Moreover, the most highly selective colleges have the most ($) resources, so it’s much, much easier for its undergrads to get involved in highly-valued EC’s, such as research (for top med schools).
^^^hmm, perhaps I am misreading, but when I sorted (descending order) on endowment/student, I only saw a handful out what I would consider ‘outliers’ in the top 40+ schools listed. The top 9 are the usual suspects:
Unis (5): HYPSM
LACs (5): AWSP
Grinnell (#19, which is still pretty darn selective)
Berea? Washington & Lee? Richmond? Smith? Trinity (San Antonio)? Rochester? TCU? Wake Forest?
Do any of them show up on any of the top “feeder school” lists?
Colleges that purport to send the most kids to med school are often the ones doing the most strenuous weeding, from freshman year. They may start with hundreds of freshmen with med school interests, then boil it down to a much, much smaller number they endorse. And that starter figure is nearly impossible to find.
You want the college where the individual kid can thrive, survive, and have the best shot at a med school admit, based on his own record. That’s not always the ones that send off the most of their highly reduced pool.
And yes, non-stem college majors are fine, if the rest is there. Don’t just look for a list of top producers. That’s the tip of the iceberg, falls short. Look at what it really takes, to make it to the point where that college swings support behind his app.
It’s not endowment per student. It’s the nature of their pre-med philosophy and support. That can come from some unexpected colleges, while the big $$ colleges are doing their weeding.
The best professional school feeder study I’ve seen was the one done years ago by the Wall Street Journal.
See post #5 above. That study took a lot of flack, in particular for its small (and apparently regionally-biased) basket of target schools. As far as I know, the WSJ never repeated it nor did anyone else.
One big challenge for any such study is to control for confounding selection effects.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the most selective, prestigious colleges are over-represented in the most selective, prestigious professional schools. How do you prove that selective professional school admissions aren’t simply telegraphing the effects of selective college admissions?
Anyone who tries to demonstrate that confronts a sparse data problem. First, the number of elite professional school spaces is even smaller than the number of elite college spaces. Second, the same top students who are content to attend a “good enough” local college may not be any more motivated to attend an elite professional school. You’d need to identify a population of equally capable, equally motivated high school students who wind up at a variety of colleges, then apply to a representative cross-section of elite target schools. That population would be too small to demonstrate anything with confidence.
See Table 4 in the first study and Table 4 in the second study for lists of colleges that generate the most alumni-earned PhDs per capita. However, neither table tells us anything about the target schools.
Note that an MD-PhD program is a medical scientist training program, so I certainly wouldn’t expect to see a lot of humanities majors in them, just as I don’t expect to see many humanities majors in other STEM PhD programs.
Med schools may like to see more humanities majors as regular doctors, though.
btw, Stanford’s medical school may be great for research but I know students there and for clinical work it seems to not be as great per report. anecdote. Know a Harvard medical grad who worked along side state grads in their specialty. He was no better/worse than the others. Likewise those who did residencies at various places.
OP- any top tier undergrad school will work well for getting into medical school. Some are filled with premeds - MD wannabe’s. Others have multiple offerings in the various needed sciences and have many who truly like the subject and major in it with an intent to do grad school. So- get a reasonable STEM degree and go to a medical school or pay attention to get a top notch STEM degree.
okay- darling kid goes to elite school and is premed with some major or other popular for premeds. Gets into elite medical school. Parents presumably can pay the costs without much, if any debts. Said kid does not do an MD-PhD. Kid then does a residency in field of choice. This “well trained” physician is likely to end up practicing with others who just went to ordinary top tier colleges and any medical school. ALL physicians need to be competent, pass exams, do residency, pass boards in their specialty. It does NOT matter if it was Harvard or State U. The most skilled physicians in a specialty will be so not because they went to school XYZ but because they have the ability to do the type of work needed in their chosen specialty.
OP- you need to live in the right here and now. Finances matter. A good fit school matters. This is one where the student enjoys being and can get the appropriate courses for the desired major. It means having a likeminded peer group. Perhaps your kid chooses something besides medical school. Bravo. As physicians H and I used to state our (gifted) son was too smart to become a doctor.
If grad school is a possibility the best school is so dependent on which majors are desired. Schools with good grad schools may be useful for Honors students who take grad level classes while an undergrad.
Per post 20, 3.61% of applicants vs 4.2% of those accepted had humanities backgrounds. If I wasn’t worried about noise, I’d conclude that a humanities major gives you an edge.
But I am, so I don’t.
A large part of that is a combination of self-selection, the fact so few music majors or other non-natural science majors apply(especially non-bio) and @PurpleTitan 's quote above.
Incidentally, my childhood pediatrician attended an LAC as an undergrad history major before med school. .
My medical school class had mainly STEM majors because most physicians are drawn to those. However, there are people who go for their other passion and add the needed premed sciences while they were a part of our majors. No best major- just the one liked best.
Please, do not try to play the percentages. It is the student, not the school, that matters. Medical schools will choose an excellent candidate regardless of where they went to school- that means having top credentials. Get the most appropriate (best for student) education.
@wis75 - Agree with all points made. My older S is a pre-med student at an in-state public university, and I’ve done a plenty of research enough to know that he actually might have an advantage over my younger S who’s heading to a top private college. The younger S wants to major in music while fulfilling pre-med required courses because he likes both fields. There was never an intention to play percentages; that’s plain silly.