Oh, also, urban-wise, there is the pair of New Orleans schools that are right next to each other: Tulane and Loyola New Orleans, which is another Jesuit school.
Likewise, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon are right next to each other in Pittsburgh.
And there’s Emory in Atlanta, which is more selective than BC but less selective than WashU… and tons of medical and public health (across the street from CDC headquarters) opportunities.
@aquapt ahh I forgot to mention I’m doing a Brown program that does research in CDC in a couple weeks! Really interested in doing more there. I’ll check it out. Thanks for your wonderful suggestions, a lot of them I will be researching in the rest of my summer holidays!
If you go the UC route, I would seriously consider Davis/UCSB/Irvine over UCB/UCLA/UCSD. The pre-med “weeding” and grade-competition is real at UC’s, with students re-taking pre-med classes to improve their grades, and driving up the curve so that it’s devlishly hard to do well on the first try. UCSD, in particular, has painfully low med school admission rates; and UCLA’s seem better but mostly because so many wash out of pre-med before even applying to med school. As I said before, if I could pick any UC program to do as a premed, it would be one of the science majors in CCS at UCSB; and my second choice would be Davis. JMHO.
@aquapt I agree with you, I heard about the harsh curves in UCLA and UCB. Was interested in UCSD, definitely interested in UCD (literally 20 minutes away from my house), UCSB is great but my parents don’t want me to attend because it’s a party school?!, and UCI is on par too imo. I wanted to do pre med in Davis. Most likely a Bio major.
UCSB does have the party-school reputation, but it’s also a serious research university, and the College for Creative Studies is a very different experience that attracts serious students who want a “grad school for undergrads” type education. Maybe show the CCS website to your parents and keep that option open. But Davis is a really good target, and they have a ton of interesting pre-med-appropriate majors… “genetics and genomics”, “neurobiology, physiology, and behavior”… lots of options.
Have fun at Brown!
@aquapoint has excellent suggestions above.
I second the Fordham Santa Clara and BC thoughts as well.
My only minor diversion and it’s splitting hairs, is that it will be an easier route to BC than Emory. Which was the truth until the past five years or so. I include emorys Oxford campus option.
I believe it is just about the same. Really hard. But both are worth it if you chose either.
Emory Total admitted of 5000 and 4000 respectively for each campus out 24000 applicants roughly. Sat of 1472 and 1458. ACT of 32.1 and 31.8 respectively for each campus. 3.8 ish gpa. BC 8300 admitted out of 32k 1458 sat and 33 act. Gpa the same though they don’t publicly release. And bc has big time athletes in those numbers. These are averages of course. So there’s a bit of variance. And for admitted class. Not matriculating.
@privatebanker I see…as soon as aquapt mentioned Emory’s link with CDC I was hooked. But I know it’s super competitive as well and so I will take their other suggestions gladly.
The CDC hook is a big one. Emory was always the Harvard of the south. I know a lot of people hate that but that’s how it is viewed in my part of the north. Along with Duke UVA it’s southern collegiate royalty.
Yeah, it seems as if the admissions arms race has been particularly intense at the Boston schools. And BC is launching an engineering program which will attract the whole “I don’t want to rule out engineering” crowd.
Emory’s ED admit rate is a bit higher than RD, but not as much of a bump as some schools.
And there’s Agnes Scott which gives a foot in the door to opportunities at Emory and has some great programs in its own right.
Disagree with the post above. Emory gives a huge bump to ED1s. Without ED1, Emory is a reach for those even scoring 1500 since that is the average SAT for all admits, which include the EDs. If you really want to go to Emory and finances are not an issue, I would highly recommend ED1.
Emory’s ED rate is 31%, compared to 24% overall.
Washu’s ED rate is 38% compared to 15% overall.
So yes, ED is advantageous for Emory, but it’s not as big a bump as at WashU and some others. That’s all I was saying. At any rate, there’s no point letting ED advantage drive your preferences among colleges. If you have a first choice, then absolutely utilize whatever ED “bump” that first choice gives, whether it’s the largest bump out there or not.
Emory’s overall rate is NOT 24%. That’s not accurate information, at least for the Class of 2022. Emory College offered admission to 5,103 students, an 18.5 percent admission rate. It’s right on their website. I do agree on the 31% ED1 rate, but you also need to consider that test scores and GPAs in the RD round for Emory are higher as well. The ED1 bump is very high.
http://news.emory.edu/stories/2018/03/er_admission_2018/campus.html
There is a point to letting an ED bump influence the first choice. That’s where the bump is big for one and not the other where both schools are close as to applicant preference.
