<p>Hi, I was just wondering what the most prestigious Undergrad colleges are for Pre-Med students. I understand that thuis shouldn't be a deciding factor in choosing a college. Just wondering.</p>
<p>I think what I mean is "Which Ungergrad Universities have the highest rated biological sciences programs."</p>
<p>I've heard good things about Duke and JHU</p>
<p>chanceme: if it's possible to rank undergrad majors...us news would have already done it lol</p>
<p>on the other hand...since u asked =D my local cc, it's the best =D if anyone dares to argue...u r ignorant!!</p>
<p>Don't make the fallacy of confusing "pre-med" with "biological sciences". Though biology is the most popular major among premeds, applicants to med school also major in a lot of other things.</p>
<p>HYPS, WashU, JHU</p>
<p>Any of the top 40 or so colleges are very highly regarded by admissions committees. The variation in admissions are mainly due to the overall academic ability of the students, as reflected in their SAT scores they needed to get into the college, and their MCAT scores applying to medical school. If you know the SAT scores of students entering a college, you have a good prediction of the MCAT scores the premeds will generate.</p>
<p>So a question "which colleges send lots of students to top medical schools" is answered "any colleges with the highest admissions selectivity". Line up the colleges by median SAT scores, and you have your answer. Probably omit the heavily technical places like Caltech, MIT, and Harvey Mudd.</p>
<p>Since many premeds do not major in bio, and many come from LAC's, the reputation of the biological science graduate program does not matter. </p>
<p>The universities with top ranked bio grad programs AND high SAT scores (HYP, etc) have terrific medical school success. Universities with top ranked bio grad programs, but NOT high SAT scores (example Berkeley) have much less success.</p>
<p>^^^I wish we could sticky this post by afan and avoid all of the "which are the best premed schools" questions forever.</p>
<p>okay. thanks everyone.</p>
<p>as for median SAT scores, is there a list of those anywhere? or would I have to find median scores for the individual schools im interested on their official websites?</p>
<p>I would take exception to the comment by afan regarding MIT. MIT students do extremely well at med school admission, particularly at top schools. Only Harvard send more students to HMS for instance. In some departments such as BCS (part of the largest neuroscience center in the world) virtually all the students are premed. Same thing with the bio department wihich is arguably the finest in the country.
<a href="http://mit.edu/bcs/%5B/url%5D">http://mit.edu/bcs/</a>
<a href="http://mit.edu/biology/www/biology/index.html%5B/url%5D">http://mit.edu/biology/www/biology/index.html</a></p>
<p>MIT is a terrific school. perhaps the greatest science and engineering university in the world. (I say "perhaps" to avoid a dilatory argument)</p>
<p>However, as has been rehashed on CC, its students do not do as well in medical school admissions as they "should" based on gpa and MCAT scores. The average GPA and MCAT scores of MIT admits, and more importantly the grades and scores of nonadmits are relatively high.</p>
<p>So, for a student who can get into MIT, and who wants to go to medical school, there are probably other elite colleges where the odds are better. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Only Harvard send more students to HMS for instance.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That is rarely the case. Yale does particularly well at Harvard. Even if the number of MIT students at Harvard is higher than most other colleges, this does not address the point. What qualifications are required of an MIT student to get into medical school overall, or into Harvard?</p>
<p>And besides, only the top few students at any given undergrad will ever care about their odds at Harvard. It's your odds at medical school that matter, or perhaps your odds at a top-twenty school if you're going into academic medicine or something. Your odds at Harvard might be 4% instead of 3% at some school or other, but it's hardly a consolation if the price for the extra point is that your odds at medical school overall drop from 90% to 75%.</p>
<p>We all found these premed stats a while back so we could have a discussion based on fact rather than conjecture. The numbers are fairly similar for MIT, Duke and Cornell last year. Lets try to stick to known facts rather than conjecture. We don't know how other elite schools do because they are not willing to share their stats with the public.</p>
<p>A somewhat-more-detailed discussion can be found in posts #19 and on here:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=367551%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=367551</a></p>
<p>I maintain that MIT's statistics do seem noticeably different from other schools', although the difference is no longer as high as I remember it being from even a couple of years ago.</p>
<p>To be fair, you have to compare MIT to the tiny handful of places with comparable admissions standards.</p>
<p>Princeton, for example, greater than 90% admissions success for premeds, including current students and alums</p>
<p>Brown, elite, but a bit easier to get into than MIT 92% <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=187437&highlight=brown+medical+school%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=187437&highlight=brown+medical+school</a></p>
<p>Amherst, elite, but a bit easier to get into than MIT >90%</p>
<p>Swarthmore "In 2006, Swarthmore's acceptance rate for the 7 graduating seniors was 100% and the 28 alumni/ae applicants was 79% for an overall acceptance rate of 83%" </p>
