@gallentjill I don’t think it’s a matter of deciding between GPA and love of learning. I don’t think that every person who doesn’t get into Med school was nixed due to GPA. It could be that they are all following some formula that does not enable them to stand out. Someone who has the classes needed, a high MCAT score and has taken some interesting turns stands a much better chance. Also, the decision between lower level college and higher isn’t a direct correlation either. Some small schools have better STEM programs as cited, or your daughter might find a great professor Fresh/Soph year that turns her into an unexpected path. A few doctors I know also started out in other fields then filled in the blanks before med school. They are doctors who became doctors after doing something else. There is no one and done choice in life. If she doesn’t get in after undergrad she is not “locked out” of med school for life. Most people who are successful in any field took a few turns. These sometimes prove to be the most interesting and even best for them.
Based on your posts, it sounds like she wants good grades and love of learning. I’m sure she can find a good fit for her the incorporates both.
@bluebayou Does that mean you think Malcolm Gladwell’s take is wrong? That students will not be pushed out at top tier schools who might have done very well at lesser schools?
I think Malcolm Gladwell likes to sell books and be on tv.
He seems to cherry pick facts to suit whichever theory is going to maximize his exposure on any given issue.
I wouldn’t pick a college based on his “theories”, especially since there are many “top tier schools” which are very supportive and nurturing, and some “lower tier schools” which do not offer nearly the kind of academic support that a kid might need. If I had a kid choosing between Dartmouth and “random lower tier school” who wanted pre-med AND could get into Dartmouth AND we could afford Dartmouth, I would not conclude that D was a lousy choice (of course, depends on the random lower tier school). I think it’s hard for a kid to flunk out of Dartmouth. I think it’s hard for a kid to fall off a professor’s radar at Dartmouth. I think the advising at Dartmouth is terrific; I think they way the summer semester is structured allows for a kid to do something interesting/fabulous on the non-Dartmouth semester where there is less competition to get a medically relevant internship (fewer students around in the off-season, depending on where you live) and I think Dartmouth has terrific life sciences resources right in Hanover which is an easy place to get around (it’s not like a kid is living in LA and has to own a car or navigate traffic for 2 hours a day depending on where the lab is located vs. the dorm).
But that goes for a lot of places, not just Dartmouth. I’d pick Stonybrook over a wide range of private U’s so it’s not public vs. private. I think the sweet spot isn’t where Malcolm Gladwell puts it-- the sweet spot is balancing rigor (very important, not just for getting IN to med school, but being able to keep up) and support of all kinds- academic advising, access to TA’s and tutoring, professors who notice who has stopped coming to seminar, department chairs who can (and will) pick up the phone for a random undergrad who needs an 8 hour a week research gig or a 10 hour a week paid job.
oh, gosh yes, Gladwell’s pop psychology is wrong on so many issues (or at least the popular interpretations of it).
But health* professional school really is a sliding scale. As noted above, kids with a 3.0 (and high mcat) can get into med school from WashU, a highly selective college. In other words, professional schools will go deeper into the class at highly selective colleges. The same is just not true at Podunk Directional State U.
Also, the grading scales are more generous at the higher ranked colleges. Others have already written about Stanford. For another example, the median grade at Cal and UCLA is higher than that of UC Riverside. In other words, Cal and UCLA give out more A’s than Riverside. So, the gamble is, ‘how confident are you of being the big fish in Riverside’s smaller grade pond?’
*Law school is nearly all about two numbers: GPA+LSAT, so attending Directional State U and earning a 4.0 increases the chances for Harvard Law over attending say, Princeton, and earning a 3.5 (LSAT being equal0.
IMO, if you really want a certain career path you will make it happen no matter where you go. My BIL has always wanted to be a doctor but didn’t get into a top medical school (NY Medical College ranked 566 in the world) but worked hard to receive a dual MD/PhD as a pediatric anesthesiologist, did his residency at Columbia University Medical Center, fellowship at Texas Children’s Hospital, and now is working full-time at a UC Medical Center. You don’t necessarily have to have top grades/scores to achieve your life goals.
