schools with highest acceptance rate to med school?

College Search & Selection
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<p>I think that this is plausible -- in fact, likely -- and I don't agree that it is foolishness.</p>

<p>It is not foolish to avoid applying to schools you do not want to attend. Not every pre-med is exclusively interested in medicine as a career, nor does every pre-med want to be a doctor at any cost. This is particularly true at a school like MIT, where all students have to take most of the required pre-med sequence (math, chemistry, etc.) whether they are pre-med or not. Plenty of students are just not interested in going to med school at North Dakota or West Virginia Osteopathic, and thus they do not apply to true "safeties." If you believe that premeds should only care about getting the degree and not about where they study, then the choice those students are making reflects a competing set of values, but it's a perfectly rational choice.</p>

<p>I realize that medical and law school are not perfectly congruent, but I saw a TON of this among pre-laws at Harvard. There were some kids who were truly dying to be lawyers no matter what and were willing to go to schools like B.U. and Cardozo (which, you'll notice, are still highly respected schools). But most only applied within the top 25, and many stuck to the top 10. If they didn't get into those schools, they'd explore a different career, or apply again in a few years after raising their LSAT score. They knew perfectly well that they could get into safety schools, but they weren't interested in going to those schools. Again, that reflects different priorities, but it is not at all foolish.</p>

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<p>For a future doctor, I'd say it most definitely represents poor or non-existent advising. The "top" medical schools are almost all geared toward research; they provide nothing additional in the way of educational quality for the average doc. Year after year, the University of Washington ranks first in the quality of training of primary care physicians (the school is actually a consortium program of five states); for a doc who wants to treat patients to insist on one of the top 5 schools is sheer folly, EVEN IF s/he gets in, especially given the cost differential. And if no one in the university's advising department wizened them up, it is just another indication that the school's program is inferior, even after one deals with the issue of "weed-outs". First they've weeded out those who could have become perfectly fine doctors had they gone elsewhere (and would have been thrilled with West Virginia Osteopathic), and then provided poor advising to those who stayed. That's not a track record I'd be proud of.</p>

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<p>Once again, not everyone DOES want to do primary care. And we're not talking about insisting on the top 5 schools -- even my friends at Harvard Med didn't do that when they applied. We're talking about insisting on the top 100 -- the choice not to apply to ultrasafe safeties.</p>

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<p>And how is that relevant to an aspiring pathologist?</p>

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<p>Could you please back up this statement with ANYTHING besides pure speculation -- even anecdote about the kids you know personally who went to MIT and ended up in this position?</p>

<p>Edited to add: The Hope College admission rate is 91.2% for students with over a 3.4, a detail you neglected to mention. It's 85.6% overall. Note the number doing DO's, too. <a href="http://www.hope.edu/admissions/academic/premed.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.hope.edu/admissions/academic/premed.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Law school and med school are VERY different. If you graduate from med school, you're going to be a doctor. A lot of your career depends on residency, not just the med school. </p>

<p>Contrast law school: your career will be heavily, heavily influenced by where you go to school, both in terms of geography, advancement, and salary. For law school, it makes sense to keep applying until you get into a good enough school. When you get a JD, there are no guarantees of being a lawyer - it is a well-known fact that more people have law degrees than the market can absorb. Med school is radically different - which is why the "low" acceptance rate from MIT doesn't make much sense.</p>

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We're talking about insisting on the top 100 -- the choice not to apply to ultrasafe safeties.

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<p>Aren't there only 125 schools that give MDs?</p>

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<p>That sounds right. Although if we're including Hope College in the debate, we have to note that unlike MIT, it's sending more than 10% of its admitted premeds to DO programs, so they won't be getting MDs, and we need to include DO programs on the list. Second, the kids at Harvard (the school where I have the best data) who applied to med school and didn't get in were generally applying to all but what they viewed as the very worst schools, so yes, something like the top 100.</p>

<p>Edited to add: I should stress that I agree that which med school you attend isn't very important if you want to be an internist or pediatrician. I simply don't think it's illegitimate to be interested in medicine, but not interested in primary care.</p>

