Hi-Just wondering if anyone has first hand premed experience and could share some insights at schools like HYP versus William, Amherst, Bowdoin, Swarthmore. thx
Do the Ivies even have pre-med advisors? Honest question.
@Cloudybay23 just curious why you have targeted these colleges as a possible future medical school student?
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Yes, the Ivies have pre-med advisers.
See https://ocs.fas.harvard.edu/premedical-health-careers-advising
https://advising.yalecollege.yale.edu/preparing-health-care-professions
https://hpa.princeton.edu/
https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/advising/health-careers/
If a person is absolutely, positively sure that they want premed, they’re probably best off going to an in-state school for cost, or even chasing merit at a less selective private school (unless of course their family’s income would qualify them for excellent financial aid at a highly competitive school, in which case they should try to make it in premed there. The fact is that admission to medical school is heavily based upon GPA and MCATs. The competition at the most selective schools in premed is fierce, not to mention that assuming limited resources, best to not go into debt for undergrad, and save resources for med school.
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I think it would be hard to compare the 2 because, in order to fairly do so, you would need firsthand experience at both, which will be hard to find. The recommendation of saving money is a good one. I would just like to throw out there that the most important thing is high MCAT and GPA, and there are rumors of grade inflation at some Ivies, which, if true, could help your application.
I agree with @parentologist. The top ranked universities have a higher percentage of their students going on to medical school. However, a very large amount of this (maybe all of it?) is because of the type of student who gets accepted to Harvard or Stanford or similar schools in the first place. It is not at all clear that arriving as a freshman at Harvard in the bottom 1/2 of the class is going to give any one student a better chance of attending medical school compared to arriving as a freshman at U.Mass Amherst as a student in the top 1/2 of the class.
Either way premed classes are going to be tough. My daughters both had majors that overlapped with premed classes (one is in a DVM program right now) and I have heard many stories about how strong premed students are at even a “pretty good” university and how tough some premed classes are.
Also, if you are premed you need to budget for 8 years, where the last 4 years are expensive. At today’s prices medical school can be over $80,000 per year, and prices keep going up. Doctors can be paying off their medical school debt for a long time.
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Just a reminder that you can major in anything and go to med school. Yes you need to do prerequisites, either during college or in a post-bacc program (if you can afford one).
If you have other interests, you could attend a school like Brown or Amherst that does not have gen ed requirements so there is more room in your schedule for prereqs.
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I think that’s a low estimate when you also include all living expenses in the costs. Anyone thinking about medical school who is applying to undergrad now could easily have $500,000 in costs just for medical school. @WayOutWestMom ?
While the article is a bit dated, “According to OCS’s medical school admissions data, Harvard pre-med applicants with a 3.50 GPA or higher had a 93 percent acceptance rate to medical schools in 2012” (The Harvard Crimson), I would not expect a huge variation in success rate for current students. Looking at the OCS handbook for premeds, current admissions data is available in a publication in the OCS Reading Room. This is also not a case of a small/select group. According to the same article, “OCS estimates that, ultimately, 17 percent of a given class will apply to medical school.” The Harvard class size in that period was 1,600 to 1,700 students.
This is like the debate about whether or not undergrad matters for law school. I’d like to know what other schools have anything close to 93% percent success rate for premeds with a 3.5 or higher GPA. Looking at the UCB (far from Podunk U) data on Cal undergrad acceptances to medical school, the overall admit rate for students with a GPA of 3.4-3.59 was 47%, for those with an MCAT greater than 520, it was 82%. Cal students with a GPA of 3.9+ and an MCAT of 515 or greater was only 87% (91/105). Looking at Cal students with a GPA greater than 3.4, the admit rate was 69% (431/621).
https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/MedStats/MCAT-GPA-tables_2020.pdf
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Thanks everyone -just looking for personal experience as a premed at a small LAC versus an Ivy. (not a direct comparison from the same student!) State Schools or cost are not factors. Student is not definite about pre med but interested. Major is totally undecided.
If cost not a factor, I think it will depend on where your kid thinks he/she will thrive. Daughter went to a NESCAC and had several friends who started out as premeds. A number are now in med school or veered into biomedical type research. I think they all got plenty of support from the school in terms of advisory services. The classes were small and the school was a pretty small enclosed community (one of the rural LACs). Son’s GF is a premed at an HYP. Classes are a bit larger and there are more medically focused research opportunities because the University has a working/teaching hospital. The University is also much more diverse because of the significantly larger student body (undergrad, grad and professional). It all goes to fit for your kid as others have advised above.
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@Cloudybay23 is this student your child or you?
For 2020-2021, the median price for tuition, fees and mandatory health insurance at private med schools was a hair under $80K/year for 2020-2021. For instate public med schools, median cost was $40K/year.
There are a few medical schools where OOS tuition and fees are well north of $120k/year.
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The problem with the statement is that we have no idea how many students who are applying to medical schools have a GPA of 3.5. Considering that the average GPA of science majors at Harvard is 3.7, and the median is likely higher (college average 3.65,college median 3.7) it is unlikely that there were many applicants to medical school with a GPA of 3.5. Moreover, that statement is true even if not a single student with a GPA of under 3.7 (the college median) was accepted to medical school. If 7% of the applicants had GPAs of 3.5-3.69, and they were all rejected, then it is still true that 93% of the applicants with 3.5 and higher were accepted.
