<p>If prestige is the most important factor, Colgate wins. Of the four schools, I believe it's the one the most people have heard of/are impressed with.</p>
<p>Colgate is an exceptional school with the friendliest student body my D encountered on her visits (and she did several college visits). It has the strongest national name by far. It ain't even close. F+M is the least known. </p>
<p>I would like to think that academics would know all of these schools but I'm not so sure if Professor Plum at XYZ Med or Law School has ever heard of any one of them . If they have that one would be Colgate. IOW not all professional school admissions committee members are as knowledgeable about the nation's great LAC's as they are about Uni's and IMO all of these schools would qualify as among the best LAC's in the country. Grad school concerns me far less. (We had similar concerns and researched placement results. We decided the school she chose could get her where she wanted to go.)</p>
<p>I have no doubt that F+M, Bates, and Colby have the same free-flowing booze pipeline as Colgate. I researched all of these schools heavily. Know your kid and and then trust them to make good decisions. OTOH If I knew that a kid had a substance abuse problem (or "issues") they would not be at school in Amsterdam. ;)</p>
<p>When we visited UDelaware 2 years' ago, they had booths set up for different majors, staffed with professors. My kid went right to the premed booth to hover. It was one of the busiest booths, since so many kids were planning to be premed majors.</p>
<p>Someone asked the Professor what UD's medical school admissions looked like. He went off on a riff about premed and med school admissions. He said that the numbers quoted by many schools are extremely dishonest, since they fail to show how many kids are weeded out and encouraged into other majors. He said that the only kids who...at the end of the day...actually get the med school Committee recommendations, are the ones who the Committee decides actually have a good chance of being admitted. He said that you can try to get into med school without your school's premed Committee's recommendation, but he's never known it to happen. </p>
<p>It was a real eye opener for my kid. We started asking schools how many students start as premed students vs. how many end up graduating as premed (and then, of the premed graduates, how many get into med school), and discovered that very few schools admit to keeping track of statistics for the former.</p>
<p>Yup. And this has been true for a long time. Back in the dark ages, at LAC #1, I took freshman biology with the would-be premeds. In those days, it was the premed weed-out course. They took attendance (and took off grades for each absence), and had classes at 8 a.m. on Saturday. The class was graded on a strict curve. There were about 106 folks who said they were premed (I wasn't - I just wanted to take biology). By the time they were seniors, there were 32 premeds. 30 were admitted to med school. But of the original 106, probably 80 would have made EXCELLENT doctors, and, given their general level of intelligence, probably 70 would have been had they attended a run-of-the-mill state university where they would have been close to the top of their classes (and hence had both more research opportunities and better mentoring.) So was the relevant rate 97%, 40%, or 28%?</p>
<p>It is worse, now - because even if you get through 3 years of pre-med, you can still end up without the recommendation of the school's pre-med committee (which didn't exist in my day.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
even if you get through 3 years of pre-med, you can still end up without the recommendation of the school's pre-med committee
[/quote]
This is an important point. Some schools will support all their premeds, whereas others only support the ones that have a good chance to be admitted to med schools (thus boosting their medschool admissions stats). It is worth finding out how your school of choice operates in that regard.</p>
<p>On the other hand, my wonderful soon-to-be son in law is about to graduate from medical school and start his residency. He did his undergraduate at Loyola New Orleans as a scholarship music major (jazz piano). He won the physics award freshman year, got in all his pre-med classes and was accepted to a number of excellent medical schools. There are several ways to skin a cat, as they say.</p>