simply look at the percentage of students who were from a certain MCAT range (again assuming students with the same MCAT score are equally intelligent and hard working. The following data is what I could gather from schools that released tables of the GPA/MCAT scores of their applicants:

36+
Washington University in St. Louis 91%
Emory 84%
NATIONALLY 83%
Cornell 82%
UC LA 82%
U Michigan 80%
UT Austin 79%
UC Berkeley 78%

33-35
Washington University in St. Louis 80%
Cornell 78%
UT Austin 75%
Michigan 74%
NATIONALLY 73%
Emory 71%
UC Berkeley 70%
UC LA 66%

30-32
UT Austin 67%
Washington University in St. Louis 65%
Cornell 65%
Emory 64%
NATIONALLY 59%
U Michigan 57%
UC LA 55%
UC Berkeley 54%

27-29
Washington University in St. Louis 53%
Vanderbilt 47%
U Michigan 46%
UC Berkeley 45%
UC LA 45%
Emory 44%
Cornell 40%
UT Austin 40%
NATIONALLY 39%

24-26
Washington University in St. Louis 39%
UT Austin 38%
Cornell 30%
U Michigan 29%
Emory 27%
UC Berkeley 21%
UC LA 20%
NATIONALLY 19%

21-23
Cornell 27%
Washington University in St. Louis 20%
UT Austin 20%
U Michigan 13%
Emory 12%
NATIONALLY 6%
UC LA 0%

Again, these are only a few select schools but it gives a good indication of the general trend. It can be seen that some schools (WashU) give students with equal intelligence (again judging based on MCAT score) a better chance of being accepted than another school would. Also, it can also be seen that UC Berkeley and UC LA students do not gain much advantage at all from attending their respective colleges, it even hurts them slightly at the higher end of scores. That being said for the schools in this list I have created for each MCAT score range the acceptance chance only varies by around 10%, so the difference here is not huge. Let’s take a look at some other schools.

Harvard- Reported to have a 95% acceptance rate for students with 3.5+ GPA. As Harvard has huge grade inflation this indicates that the overall acceptance rate is probably about 95% as well. It also means that there is weeding out of students that would potentially have scored lower on the MCAT. You might think, “Well, Harvard students are just incredibly smart.” While this may be partially true, the average incoming ACT/SAT score for Harvard is roughly equal to that of WashU. So assuming this translates to a roughly equal MCAT score distribution as WashU it means that students with a 33-35 MCAT from Harvard get accepted at a 95% rate, and 36+ almost 100% acceptance. This is way above the national average. So it can be stated that an equally intelligent student attending Harvard gives a much better chance of getting into medical school than going somewhere else.

Other schools with a 90+% acceptance rate are Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. As these schools also have grade inflation, little weeding out, and students of roughly equal intelligence as WashU these schools are also great for getting students into medical school.

To name some other schools MIT, Stanford, U Chicago, Northwestern, Duke, and U Penn all have ~75% acceptance rates. This is the same overall acceptance rate as WashU. These schools also all have about the same intelligence of students as WashU (UChicago and MIT a little higher, Duke a little lower). Therefore, the distribution of acceptances by MCAT score would be roughly the same as WashU. However, students at NU, MIT, and UChicago have a bit more weeding out which means that they may be slightly worse options.

I don’t want to go over every school in the country but here is data on a few more. Brown states they have around an 85% overall acceptance rate. This is higher than UChicago, WashU, NU, and MIT, all of which have smarter students (based on SAT/ACT score). This is likely because Brown has the highest rate of grade inflation in the country. Therefore, Brown is an excellent option for students trying to get into medical school.

Two other schools that are great are Rice and Case Western. Rice boasts a 88% acceptance rate. This is much higher than other similar schools (WashU and Duke) yet the average ACT/SAT of Rice students is roughly the same. Case Western, a school with less intelligent students than those mentioned before, has an 80% acceptance rate, meaning that students often get accepted with lower MCAT scores than schools like WashU. It also gives a lot of merit aid to students with high ACT/SAT scores, which makes it even more attractive.

Johns Hopkins is known for its premed program but in fact does not help students get accepted into medical school better than other institutions. This is because it has a large amount of grade deflation meaning that only 20% of initial premeds end up applying to medical school, making its 85% admissions rate deceptively high.

BOTTOM LINE: If you can get accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Columbia attending these schools will greatly help you get accepted to medical school over other institutions. Getting into Rice or Brown will also improve your chances over a different school. If you cannot get into these schools try to go to Case Western. It is easier to get into, will save you money, and will help your chances of getting accepted. If you do not attend these schools the reality is that the school you attend will not help your chances of getting into medical school in any significant way. Therefore, if you do not get into these schools or do not want to go to them for another reason I would recommend attending your state school. It will save money and with your particular intelligence it will give you a statistically equal chance of getting into a medical school.

