I am not sure how the thread got on medical school admissions data, but I am glad it did because the AAMC website shows a level of transparency with medical school admissions that I wish was shown in elite college admissions. The amount of data gathered is amazing and the transparency is refreshing to see.
However, there is less transparency with respect to specific medical schools, though there is a medical school admission predictor web site somewhere that purports to help pre-meds choose medical schools to apply to.
The Med School applicant data was a little shocking.
The last data I saw was that 47% of K-12 students were white. Do we ever reach a point where the white population in the USA gets small enough where we stop disadvantaging white kids? Maybe when the K-12 minority population hits 60%, 65%, 70%?
@WayOutWestMom, can you please weigh in on this? Specifically post 4019?
I have never heard of a student with a 2.8GPA getting an interview, much alone getting into medschool.
2.8 GPA + 33-35 MCAT – 73% acceptance rate
2.8 GPA + 33-35 MCAT – 23% acceptance rate
I was kind of being a little humorous with the 2.8 comment, that’s a bad GPA, but looks like the MCAT saved them. If you assume the student got say a 3.5 in Math/Science courses that’s a whole of Cs and Ds.
^^ for 2017-18 to 2018-19 data from AAMC website, there were 3,169 applicants to US medical schools with a 2.79 or below GPA. This represented 3.3% of all applicants. Of these applicants with a 2.79 gpa or below, 184 students were accepted (5.8%).
Many of these accepted students with low gpa will have one or more attributes/hooks, e.g. had very high MCAT scores, performed research and got publications, helped to organize a novel outreach clinic in a disadvantaged area, are URM, etc.
To changethegame, it’s true that the AAMC provides quite a bit of data, but more recently, they no longer provide a grid of GPA to MCAT scores by race. The last tables that I saw that these were included is in 2015. Looks like transparency here is also slowly being eroded.
To calmom, actually It’s not that hard to complete medical school without being broadly knowledgeable. In fact, there is less than a 1.5% attrition rate of medical students who drop out due to academic reasons. Once your in, it pretty hard not to complete it (https://www.aamc.org/download/492842/data/graduationratesandattritionratesofu.s.medicalstudents.pdf). What happens is that less capable medical students don’t get the plum residency slots, usually in attractive subspecialty disciplines.
So the less capable ones will go into primary care where the greatest breadth of knowledge is required?
Given how difficult it is to get into medical school in the first place, I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion from the low attrition rate. Bottom line, is no one who is not capable of doing the work is getting into med school in the first place – at least not into US schools. The high debt load fo med school is also going to incentivize student to stick things out, even when the going gets tough. There’s nothing worse than being a med school dropout with $200K worth of student loan debt accumulated during the time before dropping out.
@havesomeheart I was wondering if the data hasn’t been updated recently because of the change to the MCAT scoring system and wanting to have a historical comparison from the previous 40 years. I know I was happy that they still have the old numbers which I understand much better than the new MCAT scoring criteria (472-528 with a 500 median).
“Given how difficult it is to get into medical school in the first place,”
Is it that difficult for URMs? See data10’s post on this:
“Black Applicants
2.8 GPA + 33-35 MCAT – 73% acceptance rate
2.8 GPA + 30-32 MCAT – 52% acceptance rate”
That is not difficult really, because again, a 2.8 means you got a lot of Cs and Ds in undergrad, which is of course pretty easy to get. A 30 in the old mcat is 79%, which means basically that the most difficult part of the application is race. There’s really no other way to interpret that data.
If someone told you that all you needed was a 2.8 undergrad and 79% on the standardized test to get in, would you think that was difficult? Or easy or moderately hard? Looks pretty easy to me.
For comparison to the table linked in #4019, here is the table for all applicants and matriculants. This is for 2018-2019, with new MCAT scores.
https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/factstablea23.pdf
More at:
Some additional factors related to the discrepancy and difficulty of admission are:
[ul][li]“Accepted” means accepted to a medical school during the listed years. If a student applies to 20 schools and only gets 1 acceptance, the student is counted in the “accepted” percentage. As noted in the lower right hand corner of the table, 64% of Black applicants did not receive any acceptances, largely due to the lower MCAT score of most applicants. The average MCAT score of applicants by race is below for the listed application cycle.[/li]
[li]Average Applicant Stats[/li]Black – 22.5 MCAT, 3.27 GPA, 3.08 Science GPA
Hispanic – 24.7 MCAT, 3.41 GPA, 3.27 Science GPA
White – 29.3 MCAT, 3.60 GPA, 3.52 Science GPA
Asian – 29.8 MCAT, 3.57 GPA, 3.48 Science GPA
[li]The stats include students who are not traditional first time applicants, such as students who had much better GPA in post-bacc or MS than undergrad.[/li]
[li]There is a bias in who chooses to apply. Students who for whatever reason have something unique in their application that makes them more likely to be accepted with lower GPA are more likely to apply than the typical pre-med student with that GPA. And students who are less likely be accepted may be discouraged to apply by their undergrad college.[/ul][/li]
A 30 in the old MCAT was 79th percentile. It’s not trivial to score in the 79th+ percentile of medical school applicants. However, most students achieving highly selective colleges for undergrads do well surpass this mark. I agree that many on CC seem to exaggerate the stats required for and difficulty of acceptance to medical school.