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<p>I already did. I don't know any from MIT. I did know literally dozens of aspiring docs from my undergraduate days, with high SAT scores and grades, who were "weeded out" from the possibility of pursuing medical careers - of any kind, radiology, D.O. or otherwise. One of them was my roommate, and he would have been delighted to have become a D.O. And it's not that they didn't want to become docs, but rather that they were precluded from the possibility by their education at an august institution with 90% med school admit rates. Now, mind you, some of them might have been unhappy docs -who knows? but they never had the opportunity to find out.</p>

<p>Med school is not like law school. You have to actually show enough commitment to having taken the 12 courses, and tried to excel. I've never met ANYONE who said, "Well, I'll take the 12 courses, and if I don't get into Harvard Med., I think I'll become a stockbroker instead." Not one.</p>

<p>What is true is that med school seems to have become less desirable for grads at (at least some of) the top schools. The percentage of Yale grads going on to med. school has dropped 63% in the past 10 years (same with law school, by the way.) Of course, some will apply later, but that is true at all schools, so it's essentially a non-sequitur. It certainly isn't the case that students at Yale are less capable than they used to be (I expect the opposite is the case), but since they themselves say they reject entire classes of folks as academically qualified as those they accept, these folks are going elsewhere, and, for whatever reason, taking those med. school places. </p>

<p>But, even after the weed-out, if MIT did such poor advising that they didn't advise a candidate of her poor chances at a school with a radiology or opthamology program but that there were good possibilities in a D.O, program, even after she finished the pre-med requirements, whose fault is that?</p>

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<p>This occurred at what school, how many decades ago? And how does it support your claims about what students at a different institution in 2005 would or would not have become had they gone elsewhere?</p>

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<p>Why do you presume that a student who applied and did not get in was poorly advised? Perhaps she was poorly advised, and perhaps she was told that she might not make it and decided to at least give it a shot. That's what my (excellent) advisors told me to do regarding long-shot clerkships.</p>

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<p>How can you be weeded out of pre-med at MIT? There's nowhere to go. EVERYONE has to pass calculus, physics, chemistry, etc., or you don't graduate, and it's not like they're offering some watered-down Physics for Poets. The only way to weed out people who can't handle the core sciences at MIT is to kick them out.</p>

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<p>ariesathena, many people go to law school who do not want to be practicing lawyers. I think that this is less true of med school- most of these grads probably want to do something directly rated to medicine. Many people who go to grad school do not end up becoming professors, some by choice and some not.</p>

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Med school is not like law school. You have to actually show enough commitment to having taken the 12 courses, and tried to excel. I've never met ANYONE who said, "Well, I'll take the 12 courses, and if I don't get into Harvard Med., I think I'll become a stockbroker instead." Not one

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<p>Maybe so. But then there are those who go through med school and choose a different career path. Michael Crichton comes to mind. Harvard med, no less. I am glad he took his medical background and turned it to writing. My reading, movie and TV watching would be quite limited without E.R. , Andromeda Strain, Twister, Jurassic Park, and the others...</p>

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<p>DRab - nonetheless, there are many people with JDs who would like to practice law, or like to practice in firms, who are unable to do so. Pick up a copy of US News & World Report, graduate edition - and see that, outside of the top schools, a lot of students are not employed at graduation. While the "9 months later" statistic is better, you can flip to the back and find the percentages of students who go into government, non-legal business, private practice, etc. It's pretty easy to see that a lot of students end up going to work in other fields because they couldn't get the jobs they wanted.</p>

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<p>jym626, my dad used to like to watch er with my dad to point out how his methods and names of various objects are incorrect.</p>

<p>I agree, but how is this different than any other degree? Very few specializations or degrees are so rare than any person getting one gets a "great job" where they want it with the right salary.</p>

<p>What statistic can show "jobs that students want" or "jobs that student dont' want but eventually go into?" Many of these people, like the MIT med school apps who do it to see where they could work, would practice in firms, if the firm was good enough in their opinion, but not everyone gets a job in the powerhouse firm. Many lawyers make great money and like the fexlibility and other benefits of private practice.</p>