P.S. If you have any questions about where I got any particular statistic I would be happy to cite them for you (i.e. post the link to the website where I found it. Also, if you have any other questions I would be happy to answer them.

2

So if you are among the best and brightest high school seniors your chances of being admitted to medical school 4 years later are really good. Fascinating!

3
  1. Beware a college’s published medical school admissions rate. There are so many ways to fudge it that the number can quickly become meaningless. Here are some examples

School A publishes a 95% acceptance rate
100 students desire medical school, 50 are denied a committee letter, 49/50 (95%) get in, but the true admissions rate is actually 49/100 or 49%.

School B publishes a 95% acceptance rate
100 students desire a medical career, only 10 of them are headed to US MD schools. 40 are going to DOs, 25 to foreign MDs, 10 to PA school, 10 to NP school. 95% are headed to “medical school” but only 10% are going to the school you think it is.

School C publishes that 95% of their pre-med students are attending one of their top 3 choices.
95% of students really did get in, but the top 3 thing is based on a questionnaire at the end of the year that asks “of the medical schools that you were ADMITTED to, are you going to one of your top 3 choices.” If you were to have asked at the beginning of the cycle “of the schools that you are APPLYING to, which are your top 3” and then used those answers to calculate the percentage, it would actually be that only 40% are going to one of their top 3 choices.

School D states that 95% of their pre-med students were accepted to medical school.
Of the 100 pre-meds, 50 of them are in a combined BS/MD program. Of the 50 who actually applied to medical school, 20 are going to US MD, 15 are going DO and 10 are going foreign MD. The true acceptance rate for people applying to US MD schools is really 20/50 or 40%.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/1484178-if-you-are-in-high-school-please-read-this-before-posting-p1.html

4

<<<
School D states that 95% of their pre-med students were accepted to medical school.
Of the 100 pre-meds, 50 of them are in a combined BS/MD program. Of the 50 who actually applied to medical school, 20 are going to US MD, 15 are going DO and 10 are going foreign MD. The true acceptance rate for people applying to US MD schools is really 20/50 or 40%.


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Wow. are schools actually including foreign MD and DO schools in their reported data? I thought that they only reported US MD schools. My kid’s undergrad does not include foreign MD or DO admissions.

5

https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/advising/health-careers/medical-admission-data-snapshot

I wouldn’t be surprised if most schools don’t even put the asterisk on the public websites.

6

To TomSrofBoston. What this whole post was about is to break through the confounding variables of med school admission. So while, yes, Harvard Yale Princeton and Columbia do have very smart students, their med school acceptance rate is still higher than it “should be”. By this I mean that if a student with a 30 MCAT went to Princeton he would have a much better chance of getting into med school than if he got a 30 at UC Berkeley. Therefore if a student at Princeton vs UC Berkeley are equally intelligent the student at Princeton would have the better chance.

Also, most of the data I provided in the middle of my original post was from tables provided stating it was the percentage for MD programs. The data that did not explicitly state this was close enough where it can be assumed that is was referring to MD.

7

This data isn’t even remotely robust enough to draw any conclusions.

8

Your focus on the “main components” (aka numbers) and college attended is flawed. Although numbers are indeed important, getting into med school is much more than just numbers and college attended. After numbers, one’s motivation for pursuing medicine and qualities like empathy, altruism, integrity, team player, communication skills, research interest, fulfilling mission statements, etc as evidenced by other parts of one’s application will become increasingly more important than the numbers in deciding whether to offer an applicant an interview. And even with fantastic numbers an applicant who receives and then blows interview (eg you’re rude, arrogant, can’t hold a conversation, etc), could kiss their acceptance at that school good bye. Your college’s name and your numbers won’t save you.

IMO the residency’s Program Directors (PD) survey of factors PDs consider important in deciding to offer interviews (II) and ranking parallels the med school admissions process. You’d think PDs and adcoms are on the same team, have same goal, have similar considerations, yeah? In deciding to offer IIs, PDs first focus on numbers and performance in med school, just like med school adcoms first focus on MCAT, performance in college (aka GPAs). No real surprise in either case. Note that graduating from any US med school is also much more important to PDs than graduating from a well known school. But when looking at how PDs rank applicants, the four most important factors in deciding to rank and several other top ten factors focus on individual personal traits/ motivation, much less on numbers as numbers were why someone, in part, got an interview. There’s no need to keep talking about numbers as numbers become old news, less important, as the process moves forward, even less need to keep talking about applicant’s college, as other factors become more important. Similarly, are GPAs/MCATs important to med school adcoms? Yes. “Main components” of med school admission. No, especially as the process moves forward. And so although the college an applicant attends is not of zero importance, med schools have much more to consider before offering IIs/ and ultimately acceptances. An applicant’s numbers (along with college) are not the main consideration in getting accepted into med school. I think your leap from numbers and name of college to useful predictor of med school acceptance is flawed.

