Agreed. My example presupposes that a student who was or would have been competitive for admission at an elite school is likely to end up near the top of the class at Podunk State, in which case the example stands. But there is a certain pressure on that student to actually achieve that result, as anyone not near the top there will likely have far fewer opportunities than the proverbial lowest-ranked Harvard grad. Some students may rationally prefer the elite school for this reason, as in the big picture it may relieve that pressure to constantly achieve top marks during college in order to have decent post-grad options.
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Agree with this 100%. To put some numbers to this, based on a recent NYT article citing a study made on 22,475 Harvard law grads, about 50% of them had graduated from just 22 schools, with over 20% from HYP alone. Of course you will have more and more high achieving great test taking students from those schools, but the numbers suggest there must be some causation as well. If we use @txfriendly methodology, you canât start with the positive case from Podunk University and extrapolate in insolation. You need to take all Podunk type Universities and aggregate all their applicants with similar qualification as the Harvard undergrad applicants to HLS and determine their success rate. I donât know of any published studies, but my own suspicion is at the high end of a type of law school academic index (some formula combing GPA with LSAT), the Podunk University grads will do as well as the Harvard undergrads, but as you go down the scale, we will begin to see disparity.
Another data point, this from Harvardâs Office of Career Services, âIn recent years, Harvard students were admitted to medical school with equal or lower GPAs than national applicants. In a typical year, the admissions rate for Harvard applicants is in the range of 85 to 90%, and approximately 92-95% of applicants with GPAs above 3.5 are admitted.â chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://cdn-careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/161/2023/04/Applying-to-Medical-School-1.pdf No way Podunck U graduates can look to similar success rates.
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You cannot conflate med school and law school admissions. They operate on different principles.
No kid with top GPA and LSAT scores will be shut out of ALL the top 14 law schools. Unless there is a serious ethical violation such that the kid canât be admitted to the bar- top GPA, top LSAT, youâre in somewhere. You have nothing else going for you? Kiss Yale good-bye, but youâre in at a top law school.
Med school completely different ball of wax where even WITH the rest of the package (research, shadowing, relevant patient-facing volunteering) kids with high GPA and high scores can get shut out of the entire top tier med school and some not getting in ANYWHERE if they have a lousy interview. (law school interviews are haphazard and at some schools- almost meaningless).
So your âdatapointâ is not a datapoint- itâs irrelevant.
I know terms of service says this is not a debating society, but the point I was making is we have this constant drumbeat on CC that undergrad is more or less irrelevant for grad/professional schools, especially law and med schools. I am refuting this point of view for law school and med school based on the 2 sources I cited. A 92 to 95% admit rate on a 3.5 gpa cutoff for med school says a lot about the power of a Harvard degree for med school at the very least.
Is he a NMSF?
Please set your budget before he applies. It will stop a lot of headaches and heartbreak.
Maybe give a few hints why not Texas schools?
How far outside of T100 schools are you prepared to consider for merit? Thatâs the rub of being a donut-hole family. How negotiable is the hiking/outdoors requirement?
Iâm surprised nobody has mentioned Canadian schools like McGill. Mont Royal is nearby.
I donât believe that undergrad is irrelevant for grad or professional schools. On this we agree.
I think you chose a poor datapoint to make your argument, which doesnât mean I disagree with you. Folks on CC conflate âgrad schoolâ all the time, and I feel bad for 16 year olds who have no life experience so donât know that med school, law school, business school, MSW, Masterâs in Early Childhood- they are ALL different, you cannot extrapolate from one to the other.
Rant over.
Regarding Harvard undergraduate â medical schoolâŠ
This does not mean that a Harvard pre-med with a 3.51 GPA has a 92% chance of admission to medical school. Suppose, for example, 12 Harvard pre-meds applied to medical school, and 11 of them had 4.0 GPAs while 1 of them had a 3.51 GPA. If the 3.51 GPA pre-med was the only one who got shut out, then the 92% admission rate for students with GPAs above 3.5 is true.
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If you look at Dickinson or Lehigh maybe look at Gettysburg, Lafayette or F&M? Appalachian trail isnât far away.
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