@socaldad2002 , that is a great strategy actually. From what I became to understand lately, bottom of 1/3 of all medical school students become PCP/Ped, etc. Going to a lower tier medical school, and performing really well in the school is the way to go to get to top residency.
Every time, I hear Harvard Undergraduate/ Stanford or Penn Medical school, and then internal medicine, I cringe. Do people not considering ROI in this very important decision? D, on the other hand, asked 1st grade teacher why the teacher didn’t include taxes in the question “if one pen is $1, how many pens can you buy with $2?” when she got it wrong!
“If the SC teacher instead applies a typical SC curve, then it’s likely that that the majority of Stanford students taking the class would not receive an A, despite their beliefs about the class being an easy A.”
Ok, then Stanford students would stop taking classes at SC, if they continue this then the class does have a generous curve. I can see if a Stanford pre-med taking a class at Santa Clara if they just wanted to get done with the physics requirement, but if the professor handed out a good percentage of Cs, they would not take it, they would do the rigorous work at Stanford knowing they’re getting a B or an A.
Top residencies also require a top score on the national licensing exams. (see Chart 6 & 7).
http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Charting-Outcomes-2014-Final.pdf
Some families don’t need to consider money. They can afford full pay undergrad and medical school without blinking.
We are not that family. I want my daughter to be able to follow her heart and pick whatever career makes her happy. That means keeping college and graduate school expenses in mind.
Sincere- you actually cringe that someone is going to become a primary care physician? Especially since there are programs at the federal, state AND philanthropically funded level for loan forgiveness for PCP’s? And that there are hundreds of hospitals and clinics around the country who are benefiting from the work by dedicated physicians devoted to underserved populations- who get their med school loans forgiven in exchange for their work? Not to mention physicians whose med school costs are covered by the armed services?
You don’t cringe every time you hear of a talented young doctor heading off to learn how to do face lifts, administer botox, or perform breast augmentations ( very lucrative procedures and lucrative specialties) but you cringe that a talented young doctor is going in to primary care???
All US medical schools are effectively elite admission. Most pre-meds are weeded out before applying, and most applicants are shut out completely.
Perhaps they had less debt than average and can afford to do internal medicine?
Actually, it is a problem that primary care specialties pay less, when they really need the best medical students to go into them, because they need to be able to figure out any condition that a patient may bring in.
btw: the national licensing exams are the ultimate curve (or sorting hat). 
Piling on to this ridiculous statement:
(1) “Harvard Undergraduate” and “Stanford or Penn Medical school” provide significantly more financial aid to many students than they could obtain elsewhere. Harvard College especially. My favorite Harvard/Penn MD among my kids’ friends paid about $30,000 total for all of her degrees. (She also has a PhD.) Unfortunately, she took them to McKinsey. Her ROI is through the roof, but I really cringe at that. She would have had a perfectly acceptable ROI even if she had gone into internal medicine.
(2) At full pay for medical school, you can usually get a meaningful price break at an in-state public, but it’s not such a substantial break that it’s really going to make a fundamental difference in your life. There’s an 18% difference between full-pay educational expenses at Penn State vs. Penn medical school. Someone in a low-paying specialty may well have a crappy ROI no matter where he or she goes to medical school.
(3) Some people are willing to accept lower compensation in order to do good in the world. That works fine, as long as they can service their debt and support themselves. It is important to make certain that the debt can get serviced, but you don’t need to obtain the highest ROI. Notwithstanding the Efficient Market Hypothesis, very few real human beings make decisions on that basis.
We are full pay, so what I was referring is full pay to those Ivys for undergraduate and medical schools. None of the full pay people I know applied to serve underserved populations.
To D and us, the $200K she saved by going to Vandy instead of her other top choices will allow us to help her with her medical school if she so chooses. And knowing her, she will probably go where she can do well, instead of going to where the name prestige is.
QUOTE=JHS At full pay for medical school, you can usually get a meaningful price break at an in-state public, but it’s not such a substantial break that it’s really going to make a fundamental difference in your life. There’s an 18% difference between full-pay educational expenses at Penn State vs. Penn medical school. Someone in a low-paying specialty may well have a crappy ROI no matter where he or she goes to medical school.