Bottom line, that statement does NOT claim that the admission rate of “Harvard applicants with GPAs of 3.5” is 93%. It also does not claim that the admission rate for “all Harvard applicants” is 93%. It ONLY claims that the admission rate of “Harvard applicants with GPAs of 3.5-4.0” is 93%. That is something very different, especially is applicants with GPAs of 3.5-3.7 are a small proportion of the applicant pool. We do not know what the admission rates of Harvard applicants with GPAs of 3.5 is, nor do we actually know the admission rate for Harvard applicants with GPAs that are lower than 3.5.
Of course, Harvard is also a feeder school to its own medical school and that of Yale, as well as to those of other Ivies.
Still, it would indicate that Harvard has a higher than average admission rate for its students, and it is more likely that this is for the applicants with high GPAs and MCAT scores.
Another route that has a higher acceptance rate are many Liberal Arts Colleges. Some, such as Williams, Amherst, Pomona, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and others have acceptance rates of 85%-90%. Haverford beats Harvard with an acceptance rate of 95% to medical school from 2015-2020. That is the rate for applicants with any GPA, including GPAs of below 3.5.
In any case, much of the high acceptance rates that we see for pre-meds from some schools probably has a lot to do with good advising. They help students select the right courses, help them prep for the MCATs, make sure that students apply to colleges that match their GPAs and MCAT scores, and try to dissuade students who are unlikely to be accepted from applying.
So attending Harvard won’t help a students who struggles academically or with the MCAT get into a top medical school. It will likely not even help a student with a GPA of 3.6 be admitted to a medical school where the average GPA is 3.9. It will, though help a student do better than expected, based on their GPAs, and help students apply more strategically. Still, Haverford is a better choice than Harvard…
…and in some cases pre-application diversion/selection: the degree to which a school encourages/discourages applications from weaker candidates. For example, some colleges do their LoRs by committee, and the committee may decline to write the LoR for a student they don’t feel has a reasonable chance of success.
As money is not an issue, the most salient point for the OP’s student is whether the experience of students doing pre-med courses is meaningfully different between one set of top-tier schools versus another, and I would argue that the most meaningful differences are in the overall school experience, and how well it suits the student. For example, at Columbia vs Williams, the classes aren’t going to be notably harder/easier and the other students aren’t going to be more/less smart or goal oriented.
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While we don’t have the breakout that Berkeley provided unless someone can get to the referenced OCS medical admissions data, you are completely speculating as to the distribution within the 3.5 and higher GPA medical school applicant pool to fit your narrative. The article also stated that the OCS estimates about 17% of the class applied to medical school, so between 270 to 290, not a small or discrete sample size.
If we look at the Berkeley data, the distribution and percentages are as follows:
| GPA Range | 3.9+ | 3.89 - 3.8 | 3.79 -3.6 | 3.59 -3.4 | 3.4+ | <3.4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Applicants | 127 | 143 | 235 | 116 | 621 | 94 |
| Admits | 108 | 115 | 154 | 54 | 431 | 16 |
| % | 85% | 80% | 66% | 47% | 69% | 17% |
While Harvard’s distribution will not be identical to Berkeley’s, I doubt that the extreme distribution you posit is the case (large portion bunched at the high end, few in the 3.5-3.7 middle range and possibly a bunch more below 3.5). It should be more similar to Berkeley’s. When we look at Berkeley’s admit rate for 3.9+ and MCAT above 515, the extreme end of the distribution curb for applicants, the admit rate was only 87%.
The LACs you mentioned are great, don’t get me wrong, my D graduated from one with several successful premed friends, but many of these LACs are very selective in the support letters they will write for med school applicants, making their sample size small and select. In looking at Haverford’s website, it looks like there is a detailed process to get a “Committee Letter” to support the application. I don’t have knowledge on how selective of a process this is in terms of weeding out or denying a Letter for some aspirants. Also the 95% has no raw numbers of total applicants or acceptances connected with it. We only know the successful applicants averaged in the 86th percentile of MCAT scores. So there is no basis to say Haverford > Harvard. It is pretty clear Harvard > UCB, and a reasonable extension of that is Harvard > Podunk U that people on CC constantly say is = to Harvard, assuming the same GPA and MCAT.
The thing is we still don’t know what’s in that Berkeley data (and this is the case for any school reporting med school data). For example…
Is it for both MD and DO schools?
Does it include only the current year’s grads or does it include any Berkeley grad who applied to MD/DO school that year…for example, does it also include those who took several years off to get more patient facing experience, or those who completed a post-Bacc or SMP Program? The trend is to not apply to med school directly out of undergrad (because it’s relatively tough for these students to compete with applicants with additional years of patient facing and/or research experience, or those who completed master’s level programs).
The devil is in the details, which to my knowledge no school is adequately transparent.
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point.
Here are some stats on medical school acceptance rates among top LAC:
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The notes to the table:
“Acceptance Rates by New MCAT Score & Undergrad GPA for UC Berkeley Undergraduate Applicants who Applied in 2019 or 2020, and within Two Years of Graduation.”
"* Source: 88% of UCB First Time applicants who agreed to release their data to AAMC. "
I think Berkeley is pretty good about results data. I started with this web page which links to others. https://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/MedStats