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>Or, #2 - these people are only applying to the most elite med-schools are no safeties. Neither of these reasons seem particularly credible. Both of them are premised on the same thing - simple foolishness on the part of the candidate.</p>

<p>I think that this is plausible -- in fact, likely -- and I don't agree that it is foolishness.</p>

<p>It is not foolish to avoid applying to schools you do not want to attend. Not every pre-med is exclusively interested in medicine as a career, nor does every pre-med want to be a doctor at any cost. This is particularly true at a school like MIT, where all students have to take most of the required pre-med sequence (math, chemistry, etc.) whether they are pre-med or not. Plenty of students are just not interested in going to med school at North Dakota or West Virginia Osteopathic, and thus they do not apply to true "safeties."

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<p>But that's skirting the real question. The real question is, would MIT premeds be doing this any more than premeds at HYPS, and if so why? You said it yourself when you looked at law school - prelaws at Harvard were just not willing to attend a no-name law school, so they wouldn't apply. </p>

<p>The question that I have placed on the table is why does MIT have a conspicuously lower premed placement rate than does HYPS? It has been asserted that perhaps this is the case because MIT premeds are only shooting for high-end med schools without safeties. However, it would seem to me that if MIT premeds are doing that, why wouldn't HYPS premeds also be doing that? I think they would. Hence, it's a wash, and therefore cannot be an explanatory factor for the delta in premed placement rates.</p>

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<p>Sakky, perhaps the fact that many of the MIT premeds are not true premeds- they HAVE to take the classes required for med school admissions, whereas the people at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and many other elite schools do not have all of the students complete the premed sequence. If these people aren't really interested in becoming doctors, they might still apply to the best med schools, just to see what happens. If they get into JHU med, Harvard Med, UCLA Med, UCSF, Stanford Med, maybe they'll go- but they don't want to be doctors that much: it is just one of may options. The traditional premeds from all schools want to be doctors so much that they would go to almost any med school, sometimes even out of the country if that is all they can do (and this is not that rare), that they would apply and probably get accepted to lower rated schools. Makes sense?</p>

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<p>Drab, I thought about that, but I discount it. First of all, as mentioned above, regular MIT students don't complete the ENTIRE premed sequence. In particular, OChem is not a requirement. Unless you major in bio or chemistry at MIT, you don't do OChem. Hence, it's not like everybody at MIT can just apply to med-school just for the heck of it. To apply, you have to go out of your way to complete the 5.12/5.13 OChem sequence, which is an extra painful step, considering the extremely busy schedules of the MIT student.</p>

<p>Now you might say that you might like to narrow your discussion to just the MIT bio and chem majors, because you might see that these people complete the premed course sequence as a consequence of their major, and so they might try to apply to med-school just to see what happens. However, that doesn't exactly answer the question, because bio and chem majors at HYPS also complete the premed course sequence as a consequence of their major, and so you could say that they would also apply to med-school just to see what happens. Hence, it still doesn't explain the difference in placement rates between MIT and HYPS premeds.</p>

<p>Furthermore, most importantly, I think the whole notion of applying to med-school just to see what happens is unrealistic. Being a viable premed candidate is not just a matter of taking the premed course sequences. You still have the huge hurdle of taking the MCAT. That's not something you just "decide" to do one fine day. To take the MCAT and score respectably, you have to study for months beforehand. It's not like MIT students have a whole lot of free time on their hands, so prepping for the MCAT is not exactly the easiest thing in the world for them. </p>

<p>Think of it this way. If MIT students were just taking the MCAT 'for the heck of it', you would expect that they would be scoring rather low on it, relative to HYPS premeds. After all, why study hard for something that you're not really serious about anyway? Yet, the average MIT premed who applied to med-school had an MCAT score of 33.6. That's really really good. </p>

<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/preprof.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/preprof.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Compare that to the average 2004 Princeton premed who had an MCAT score of 31.8 (Apr 2004 scores) or 32.3 (Aug 2004 scores). Hence, the average MIT MCAT score was 1-2 points higher than the average Princeton premed score. So it seems as if the MIT premeds are indeed studying very very hard for the MCAT - harder than the Princeton premeds are. Hence, if anything, the MIT premeds may be MORE serious about getting into med-school than the Princeton premeds, not less serious. </p>

