<p>As others have said, prestige is not an issue for med school accept. Having large loans in the UG years can definitely affect your quality of life after graduating with your bachelors. There is this thing called interest that keeps right on churning and those PLUS or cosigned loans do not usually have favorable interest rates. WIth the cosigned ones, anything happen to you and your parents are still stuck paying most of the time, so you better get some life insurance on yourself too. Also, as other have noted, it’s not like med school acceptance is a guarantee and you will have many years before you earn dollar one as doctor. In the meantime you will have all of these loans building up all of that interest and some may need for payments to start even if you are in med school. </p>
<p>UCD is not exactly way below BC in prestige either. If you were talking about SouthEast California State College vs BC, that 's one thing. But UCD vs BC? There is a good argument for one over the other when it comes to prestige, and I wouldn’t bet on BC winning the rounds either. UCs are excellent schools. </p>
<p>The advantage BC would possibly have over UCD is if their premed program is more nurturing and has a high success rate in freshman aspirants actually sticking it out to become med school applicants. That 's the big drop in the percentage. The med school accept rate…phht, most kids without a good chance of acceptance don’t bother to apply, so I would guess it’s pretty good at both schools, and is meaningless to me. JHU has a 100% or close to it accept rate, but I don’t want to even try to guess as to what % of those starting Premed get flushed during the process and not even apply to the PreMed Council or what ever they call it to even get a shot at applying to med school. THe program is the gauntlet, not just the application. Some schools are just more forgiving in grade curve, have smaller classes in the labs and will cheer and help the kid through things like the ever important O-chem course and lab, and others use it a pruning device. Off hand, I’d give the edge to BC on the nice-nice factor, but by how much, I don’t know. I doubt I’d value it at the cost differential A nice school like Sienna College or Stonehill might well be better in that department than BC.</p>