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That can depend on the state. Residents of Texas and New Mexico have relatively low price in-state public medical school options, if they can get in.
Young doctors make all sorts of choices about their career paths, some of which have a terrific ROI, some of which are neutral financially, and some of which are terrible. But guess what- older doctors do as well. My gynecologist shuts his practice down for two weeks a year and goes to a rural area in South America where he teaches safe birthing practices to midwives and other women who attend births with minimal medical training.
What’s the ROI on that? He pays his own way, he pays his office staff while he’s gone and while they aren’t seeing patients, still has rent and other fixed costs to cover with no income coming in. And he refers patients to other practices while he’s gone… so potentially losing a chunk of his practice to other docs every time he leaves town.
What kind of idiot would do that?
An idiot who knows that he can save thousands of laboring women and their infants by teaching hygiene, basic anatomy, how to recognize and prevent sepsis, etc.
Sincerer- do you cringe when you hear about folks like my doc??? what kind of idiot takes a financial hit to save lives?
All classes do not have the same grade distribution and/or curve, and students generally do not know what the grade distribution will be prior to taking the class. It is often not practical to look up previous years, and this type of distribution often changes when a different professor teaches the class from previous years. Some pre-med classes at less selective classes are curved, and sometimes the curve is not generous. For example, I took some of the intro math/science classes at one of the SUNYs while I was in HS. My multivariable calc class had a reasonably generous grade distribution, with a good portion of the class receiving A’s. However, my Linear Algebra class had the harshest grade distribution I have ever experienced in my life, in spite of being curved.
Regarding the Malcolm Gladwell discussion, I’ve seen the Google lecture. I haven’t read the book. One key flaw is assuming that all students wants to be a STEM major, so the reason that a good portion of students at Harvard or other selective colleges are not STEM majors is because they felt inferior to the competition. If you compare the freshman and senior surveys at Harvard, the percentage who express interest in a SEAS school major is almost identical to the portion who receive them in the senior survey, suggesting little attrition. It’s less than 100% because Harvard admits students who have a wide variety of interests beyond just STEM majors.
In the Google lecture, he shows what percentage of graduating STEM majors that have math SAT percentiles in the top 3rd of their class, middle 3rd, and lower 3rd. I believe the displayed results are % graduating class rather than persistence rate for each group since the sum adds up to 100% (sum of persistence rates would not add up to 100%). He shows that the schools he chose with different levels of selectivity all have about 50% of the graduating STEM majors in the top 3rd of their class in math SAT score and only ~15% in the bottom 3rd. Students with math SAT in the bottom 3rd of their class are less likely to be STEM majors, so he suggests students should choose colleges where they are in the top 3rd. I’d expect that the students who intend to major in STEM fields tend to have higher math SAT scores than the students who do not intend to major in STEM at many colleges. That is, students accepted to a college’s engineering school tend to have higher math SAT scores than the humanities school. If the entering students who are interested in STEM have higher math SAT scores than those who are not, then it is not surprising that the graduating STEM students have higher scores. Similarly the lower scoring students might overreperesent hooks, such as athletes. And hooks may have a reduced chance of majoring in STEM.
That said, there is an element of truth in the obviously flawed logic Some students do function best as the big fish in a small pond, and some STEM majors do tend to have a high attrition rate, particularly at less selective colleges. The reasons for this high attrition go far beyond math SAT score, as well as selectivity. I’d consider what’s best for an individual student, rather than listening to Gladwell.
Re: pre-meds taking pre-med courses at other schools during summer sessions
Isn’t that a little too obvious in terms of grade grubbing or rigor dodging, in terms of being visible to medical school application readers?
In contrast, repeating AP credit (if not listed on the transcript) and choosing the least rigorous course options at one’s usual college is less obvious in this respect.
speaking of Gladwell, here is another pov. Did Gladwell really say that U-Maryland was a better choice for this girl than Brown, the pinnacle of high grades?)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christeare/2015/09/26/malcolm-gladwell-misses-a-key-point/#42a2300d4b8a