Oh wow that is a colossally higher rate for ED I at Emory. @ljberkow
@ljberkow , the numbers for Emory are confusing. The 18.5% rate you are quoting is for the main campus only. The percentage for the Oxford College option isn’t stated in the press release. If you were to add the two numbers of admitted students together (5103 admitted to Emory College and 4144 to Oxford College) and divide by the total number of applicants (27,982) it would look like a 33% admit rate, but we know that is incorrect because there aren’t 9247 admitted students - a lot of individuals were admitted to both colleges. They tell us that 58% of applicants applied to both colleges, but they don’t tell us how many were admitted to both. Obviously the total number of admitted individuals is significantly greater than 5103, but also significantly smaller than 9247. It would be easy for Emory to supply the actual numbers, but they do not.
If you ask me, Emory is deliberately obfuscating the numbers to make their admissions rate look as low as possible. Clearly not every student admitted to Oxford College was also admitted to Emory College, so the overall rate is not 18.5 for the university as a whole. If it were, they wouldn’t be switching mid press release from university-wide numbers (the number of applications) to Emory-College-only numbers.
So that 24% number isn’t all that far off for applicants who are willing to apply to both colleges. BUT, the ED acceptance rate is much lower for Oxford College, so… apparently there’s not much of an ED bump for Oxford. (Depending on the overall rate for Oxford which Emory keeps shrouded in mystery, lol.)
I guess we’ll get the real story when the Common Data Set comes out. The 2017-18 numbers reveal an actual 22% acceptance rate for both campuses. http://opb.emory.edu/documents/data/Emory-Common-Data-Set-2017-2018.pdf The numbers also show, however, that it’s a steeper admission path for women than for men, fwiw. (21% for women, 23% for men.)
So yes, sorry, my 24% number was outdated by a year, soon-to-be two when this year’s common data set is revealed.
And that concludes my research project for today. 
@aquapt , yes, I only provided numbers for Emory College. I assumed @Aneem00 is only interested in Emory College.
Oxford is a little easier to get into on both rounds, but the gap is closing. The campus is remote and it’s a two year experience, before students transition to Emory College or Nursing or Business schools. It’s in a remote location and not for everyone.
I would say that if someone is undecided between two schools like Wash U and Emory that they should pick one of them and apply ED1. By not selecting either, the risk is heightened that you’ll get into neither. Aneem00 should visit Emory in September or October and decide then.
@aquapt thank you for all the data! Super helpful to my individual research.
What is the difference between Emory and Oxford College at Emory? I searched it up but didn’t get much information.
Agreed, not everybody likes the Oxford College option. However, it isn’t to be ruled out out-of-hand either. A smaller-college experience in the first two years, given that your last two years on the main campus are guaranteed, isn’t necessarily a bad thing - and as you note, the gap is closing, so the peer group is strong at Oxford too.
On the plus side, doing the required lower-division premed classes in this smaller-school environment could be advantageous in some ways - focus for those first two years on getting top grades in those premed “weeder” subjects, and then move on to delving into all the research/shadowing/etc. experiences on the main campus (with your whole cohort of friends coming with you).
Personally I think it sounds like a nice way to transition into college, particularly for a student with premed goals. There are a lot of small schools that make me feel like, “This is lovely, but four years here could be a bit much.” Oxford-to-Emory offers the lovely LAC experience for what could be an optimized period of time, without sacrificing the opportunities of a larger research university or losing your peer cohort through a transfer process. It all depends on the individual of course, but I don’t think there’s any reason to assume it wouldn’t be a valid option for OP.
I actually think it’s really unfortunate that schools like WashU and Penn and others that accept 40%+ of their class through ED are essentially gaming yield-management (and by extension, rankings) at the expense of students who cannot financially afford to put all their eggs in the ED basket. (This is one reason why WashU ends up with literally the wealthiest student population of any elite college https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/washington-university-in-st-louis FWIW Northwestern is #32 and Emory is #53 on the household income metric, out of the 65 schools arbitrarily included as “elite”) But it is what it is, and OP is fortunate to be able to afford to go ED if she chooses, so you’re right that it may be a wise move.
Edit: @Aneem00 , I didn’t see your question before posting but I guess I kind of answered it implicitly. Oxford College is part of Emory University, but it’s a separate two-year liberal arts campus in a more rural setting. All of the Oxford College students continue to the main campus as juniors. Applicants can apply to one or the other, or to both.
@aquapt wow that’s really nice! I may consider that, since it’s just the first two years. Plus a leg up later in the premed program.
Yeah that’s crazy considering most kids need financial aid or low cost tuition. It’s basically just another advantage for richer people. Living in California where the UC system is a wonderful, affordable opportunity, I don’t like what they’re doing with the OOS students. Kids that are qualified in Cali may not be accepted because their tuition by default costs less. But as an OOS student, must be nice!
If you have more questions about Oxford, on the Emory boards here on College Confidential, there is an active participant who transitioned from Oxford to Emory and is now a rising senior. I am sure all of your questions and concerns will be answered. You can apply to both Emory and Oxford on the same application as well and apply ED to both as well.