<p><a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/x8886.xml%5B/url%5D">http://www.swarthmore.edu/x8886.xml</a></p>
<p>Etc</p>
<p>let's not mention that mit has 2 semesters fully covered, and from many premeds it seems like that part of their gpa is downed the most...so if that first 2 semesters were included, the avg mit gpa will probably be lower=good lol</p>
<p>Of course, if their grades are covered from medical schools and in the GPA their premed committee is reporting, that all cancels out and we're back to square one.</p>
<p>afan:</p>
<p>With all due respect many of the stats are misleading. Swarthmore is a good example. They typically have only a handful of enrolled students applying for med school straight out of college. The vast majority apply once they have left Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Amherst uses the "well-qualified" and "less qualified" categories with less than 40% of the second group admitted on their first attempt. </p>
<p>Many other top colleges use advising and weeder classes to preselect the best candidates. So it becomes very hard to tell what the actual success rates are because many of the less well qualified students don't get to apply and even harder to make inter-institutional comparisons unless it is corrected for this referral bias. </p>
<p>At MIT, there is no pre-screening of any kind, no categories of applicants or weeder classes. I have only anecdotal evidence (apparently confirmed by Mollie) that most of the candidates who struggle with med school applications are engineers with very heavy workloads in their majors. They have lower GPAs and less overlap between their classes are premed requirements. The main deparments feeding med schools at MIT are biology and BSC and the students in these departments fare very well in their applications. If you separated MIT applicants into engineers and non-engineers, I would not be surprised if the latter group also had a success rate approaching 90%.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The vast majority apply once they have left Swarthmore.
[/quote]
As is the case nationally.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Many other top colleges use advising and weeder classes to preselect the best candidates.
[/quote]
I don't think you'll find a single college in the nation which admits to using weeder classes.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Amherst uses the "well-qualified" and "less qualified" categories
[/quote]
And so we should just take the merged data. I don't see why their splitting the data is a problem as long as we use the unsplit data.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you separated MIT applicants into engineers and non-engineers, I would not be surprised if the latter group also had a success rate approaching 90%.
[/quote]
Sure, if you separate Duke's applicants into kids-who-had-easy-classes and kids-who-took-hard-classes, I wouldn't be surprised if we had a success rate approaching 90% in the former group also.</p>
<p>You can't do those separations, not least because so many MIT premeds WILL be engineers. And furthermore we can all sit around and make up whatever numbers we like. We need to let the data we have drive our decisions, not the data we might like.</p>
<p>Let's stick to the data:</p>
<p>Princeton and Swarthmore data are also for 2006 and are valid for comparison. Brown and Amherst data are unclear.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/x8886.xml%5B/url%5D">http://www.swarthmore.edu/x8886.xml</a></p>
<p>Looks like Princeton has the highest acceptance rate to medical school from the publically available data. Congrats Princeton! Now about those eating clubs ...</p>
<p>Again, what I'd really be curious about is mean GPA of admitted students compared to mean GPA awarded in premed classes holding MCAT scores constant.</p>
<p>I've never seen any school provide this data. But it seems to me like that's the best way to measure.</p>
<p>Generally, my preference among data that we DO have is undergrad GPA among admitted students, and if necessary we can examine grade inflation data in prelaw students for some rough idea of what those grades mean.</p>
<p>I haven't examined the links Russ provided, so hypothetically let's discuss CalTech. If CalTech has an admitted student GPA much lower than Duke's, that would appear on face to be a good thing. If CalTech gives out much lower grades overall, however, then that cancels out the apparent advantage. How much? In which directions? What adjustments should we make? It's hard to say without better data.</p>
<p>If I remember correctly, this is precisely the situation that a Penn vs. Stanford comparison finds itself in. Penn admits have lower grades, but Penn gives out lower grades generally, so it's unclear which school is "better". (Penn's much higher admissions percentage could be any number of things, including Stanford's disproportionately Californian student body.)</p>
<p>What we can say is that there are some comparisons in which one school will lose on both counts -- say, a school with a higher mean admitted GPA that gives out lower grades. Schools like that may well pose serious problems.</p>
<p>All of this information should be put in perspective for the college applicant who wants to become a physician.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>All the elite schools will provide you with a much better than average chance of getting into medical school (>70% with no screening/weeding vs. <50% with possible screening/weeding)</p></li>
<li><p>You will probably only be admitted to a couple of the elite schools you apply to anyways.</p></li>
<li><p>Since you may change your mind, it's best to go the college that best suits you.</p></li>
<li><p>All of us posting on this website have way too much free time :)</p></li>
</ol>