I just read that, while Notre Dame undergrads have med school acceptance rate over 70%, Emory undergrads barely have a 50% acceptance rate. I understand that Notre Dame students are of slightly higher caliber (acceptance rates of 19.7% vs 23.4%), but I don’t think the difference is big enough to explain the 20% difference in acceptance rates.
I can’t explain the how the schools played with their data to account for the 20% difference, but I will say that these numbers (70%, 50%) only reflect the number of premeds who survived the premed gauntlet and actually applied to a med school and does not include a large number of students who started premed, but changed career pathways due to grades, MCAT score, realized that post college they were in most cases looking at a minimum of 7 more years of training, etc.
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%.