<p>In doing these comparisons remember that the big elite universities are larger than the LAC’s and produce many more premed applicants. Searching SDN is likely to turn up many more graduates of these universities simply because many more people graduate from them.</p>
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<p>I am not so sure about that. I suspect the biggest difference between a “name” place like those, and most other colleges is the academic abilities of the students. At Amherst and Yale the average undergrad has the academic skills and focus to be a successful premed. Now plenty of them go into other careers, but essentially all are at the required level. Doctors come from the top of the academic talent pool, and not many colleges can fill their classes with people at that level. For those colleges consisting almost entirely of doctor level academic ability one will see very high premed success rates. That tells us nothing about how medical schools view individual graduates or how much the students may learn.</p>
<p>The students admitted to top med schools with MCATs below the medians tend to have something else in their portfolios. I gather that “great research” is unlikely to be the factor simply because the kids who do great research, on the whole, also have top grades. The other factors appear to be serious commitment to activities that the committees find have promise for a medical career, demographic requirements (can be race or gender, but can also be state residence), etc.</p>
<p>High MCATs really do predict success in medical school. It is not clear whether that continues all the way up to the highest scores, or whether this effect saturates at some level. The top schools tend to get lots of applicants with extremely high MCATs, so they need not take chances. But it is hard to believe that someone with a 37 is really less likely to finish in good standing than is someone with a 39.</p>
<p>Most med schools want students from a variety of undergraduate colleges, and will be unlikely to fill their classes from the Ivies and a handful of similar elite universities.</p>