@Data10 I personally prefer looking at the matriculates data because that gives a better idea of what is needed to actually get accepted.
I asked what would it take to get rid of AA a few weeks back and I was thankful for OHMomof2 for giving a honest answer. This morning, I was listening to a Soundcloud of John Sylvanus Wilson Jr. a former President of Morehouse College and who is currently a Senior adviser and strategist on diversity and inclusion initiatives for the President of Harvard University. During the discussion, he listed off some numbers about young African American males that make it truly impossible for an representative sample of the population to be reached (without fixing the underlining issues). Here is a small excerpt from the Walking the Talk conversation (from Nov 2017) he had at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE).
“Every year in this country, there are roughly 320,000 African American boys starting ninth grade, Wilson notes. And every year there are roughly 160,000 finishing 12th grade. So we lose half between ninth and 12th grade. Of the 160,000 who finish 12th grade in this country, only 50,000 attend a four-year college, and only 8,000 attend moderately competitive places. Going from 320,000 to 8,000 who have the best chance of being ready for this economy — that defines the crisis right there”.
He notes that this is not a “leaky pipeline” but a “pipeline failure”. I believe that this all but ensures that a representative sample based on population is not in realm of possibility, because there are just not enough viable candidates currently (at least among African American males). It has already been noted on this thread that only about 35-40% of those African American young men will graduate from college. The facilitator gave his own answer to the question about how will we know when we have enough representation and inclusion . He said it was a “moving target that is dependent on our community based on what is needed to thrive”. Even though I do not believe in AA as a practice, that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in diversity, but I feel there is never enough thought put into fixing the issues that plague underrepresented groups (instead of just lowering the admissions bar) and working to remove the achievement gaps that currently exist within our society.
RE: Post #4019 and $4020
That data is at least 5 years out of date. AAMC no longer reports a GPA/MCAT grid by race and hasn’t since 2014.
And this data is skewed by a several factors—primarily:
HBCU medical schools have lower admission stats compared to other medical schools. (Mission oriented schools tend to have lower admission metrics–and not just at HBCUS.) Over 2/3rd of the black students admitted to US allopathic med schools annually attend one of the 3 HBCU med schools.
Make sure you’re comparing apple to apples. In this case you’re not.
Agree. Seems like much of the pro-affirmative-action side focuses on quick fixes at gateways (college admission, job hiring, etc.), perhaps because the “pipeline” issues are a more difficult problem to tackle (because the causes and problems are more distributed – a greater incidence of small problems here and there add up to a large cumulative effect, whether on one person or a large group of people). Meanwhile, much of the anti-affirmative-action side just wants to get rid of the stuff at the gateways, but wants to ignore the “pipeline” issues, or write off the achievement gaps as evidence that URMs are inherently inferior.
You can see the specific numbers at https://www.aamc.org/download/321540/data/factstableb5-1.pdf . The 3 medical schools with the largest listed black enrollment during 2018-19 were Meharry (336), Howard (308), and Morehouse (254). These 3 made up 13.8% of the total black enrolled students. The other 86.2% of black students attended non-HBCU medical schools.
It also looks like about 20.9% (1,232 out of 5,881) of Hispanic or Latino medical students attend medical schools in Puerto Rico.
I’m not sure if I am reading that table correctly, but doesn’t it indicate that multi racial/ethnic are counted twice? If so, it would be impossible to figure out only white, black, Hispanic, Asian and NA since many, including my kid are counted in 2 columms.
For my kids school, there are about 140 more students listed for the total enrollment for the 4 year class, so am I correct in thinking those are the students counted in more than one ethnicity?
Reading tables and stats are not in my wheel house so forgive me if I am not understanding that correctly.
@Data10 - Just a footnote to the data you posted. UCLA has a partnership with Charles Drew (an HBCU) and takes in 24 students a year via that route. Drew’s medical college breakdown is 47% African American, 43% hispanic. Drew is not separately reported on the data, those students are probably included within UCLA’s numbers: 106 African American, 132 hispanic, out of a total enrollment of 840.
UCLA is doing a good job of educating minority students in any case-- my only point is that almost half of their African American students are simultaneously enrolled in Charles Drew (an HBCU), so that puts an additional wrinkle on the numbers.
I don’t know enough about the Drew program to know the exact mechanics, but I’m guessing it works something like the Columbia/Barnard partnership. (i.e, my daughter was admitted to Barnard and attended Barnard, but her degree is from Columbia U.)
Rather than double count, federal racial definitions define “Black” as single race Black (or a student who only chooses to check the Black race box on the relevant forms) and have a separate grouping for students who check multiple racial boxes. In the table, the mixed race grouping is in the column “Multiple Race/Ethnicity.” The totals at the bottom confirm that no groupings are double counted. The totals also show that relatively few mixed race students are enrolled at the listed HBCUs, so including mixed race is expected to bring the percentage of Black students attending HBCU med schools down.