Small Pre-med schools, rural settings

Parents Forum
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Would love to know what the “among others” are. I highly suspect some Caribbean schools to be listed among those. It’s another typical trick colleges use to inflate numbers.

I also want to know how “recent” their numbers are. Past 5 years? 10? 20? And how many in real numbers are we talking about? 1 went to X out of all those years? Or how many?

There are so many ways colleges can cook numbers that it makes acceptance rates meaningless IMO.

That said, yes, colleges like this send students to med school. Pretty much all colleges send students to med school. All one needs are top grades, a high MCAT score, oodles of ECs, and a little bit of luck. Colleges look for talent from all sorts of schools because they are preparing doctors for all sorts of areas. Many of those colleges listed like U Washington have a strong preference for their in-state students, so a student attending Carroll from Washington (resident of Washington) has as good a chance as from any other college, but a student coming from NY (NY resident) wouldn’t.

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I took that from their website.

It’s a fair point - OP, once they narrow in on prospective colleges they could like and afford, could likely email/contact the pre-med advisor at each school and ask for a full report.

I’m personally a big fan of talking to schools themselves about programs kids have interest in.

You wouldn’t think a lesser known school with lower scores and lesser selectivity would be the gold star of any high level fields. It’s not impossible - you just wouldn’t think it…

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The point is they aren’t a gold star. No school is. They can be very good at what they do, as are many of the other smaller, lesser known, schools on this thread that have been mentioned.

All colleges can get students into med school. Sometimes on CC people think it has to be Top 100 or whatever, but places like Washington & Jefferson and Juniata (two I’m familiar with in PA) give their students good foundations too.

There’s a reason I tell prospective pre-meds to heavily lean toward schools where they are in the Top 25% for grades and test scores - perhaps Top 10%. Med schools want the best students from a variety of schools. There are students at the top of every single college out there. If they’re interested in med school and get the ECs plus MCAT score to show they are competitive, then they’re competitive.

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Actually, there was a fascinating article in the New York Times a few years ago (when I have time I’ll find the link) of an HBCU with very modest admissions stats which is KILLING IT in the med school admissions process. As far as I can recall, it was a hugely motivated president who decided “we can’t be all things to all people, but we can excel at this one thing”, some donors who believed in the vision, and members of the faculty who jumped on the opportunity to show that a kid with “not so great” HS prep in the sciences can catch up in college and rise to the top of the applicant pool. Lots of coaching and counseling involved- from the outside looking in, it’s easy to be skeptical and say “sure, Af-Am candidates from a rural area, any med school would want them” but it’s not true. These are students who are actually getting the high MCAT scores, presenting with the “right” kinds of activities and EC’s, acing organic chemistry, many of whom had never met an Af-Am physician before they started college. So no role models…

It’s possible. But it sure doesn’t happen by itself…

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You rock!!!

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All fair points. One could contact the college directly to ask about that.

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New Orleans recently renamed a fairly large street that is near Xavier’s campus after Norman Francis, the Xavier president who helped create the school’s emphasis on increasing the number of black doctors.

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Here’s the list from U Roc’s Class of 2025. Note where Xavier is compared to the other schools. If anyone gets a Gold Star, they sure do. If one compares it to other years the results are similar, so obviously UR likes what they see from students. On top of that, look at the diversity of schools listed. Med schools like to get students from all sorts of colleges, not just name brands.

You’ve attended sixty-one different colleges and universities as undergraduates and I’m listing all of them. In addition to the 16 students from Rochester; 5 attended Johns Hopkins, 4 each from Berkeley (GO Bears!), Hunter, and Xavier of Louisiana; 3 from Rochester Institute of Technology; 2 each from Amherst, Brandeis, BYU, Brown, Harvard, Middlebury, Stanford, Buffalo, Connecticut, and Yale. Also represented are: Carleton, Carnegie Mellon, Colgate, Cornish College of the Arts, Duke, Georgetown,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Hamilton, Haverford, Indiana-Bloomington, Indiana-Purdue, Juniata, Lipscomb, Metropolitan State of the University of Denver, Michigan State, NYU, Northeastern, Oglethorpe, University of Oklahoma, Christian University, Princeton, Rutgers, Smith, Spelman, SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Maritime, SUNY Brockport, Swarthmore, Syracuse, The Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory, University of Scranton, United States Naval Academy, New Hampshire, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, Colorado, Florida, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, Pennsylvania, University of Vermont, and Utah Valley.

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Yep, Xavier in New Orleans. XULA. The only Catholic HBCU. This premed program is the brainchild of Dr. Carmichael, a non-retired professor who dedicated his life to it.

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Several of the physicians on the BravoTV Married to Medicine franchises attended Xavier. One of the story lines had them attend a reunion and it looked and sounded like an amazing place.

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Xavier’s success at the University of Rochester appears related to its connection to UR’s medical school through an early assurance program:

The OP should note that colleges discussed as being of particular interest, such as Carleton, offer similar advantages.

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XULA is not rural, though…

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Sorry, but that show is a mess. Not a good look for showing positive physicians, or UG students wanting to be a Dr.

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Can’t argue with you. I watch it as I am"married to medicine" and can’t for the life of me figure out how any of them live the lifestyle they do as physicians. I’m sure most of their income now comes from being on TV.

However, it did bring Xavier to my attention in a positive way. I was impressed with the school.

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What about Wake Forest?

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I think the OP’s daughter might find a lot of the Catholic schools listed the right size and have the right insular feel even if they are in a city. Creighton in Omaha has a big medical concentration. Wheeling Jesuit. Regis in Denver. The campuses are often not right downtown and much more suburban than the location would suggest.

Even U of San Diego is its own little world up on the hill. If a student doesn’t want to go into the city, the student doesn’t have to. Most have several hospitals nearby for internships. The pharmacy we use has lots of Regis pharmacy students working there and we’re a good 15 miles from the school (we’re in the city, the school is in the city).

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Piggybacking on this,

U of Dayton (a Marianist university that my agnostic son is unperturbed attending) is only a few blocks away from Miami Valley Hospital a 900-bed Trauma 1 hospital.

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Thanks @EconPop for getting me to learn something. My first inclination was that your son was attending puppeteer (marionette) school. I am now enlightened😀

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I laughed hard at this, but it took my feeble mind wayyyyy to long to get it. I need some brain vitamins.

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