I’ve been searching for the percentage of Penn students that get accepted into med school, and I found 73%. This seems to be somewhat “low” (compared to its counterparts). Why is the acceptance rate low 70s? Does Penn encourage all interested applicants to apply to med school? And this website seems to show that many students take 1-2 gap years. I’m interested in a premed track, and I would not want to take gap years (I’d prefer to finish school in a timely manner), so what is Penn like for Premed?
Chicago has 82% acceptance rate for their premeds, and sources have said that for them, it is very difficult for premed students due to the rigor of the science courses. Is this a shared theme with Penn?
That said, I can think of a few reasons. The main is prob size. Penn has an average of about 300 kids applying every year. By comparison Chicago has about 100. Another thing to consider is the type of medical schools students shoot for. On that page you linked, you can see that the most popular med schools for Penn students are Harvard, Penn, Columbia, Cornell. These are some of the very very top in the country. By comparison the Chicago most popular medical school destinations are not as competitive. https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/uchicago-careers-in/health-professions/pre-health-faqs
You probably cannot access the more comprehensive look section on the page you linked because you are not affiliated with Penn. But if you do you find the following. For 2016, 246 Penn students applied to medical school. Of those, 51 people matriculated to one of the top 15 medical schools, which is about 21% of the total number of people who applied and almost 30% of the people who were accepted to at least one medical school. The number of people who actually got accepted to these schools is most prob higher , but difficult to calculate exactly.
Regarding the gap year, keep in mind that Penn students tend to be quite pre-professional. It is not at all uncommon for them to accept a job offer and while doing that prepare for medical school. I personally know a lot of people who accepted positions in healthcare consulting firms, healthcare VC, banking and hospitals (in research and business roles), and then went on to medical school, because they wanted to get some real work experience before med school.
73% doesn’t sound that low to me. In fact it sounds pretty darn good.
But the real statistic you should be looking for, is how many pre-meds were discouraged from applying in the first place? Many schools won’t write letters for kids with a low GPA.