<p><a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/hpa/MCATStats.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://web.princeton.edu/sites/hpa/MCATStats.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>It's just impossible to say what's going on based on the limited info we have. Maybe the advising is worse at MIT, which in turn could mean that any one (or several) of an array of problems is thwarting the MIT kids, from the selection of safety schools to the content of recommendation letters. Maybe the HYPS kids, who tend to have a greater interest in the humanities to begin with and who also get more writing practice than the average MIT grad, are writing better essays. Maybe the MIT kids suck at interviewing compared to HYPS kids. (It'd be interesting to find out how many of those MIT kids who got rejected in the end made it to the interview stage.) Also, when my mom was doing med school admissions at a top-20 school, she said they cut a lot of kids with great numbers because the committee considered them science drones -- kids who used every elective to take more science, didn't seem to have any human interests outside the lab, etc. -- and this was at a med school known much more for research than for primary care. I would guess that there are more of those kids at MIT than at Yale.</p>

<p>There's no way to get any closer to the bottom of the problem without hearing from some MIT pre-meds, or at least from MIT alumni who knew a bunch of them.</p>

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<p>Well, at the bare minimum, we can say that if you want to maximize your chances of going to med-school, you should go to HYPS instead of MIT. Because the bottom line is that, for whatever reason, MIT does not do as good of a job of preparing its students to get into med-school as do HYPS. Whether it's because of bad advising, or because MIT does not give its students enough writing practice, or because the MIT culture encourages its students to become science drones - it doesn't matter why. The only thing that matters is that for whatever reason, MIT has problems in getting its students into med-school. </p>

<p>However, as I have pointed out on other threads, it's not just MIT. It's also Caltech. It's also Berkeley. It's also Cornell. Basically, it seems to me that any school that practices grade deflation also seems to have a suspiciously low premed placement rate, relative to peer schools. On the other hand, those schools that practice grade inflation always seem to have suspiciously high premed placement rates. For example, I would say that Berkeley, Cornell, and Duke are peer schools. Of those three, Duke is the one that has the most grade inflation. "Coincidentally", Duke is also the one that has the highest premed placement rate. </p>

<p>In fact, I have never encountered a single example of a school that practices significant grade deflation, yet also has a high premed placement rate. Somebody once said JHU, but then it was discovered that JHU has a premed committee which apparently serves to strongly discourage (not prevent, but strongly discourage) weaker premed candidates from even applying to med-school. Hence, I have yet to encounter what I would call a 'true' example of a school that practices harsh grading, but still has a highly successful premed placement rate, without the use of artificial boosters like gateway committees.</p>

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I agree, but how is this different than any other degree? Very few specializations or degrees are so rare than any person getting one gets a "great job" where they want it with the right salary.

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<p>You're missing the point. Most engineers get respectable jobs when they graduate with a B.S. You really cannot say that for lawyers - so very many of them want jobs that they cannot have - or want legal jobs and are forced to work in non-legal fields. I personally know quite a few people like that. It is utterly insane to think that the people who graduate without legal jobs are fine with that. Try meeting people with six figures worth of law school debt who are working as bartenders to make their loan payments while they search for jobs. Then you'll understand the gulf between law school and med school.</p>

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<p>just to pick-up on Hanna's point-it may be a matter of expectations, as we have seen in this thread, there are guys from MIT, Cornell and UC-Berkeley with 38 MCAT and 3.8 GPA who occasionally do not get into medical school(probably shooting for Ivy-caliber med schools) who are to be contrasted with the guy who graduates from 'no name college' with his 3.1 GPA and 25 MCAT who happily enrolled in West Virginia Osteopathic and is a practicing physician today. Keep the ultimate goal in mind, and you can get there.</p>

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<p>But those people will often re-apply the next year, after consulting with a pre-med advisor, and revise their expectations. They would then be considered among the second year's acceptees. Right?</p>