http://www.nrmp.org/match-data/main-residency-match-data/

Top 10 factors in PDs cite in ranking:
Interactions with faculty during interview and visit
Interpersonal skills
Interactions with house staff during interview and visit
Feedback from current residents
USMLE Step 1/COMLEX Level 1 score
Letters of recommendation in the specialty
USMLE Step 2 CK/COMLEX Level 2 CE score
Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE/Dean’s Letter)
Perceived commitment to specialty
Evidence of professionalism and ethics

Graduate of U.S. allopathic medical school (ranked 15)
Graduate of highly regarded U.S. medical school (ranked 29)

9

To expand on what Jugulator has posted, I’d like to point out that med school admission is moving away from any kind of hard numbers based admission policy and toward what AAMC calls “competency based admission”.

Adcomms are looking for 15 core competencies in med school applicants, only 2 of which are academic. The bulk are interpersonal or intrapersonal competencies.

See: https://www.aamc.org/initiatives/admissionsinitiative/competencies/

This more holistic analysis of applicants is reinforced in the way scores on the new MCAT are reported, not just a simple number, but a confidence band interval.

Med school admission are starting to eliminate the current pre-req coursework in favor of demonstrated competence in core academic areas/skills.

See: https://www.aamc.org/initiatives/admissionsinitiative/prereqs/

A number of medical schools are now using Situational Judgment Tests (SIJs) as means of selecting applicants.


All of these new "best practices" are attempts to de-emphasizing socio-economic status (like attending a pricey private college) as a selection bias for choosing among med school applicants.
10

WOWM

I totally agree with the AAMC 15 core competencies in med school applicants. But most of the listed “cores” are very subjective. With med school acceptance in the single digits, the adcoms must first screen out the applicants with objective criterias before they can apply these subjective “core competencies” which is an on campus interview. That boils down to GPA and MCAT. If an applicant is not competitive in GPA and MCAT., the candidate will not get a ticket to interview let alone to get admitted to med school.

Remember, all applicants to med school are good students, they all look good on paper, the only way adcoms to set them apart is using scores.

11

agree @artloversplus. That’s why when people ask about the importance of GPA/MCAT (or at the college level for top schools, GPA/SAT) I like to say they are important for not getting rejected but not important for getting accepted.

@WayOutWestMom And I would argue that 4 of the competencies are addressed by the new MCAT and could be considered academic, not just 2. (Critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, living systems, and human behavior)

12

I like this quote a lot. Very on point about GPA/MCATs role in med school admission process. There’s an adcom (GORO) on SDN that makes similar point about how GPA/MCATs will get you to the door, but it’s ECs, etc that will get you through the door.

As to core competencies:

AAMC’s states, in part, their goal is to establish core competencies and exploring ways to ease transition to competency-based admissions. If I’m an adcom (I’m not) looking at these 15 core competencies, I might wonder what’s so different between these competencies versus my current review approach? I see competencies may provide structure in my thinking so that’s good. But I’m still trying to ascertain from ECs, secondaries, LORs, etc whether an applicant has certain traits/characteristics that my school wants to see in an applicant probably using similar competency approach now just with different words (eg altruistic, compassionate, etc). And from an applicant’s point of view, as each school will probably assign different weight to each competency, and like today an applicant won’t know what school values what competency and to what extent, does an applicant spend his/her time in say ECs trying to box check all competencies perhaps weakening overall application to please everyone or focus on say less ECs but more long term in nature? For an applicant, this choice sounds like the ones they face now. So I’m not sure from an applicant’s (or adcom’s) viewpoint how these very broadly worded competencies move the goalposts, provide more clarity to process. Any thoughts?

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For an adcom, I don’t think they do anything beyond what school leadership already does. For an applicant, I think they help as a starting ground. Many people think med school admissions is pretty much entirely numbers driven. This kind of shows how the numbers aren’t the key thing. In particular, many of the uninitiated put little if any stock in the following as being important for medicine:

Like does House demonstrate any of the above? :slight_smile:

14

All this emphasis on social skills, cultural sensitivity etc. as part of “holistic admission” to med school is such complete and utter nonsense. That’s the kind of stuff that comes with age and experience! When I go to the doctors all I care about is that the doctor is brilliant, honest, tells me what is wrong with me straight up without any BS, and cures me. I don’t need a politician who can schmooze with me, understands my “feelings” or have high “cultural sensitivity”, and can’t even cure me. In fact, I am often suspicious of doctors who are too good at schmoozing and distrust them. The change to MCAT to emphasize all this is absolutely ridiculous. Medical science is real science. Social science is pseudo science. Keep pseudo science out of real science!

