Hi. Im trying to find a reliable source that provides more information about what undergraduate schools students who were selected into the top medical schools came from (aka, their alma maters). This will help me to try and find good pre-med undergrad schools to apply to.
also, if you know of any good premed colleges with small class sizes, moderate grade inflation, and set in an urban area (within the US), please let me know.
Thank you.
There is no reliable source for this info. You could try googling " name of medical school + class profile" for a specific school to see if the school lists the alma maters of their matriculating students. But I doubt you’ll find the information you’re looking for. Med schools accept students from a very wide range of undergraduate institutions.–from elite private schools to directional state Us to I-never-heard-of-it LACs. And the exact schools vary from year-to-year.
BTW, the idea of “top medical schools” is misleading. Medical education is quite different from undergrad education. US medical education is flat. Educational content is highly regulated and standardized (IOW, all med schools teach exactly the same things) and all US medical students take the same national, standardized exams. (USMLE exams) They only people who care about USNews med school rankings are naive pre-meds and Med School Deans. A medical graduate from any US medical school can match into any specialty at any residency program. (And it’s where you do your residency that’s important–not where you go to med school.)
Just about any accredited US or Canadian college or university can be a “good pre-med school.” Med school admission offices place very little weight on the name of the undergrad an applicant attends. Admission is much more dependent on your accomplishments during college: your GPA, your MCAT scores, the depth and quality of your ECs, the strength of your LORs from your college professors, how well your education & experiences demonstrate that you meet the [core competencies](https://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-school/article/core-competencies/) for incoming medical students, how well you present yourself both in person and in your writings, as well as other “soft” factors.
A good pre-med program should meet 3 criteria, IMO–
Nice pluses for an undergrad–
–close to clinical volunteer sites
–has strong pre-med advising
–you’re in the top 25% of the incoming class in terms of stats (GPA and SAT/ACT scores) because you will directly competing against other students in your class for the crucial A grades needed to have a med school-worthy GPA.
I would suggest you start by investigating your in-state public universities.
Thank you!! I found your answer very helpful! I will make sure to investigate my in-state public universities.
@thecooleststudent - you mentioned UC’s in your other posts, assuming you’re CA resident, none of the UC’s are easy pre-med schools. Also, CA residents need higher stats (GPA+MCAT) for ANY med school acceptance in US.
The only “reliable source” for med school acceptance is the pre-health office in each college (at least for colleges using committee letter because they are tracking all the applicants with CL). The true acceptance data is NOT the one they publish on their web site which is being twisted in many ways. In general, the success rate from an incoming wanna-be-pre-med freshman to final accepted med student falls into the single digit range, which some people said here on CC it is even lower than Harvard undergrad acceptance rate.
https://www.aamc.org/download/493728/data/factstablea2.pdf
some of biggest applicant sizes as a percentage of graduation class size come from WUSTL, Johns Hopkins, Emory and may be Duke. This is not to say they are all getting in, only applying (remember this includes all applicants and not just seniors from each college). The surprising number is from Stanford since something like 700 incoming students claim to be premeds but the applicant number is nowhere close (might have dropped recently). UCLA number is really high for a public school even with 6k students per year (I wonder how many transfers they take in).
All it means is some kids choose schools to focus on being premeds and believe they receive better training which is not truly the case. In order to get in, you are already a very good student academically and you could do equally well in Podunk U. Much of what makes a successful medical applicant is based on hard work, determination and pursuing all of the required ECs, such as medical volunteering, research and keeping a high GPA.