Do elite schools matter? One man's story (long)

[mini]

<p>What's interesting about the data is that in 1975, 17% of Yalies went to medical school directly upon graduation. In 2002 (when medical school admissions were easier) it was 6%. Kind of a sea change going on there (and I don't exactly know what it means.)</p>

[cangel]

<p>Mini, from what I have been piecing together, you would see a significant drop in the % of students going directly to med school at a lot of colleges of different types and different selectivities.
When I was a first year medical student the average age was 23-24, it is now a little over 25. Many students are spreading their science courses out over the whole 4 years (this is what admissions folks at various LACs told us) to improve their GPA, others are adding a 5th year of research to pad their resumes. There are a number of post-bac programs that didn't exist 25 years ago, yada, yada. At some point (just like college admissions and ECs or SAT prep) the process takes on a life of its own - if a quarter of the applicants have done a year of research, or have a higher GPA, then you need to do something like that to improve your chances,</p>

[mini]

<p>Cangel - of course that is true - but the number of places also expand, and each of those places is being filled...by someone! I don't for one minute believe the quality of Yale students has dropped (if anything, I think they are probably better.) Nor the quality of education. But I do think, because Yale itself says so, that the gap in student quality between Yale med school applicants and those of other schools has narrowed very, very substantially. This is because 1) as Yale says, they reject entire classes of applicants every bit as academically talented as those they accept (and I believe them) - these students are going somewhere else; and 2) as student quality at these other institutions has increased, so has the quality of their academic programs; and 3) medical school admissions committees are well aware of this gap narrowing.</p>

[editrix]

<p>Mini, I think we would need to know what percentage of the Yale class applied--either successfully or unsuccessfully--to medical school in 1975 and 2002 in order to make any meaningful comparison. </p>

<p>My husband and I graduated in 1974, and as I said in the original story, it seemed as if an astonishing percentage of our class was applying to med school. It would be interesting to see how many Yalies who wanted to go to med school were denied admission in each of those two years. I certainly knew some kids who were rejected back in 1974--but since, (as you point out) med school admissions are easier now, I can't tell whether the drop from 17% to 6% represents a surprisingly low rate of med school admissions--or a simply a radical drop in the number of students who apply for admission right after college. (Medicine does seem to have been a more popular choice of vocation back in the 1970s.)</p>

[mini]

<p>"or a simply a radical drop in the number of students who apply for admission right after college. (Medicine does seem to have been a more popular choice of vocation back in the 1970s.)"</p>

<p>I think both are true - but there's no reason to believe the same wouldn't be just as true at other colleges and universities.</p>

[editrix]

<p>Mini, I wish you would say what you mean. I suspect you're trying to insinuate that current Yalies fare poorly in med school admissions, but the numbers you’ve cited don’t prove anything of the kind. If you have genuine data to support such an assertion, a research analyst such as yourself ought to be able to produce it.</p>

[editrix]

<p>

@idler

Another point of view, rarely heard on these boards, is that choosing a college is not all about which will be the highest trump to play when applying to professional school, or which college will yield the best-paying job. Surely there is more to it than that.

@aparent5

What I would want to know about Yale, in order to determine whether it "mattered," is whether your husband's experience there has had an impact on his leisure time, his concern for the wider world, his avocations. I have always told my kids that you don't attend a school like that in order to be successful, but in order to be interesting and engaged with the world. I know lots of successful people from various colleges and universities. It does seem to me that those who come out of schools that could be described as an intellectual banquet (and these are not just the Ivies, of course) tend to have very rich lives in their off-hours, reading extensively, writing, traveling.

Thank you, Idler and Aparent5, for bringing up another point that my husband and I have been discussing. When we were at Yale, the then-president, Kingman Brewster, gave a famous speech lamenting the "grim professionalism" of the growing "herd instinct for law and medicine"; he urged us to take full advantage of the richness of Yale's offerings for their own sake--not because they would look good on our resumes.</p>

<p>Both my husband and I did so, and while his forays into interesting but not strictly pre-med subjects probably didn't help him with med school admissions in a tough year, he says that they were well worth it.</p>