No other country in the world make their doctors go through this kind of ridiculous admission process, and to put all that in a test! Liberals have really gone off the deep end with their social engineering and PC bull crap. We are going to end up with “culturally sensitive” doctors who can’t actually cure any illness!

15

@cmsjmt
You keep saying “cure” as if real-life medicine is like the show House, where esoteric diagnoses followed by clever cures is the norm, as if most physicians cure things to begin with.

A number of studies show that, not only are good bedside manner and good clinical skill not mutually exclusive, but that doctors with the best outcomes tend to be the ones that are good at “schmoozing” and “cultural sensitivity,” as you call it.

Moreover, all those hypothetical doctors stil had to successfully get through medical school, regardless of whatever admissions requirements they had to meet.

16

“No other country in the world make their doctors go through this kind of ridiculous admission process”

There are probably well over 100K who show up in college on day one every year as eager young premeds. In last cycle over 49K applied, just over 20K started. Ridiculous process, maybe. But may I ask based on your background and experience how you would improve the med school admission process in US? Please be specific as somewhere along the way the US process has to lose well over 80K just due to space considerations. Maybe robots doing one’s prostate exam or pap smear are the answer as that could eliminate those schmoozers.

17

Thank you @cmsjmt, for perfectly illustrating what I was talking about.

As @AuraObscura points out, these additional qualities are not replacing intellectual acumen. The average MCAT score of medical students has been steadily rising over the years - so there’s literally no evidence that this emphasis on people skills comes at the sake of intellect, and as aura points out, there’s plenty of evidence that this emphasis actually leads to better medical care.

First off, “holistic admission” just means essentially any admissions practice that is not purely “objective” (objective in quotes because even objective measures aren’t really objective). Pretty much the only non-holistic medical school admissions protocol would be to put everyone’s name and GPA/MCAT score into a spreadsheet and sort by descending value and admit the first couple hundred names. Go ask any physician if they think GPA/MCAT score should be the sole factors for admissions.

Now, on to the importance of people skills. Clinical medicine is as much an art as it is a science. As someone who is being trained in both clinical medicine and basic science (I’m an MD/PhD student) I can assure you that they are quite different. My LightCycler (that’s a machine for quantitative PCR - a way to measure the amount of DNA or RNA in a sample depending on the experiment), assuming it’s calibrated properly, will always give me essentially the same values. It will not change its answers based on who else is in the room, based on what else may have happened that day, based on how easily embarrassed it is, etc. Unfortunately the same is not true of people. Any good physician (and frankly, even any good manager, leader/anyone who works with people in really any capacity) knows this. In order to get the right diagnosis and come up with the most effective treatment plan, a doctor must take into account all the complexities behind a person and their illness.

Let’s look at an example where cultural competency issues and understanding patients’ feelings come up:

A fifteen year old girl is brought to the clinic by her mother because the girl has been nauseous and vomiting every morning for the last week.

Now, this could very well be a stomach bug or some other infectious cause, but she has no fever, no diarrhea, no coughing, nothing besides the nausea and vomiting points to an infectious cause. Maybe it’s some sort of upper GI obstruction or structural problem (like a Zenker’s diverticulum), but eating food actually makes her feel better and that may be why her nausea is always worst in the morning vs. during the day. Her breath smells fine and when she throws up, there’s no undigested food so that doesn’t really fit with some sort of obstruction or diverticulum (a pouch on the side of her esophagus). These non infectious causes are also really rare in 15 year olds. Her physical exam is totally normal.

So maybe she’s actually suffering from morning sickness - but she’s only 15! That’s way to young to be having sex, especially since she should be abstaining from sex until marriage and I know the mother - she’s a good mom. There’s no way she would raise a daughter with such loose morals. With her mom in the room (because why wouldn’t her mom be in the room, she’s a child), I ask her if she’s sexually active. She looks at her mom, then back at me and sternly says “no, of course not I would never do something like that.” Can’t get pregnant if you’re not having sex so have to rule out morning sickness. Now I’m starting to run out of obvious answers for her nausea. Maybe it’s a psych issue relating to nerves about school - she did say it was worse in the morning. I ask her how things are going at school - she says fine. Oh well, that rules that out. Guess I should send her out to a GI specialist since this looks like it’s getting out of my league.

