Is the article attached a good representation of reality?
https://www.thompsonadvising.com/blog/medical-school-merit-scholarships/#.XDAUQxZOmEc
Well…it sure says a bunch of NOTHING.
Some schools provide merit scholarships. Some schools provide larger merit scholarships to high flying students.
Most Med schools don’t provide merit aid at all.
The sentence that got me was “most aid is need based”. Well…I suppose if you call federally funded loans…need based that is true.
I don’t think this article is much use…at all.
Fact is…financial aid for medical school is usually loans, loans, and more loans.
@WayOutWestMom your thoughts?
Also at schools that do do it, you’re talking about a handful of students. I would say it is foolish to expect a single cent of merit aid. If you get it, fantastic, but for like 95% of students who are accepted to medical school, they don’t get any.
Sure, they can offer scholarship money and their COA still be much higher than other schools. One of the schools on that list
offered my kid 40k per year, but even with that the school was way more expensive than where she ended up at. Sure, the phone call from the Dean with acceptance plus 40k per year sounded fantastic, till we crunched the numbers.
@thumper1, there is need based aid at a few deep pocket schools, but definitely not what any prospective med school students should count on.
Ah…but at a lot of medical schools…parent income and assets are required. For many students…that just puts them out of the running for need based aid.
And then there is the fact that medical school students ALL can’t work…so at some point ALL will have $0 EFC per FAFSA. Even at NYU where everyone gets free tuition…they still have to pay their living costs.
Yes, I should have clarified that need based aid was parent income and asset dependant. And trust me, even with the need based aid my kid is came out of med school with a huge debt, and times that by 2 as her husband has it too from med school.
My dd is at her med/grad school.
Every person at her med school would qualify for merit because they had to have high MCATs and PCATs to get in.
It’s all LOANS. I think one or two kids per discipline (School of dentistry, school of pharmacy, etc, has ~$5K merit?
And complicating all of this are the changes in Multiple Acceptance Report that went into effect this year.
In the past starting March 15, med schools received a weekly report that told them which students that a particular school had accepted also held an acceptance at another med school and which schools. This allowed med schools to use merit awards to incentivize certain students will multiple acceptances to enroll in their school over X,Y or Z school (Usually a higher ranked or peer institution).
Due to a potential DOJ lawsuit, AMCAS discontinued this practice or the 2018-19 cycle. Now the only information med school gets is whether any their accepted students had received other acceptances. Schools don’t how many other acceptances or at which schools. Additionally, students are being asked to identify their level of interest in attending each school for which they hold an acceptance in an AMCAS database that is visible to all schools that have accepted that student. This is done for enrollment management purposes, but may also influence the awarding of merit aid. Student who indicate a low interest in attending school probably aren’t going receive a merit award inducement to attend. OTOH, schools that an student indicates a high level if interest in attending probably don’t need to be offered merit aid to induce them to enroll there.
Finally, as part of a new initiative signed by a number of med schools (including Harvard, JHU, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Northwestern, and the other deep pockets schools), merit aid is being eliminated in favor of increased need-based aid for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Basically, as everyone else has said–big merit aid is never something that should be counted out. It’s scarce and getting more scarce. I think small merit awards ($500-$10,000) will continue, though, These are usually endowed by individual donors and often have very specific eligibility requirements. (Resident of particular county, graduate of a particular high school, descendent of a certain family, single parent attending med school, AOA eligible female student going into surgery, etc)
That said there are 2 programs that will pay 100% of a medical education (including COL). Both are service -for-scholarship programs. HPSP requires a 1 for 1 payback as a physician in a branch of military service and NHSC which requires a primary care specialty (FM, IM, pediatrics, OB/GYN or psych) and a 1 for 1 service payback in a federally designated medically undeserved location.
@WayOutWestMom, sounds like a lot more stress and jockying for position for applicants. So glad mine is done.
I’m glad both of mine are done too.
And I sure wouldn’t want to be a Dean of Admissions this year trying to figure out how many acceptances to tender so that the school can be certain it will fill all its seats but not over-accept.