Now a culturally competent physician that recognizes his/her’s patients’ feelings knows that adolescents are often not comfortable talking about sex in front of their parents and would ask the mom to leave the room - potentially needing to discuss with the parent the importance of alone time with the adolescent patient. As a culturally competent (future) physician, I would tell her that I understand that there may be things she doesn’t want to say in front of her mom and I would assure her that even though I know her mom, anything she says to me would stay in the room between the two of us (unless I think she’s in serious danger). Let’s not forget, just because I kick mom out of the room doesn’t instantly mean she trusts me and will be open with me. I ask her if her period is regular. She says “usually it is” “Usually? What do you mean by that?” “Well the month before it was late and spotty and it hasn’t come yet this month.” Are you sexually active? She hesitates, I give her a reassuring glance, “you can trust me, I promise, you are my patient, not your mother.” “Yes, my boyfriend and I have been having sex for the last 3 months.”

Let’s fast forward and assume the pregnancy is confirmed via both urine (in office) and blood test (results the next day) Now depending on what state I’m practicing in, the next steps will vary. She may or may not need to tell her parents if she wants to abort, and of course she may decide to carry to term either to keep the child or to put it up for adoption. As a culturally competent, schmoozy physician, I won’t just kick her out of the office the moment I know the answer to her nausea is morning sickness, I’m going to offer to help point her in the right direction, and maybe offer to help her speak with her mom about it (if she wants and/or needs to).

So in this case, the “touchy-feely” doctor arrives at the right diagnosis while the emotionless robot fails. Now if your answer is “that’s not cultural competency” then I guess what you really mean is “why are doctors learning about anything that doesn’t solely have to do with white people,” and that’s a separate topic, which we can get into, but I don’t want to write a whole thing about it if my example above was sufficient for understanding the importance of cultural competency and understanding patients’ feelings.

18

“So in this case, the “touchy-feely” doctor arrives at the right diagnosis while the emotionless robot fails”

IWBB, dont dismiss the robot idea. Just add some German efficiency and a German accent. As an example, Good Morning, I am Fritz your prostate robot probe, They will be no schmoozing today. Please insert your credit card and your PIN into slot. Please select the probe size. Now bend over. Thank you for coming. Please take your receipt and your results. Or, I guess there could other options such choose a language or if schmoozing is requested. Schmoozing would be an additional fee however.

19

The prostate exam will never go digital (well, that kind of digital, it already is a different kind of digital): https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ce/b7/4e/ceb74e1ca98dbab0cb63d74299aea13e.jpg

20

All else equal, obviously most people would prefer a doctor who has good bedside manners vs. one who has none. I agree that bedside manner is especially important for pediatricians, primary care physicians and obgyns. But are these qualities in born, or can they be trained?

Some doctors are naturally introverted. Often the more brilliant they are, the more introverted they are. Two of the best doctors I’ve ever had were both quiet and cold. One did a brilliant job with my eye surgery, and I continue to go to him. The other completely mellowed out with age and is now a nice, caring doctor. People change with age and experience, and grow in empathy and social skills as they age. In today’s holistic environment, both doctors probably would not be admitted to any medical school, and we would’ve lost out on the service of two brilliant doctors. Meanwhile, I’ve also had a young doctor who is very pleasant to talk to but has given me wrong diagnosis.

Why not simply admit the smartest applicants, then train them to have empathy, cultural sensitivity, good ethics and bedside manners as part of their medical school training? Why weed out potentially brilliant doctors simply because they are too young to have developed these skills? The main reason holistic admission is around is to make sure URMs aren’t weeded out with lower test scores and GPAs and the medical profession isn’t dominated by Asian males. As a woman, I’m more comfortable with female doctors, and I can understand if certain people are only comfortable seeing doctors of the same race. It’s simply a matter of personal preference and comfort level. I’m perfectly fine with medical schools setting race quotas. But to use holistic admission to weed out brilliant kids who would’ve made good doctors simply because they weren’t lacrosse team captain or soup kitchen volunteers in college is just nuts.

Medical school was the last place where meritocracy reigned to ensure the cream rises to the top and we really get the smartest people to be doctors. Now even that’s is tainted by this whole holistic admission madness, and once again, kids have to run themselves ragged in college (after doing that in high school) to volunteer, do research, internships, play sports, do leadership activities, on top of getting near perfect GPAs in much harder classes and taking the MCAT. How exactly does “leadership skill” help make them better doctors? How exactly does my doctor being team captain of his college lacrosse team help me? When will this holistic madness end?