Very few schools give to very few students. At least UCLA site says, 20% of students get complete RIDE.
Posts in SDN mentioned 2 students got this year and apparently Dean told during interview, 73 students were given last year (but not all 73 joined).
https://medschool.ucla.edu/geffen-scholarships-about-the-scholarship.
UTSW gave merit aid for all OOS students to make the fees to IS fees. (around $14k/year aid). Also few students (both OOS & IS) got additional $10k/year aid. So that leaves the to $10k tuition + R&B fees.
Texas medschools are the best value around, but I think they are mandaed to take 90% of instate students??? Maybe somebody else can weigh in on this.
I’m not sure I have an accurate impression or not, but I was assuming that when the the author of the article was speaking about the large merit awards, he or she has in mind kind of the top maybe 2 to 4 percent of all matriculating students each year. Maybe 500 to 1000 out of 22k. And of those many are at certain schools (NYU, UCLA, Case Western, Penn, Mayo, etc.) while at other schools almost no one has a big merit award.
And I certainly see the point being made that if it less than 1k out of 22k, essentially no applicant, even with top credentials, can count on getting a big merit award. And also if you don’t have top credentials (close to 4.0, MCAT 96 percentile or above, etc.) you really have no shot.
@CottonTales Yes. Public schools mandated for 90% IS. Private 85% IS per BCM.
Here are the quotes from the sites. https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/education/medical-school/admissions/
“Admission is highly competitive, and by law, 90 percent of applicants admitted are required to be Texas residents.”
https://www.bcm.edu/education/schools/medical-school/md-program/admissions/faqs
The class is composed of 85 percent Texas residents and 15 percent out-of-state residents. The Admissions Committee uses the same criteria to evaluate applicants whether they are in-state or out-of-state residents.
I think the merit landscape is more nuanced than just 4.0 GPA and a 96th percentile MCAT for med school merit. (BTW, that 96th percentile you quote is deceptive since the median MCAT for all accepted students nationally is at or above the 86-87th percentile.)
Those schools that offer free tuition serve specific missions.
Mayo values community service over sky high stats and for a top med school, the stats for its incoming classes are only slightly above the national average. Charles Drew/UCLA is for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who have demonstrated a commitment to serving their home communities. The stats for these students are quite modest by national standards. Cleveland Clinic/Lerner is only interested in students who have significant prior research experience and are committed to being research scientist-physicians. NYU claims to want to train future primary care physicians.
And as I mentioned above, something happened last that is not reflected in the article you linked. Last fall, the deep pockets schools (Harvard, JHU, Stanford, Penn, Northwestern, Yale, Columbia, etc) announced they had reached agreement to shift their FA policies away from merit aid for high stats and towards increasing grant aid to students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds.
They did for 2 reasons–First, there is a growing awareness within the medical community that a medical education has essentially priced its out of the reach of most lower income applicants to the detriment of patients. (see: [Is There Merit in Merit Aid?](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1713146?query=featured_home); for a discussion of the article, see: [Merit-based aid may be detrimental to future of medicine, medical school leaders say](Merit-based aid may be detrimental to future of medicine, medical school leaders say | Hub)) And second, the schools discovered they were essentially getting into bidding wars over a small group of high stats candidates and most of their merit aid was directed toward a pool of maybe 100 students. This practice, they decided, wasn’t simply wasn’t productive and rewarded mostly high income applicants.
Of course there are MD/PhD programs where not only tuition is covered, you get monthly stipend too.
@Andorvw Sure there are. And those programs have acceptance rates in the single digits and not all accepted get those tuition remissions and stipends (unless they are at NYU).
You make it sound like these are plentiful and accessible to just about any Med school applicant. That is just not the case.
All MSTP students get tuition remission and a stipend. MSTP is a federal sponsorship program for MD/PhD students at 50 med schools.
Whether to not MD/PhD students at other schools get tuition remission and living expense stipends depends on how the program is funded, Some do; some don’t.
I understand…what is the acceptance rate…and how many students does this involve?
And really…is this something medical school applicants should count on?
Back to the original article…my opinion is it just has too many holes.