Stanford vs Yale

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
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<p>How much do these percentages matter? Cornell has 67% premed acceptance rates into medical school which I find is grossly low compared to other schools of the came caliber. Why are bright and motivated kids at cornell only reaching 67% when the school has excellent advising, resources, and academic quality? </p>

<p>I’m actually choosing among Cornell, Carnegie Mellon (85%), and Tufts (75%). Bluedevilmike which would you attend? I know there are many factors at play here and there is a lot of subjectivity person to person, but I can’t make up my mind and I’d like to see what other people think.</p>

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<p>Not too much. Bluebayou rightly points out that a lot of these things aren’t really comparing apples to apples. (That’s why the direct evidence of Stanford’s poor advising is really the concern.) I haven’t the slightest idea. I’ve never been to any of those schools.</p>

<p>EDIT: Goodness that was a lot of typos.</p>

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<p>^re.cornell, when I sat in their premed presentation for prospective students, they mentioned something to the effect of everyone who wishes to apply to medical school can do so at Cornell, which seems to be very different from other schools which boast much higher admission rates. They do seem to not screen/weed out any applicants and allow whoever wants to to apply. Which I thought was the reason for the lower %</p>

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<p>^ Wow thanks for that info! I’ve been trying to find reasons for why cornell has such a low rate for awhile but I couldnt really confirm if it was because of low screening or hard curriculum.</p>

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<p>bdm:</p>

<p>I apologize if my posts come off as argumentative, and I have a natural aversion to anything Red, so not a super fan of that Junior University in Palo Alto. (And to the OP I would normally recommend Yale unless s/he was an Engineering type.)</p>

<p>My questions are more from naivet</p>

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Lots of schools SAY that other schools do this. We’ve never really found one that does.</p>

<p>Hopkins sort of does and Middlebury (I think) discussed it earlier.</p>

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<p>Harvard’s problem is actually that they have too many advisors. The whole point of a committee letter is that schools need reliable communication from a repeat actor. So the fact that Harvard has something like fifteen premed advisors running around all the time is a flaw, not a virtue.</p>

<p>I can’t speak to Dartmouth, but the advice coming out of Stanford’s advising office is really truly terrible. We had a poster on these boards a while ago who was a student there, and the things she was describing were really horrible. And one of my good HS friends went there as a premed as well and routinely mocked their office. (She’s at HMS now, so obviously she did all right anyway.) It’s possible that they’re just that clueless about the importance of committee letters.</p>

<p>I suspect that it’s actually more of a bureaucratic turf sort of thing, but that’s just conjecture. (E.g. maybe current “dean” is too lazy to write letters but too entrenched to fire.)</p>

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<p>Just out of curiosity, BDM, why do you say that schools that do not give committee letters put their premed students at a disadvantage? Is it because those students have to run around organizing their letters and so it’s just one more step in an already complicated process, or is it because the adcoms don’t want to read more than one letter? Is it because of these reasons and/or other reasons?</p>

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<p>Yes, both of those are true.</p>

<p>The most important reason, however, is that only a committee provides year-to-year consistency. That does two things. (1) It helps adcoms know what they’re saying is reliable, and (2) it provides accountability.</p>

<p>For example, when my advisor (well-known, longstanding) tells adcoms that the professor who gave Mike Lee a C is really, really difficult – with a longstanding committee, they know what she means when she says he’s REALLY hard. They know what she means when she says that Mike is pretty bright despite the C. They know exactly what she means because they’ve read hundreds of her letters, admitted dozens of her students, and they know what they’re getting from her. They can trust her evaluation. She writes them 300 evaluations a year and they know exactly what she means when she says something.</p>

<p>Without a committee, how often do they get a letter from the same person so that they can calibrate? Once a year? Once every other year? Even just a few a year isn’t nearly the same scale as compared to one advisor writing every letter to every school.</p>

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<p>The second reason is that candidates and even individual professors can simply lie. A committee can’t do that.</p>

<p>NCG once pointed out that a huge proportion of students promise multiple schools that they will attend if admitted. That presents a credibility problem, obviously, and medical schools can’t take those students at face value.</p>

<p>When the time came for me to play the waitlist game, however, I simply called up my advisor and I told her what my top choice was. She relayed that information to them, and bang – simple as that, I was admitted.</p>

<p>That’s not the sort of thing you can do without a centralized committee. The school knows my advisor can’t lie to them because they’ll simply punish her the next year. They don’t have any such assurances with individual students or even individual professors or even one-of-fifteen Harvard advisors.</p>

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<p>So those are the two most important functions of the committee: consistency in evaluations, plus trustworthiness. You simply can’t replace that.</p>

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<p>Stanford and Yale are both great schools, but athletics play a much smaller role at an Ivy League campus. Because the Ivy League colleges have no athletic scholarships, they are perceived as being “more serious.”</p>

<p>As BDM notes, this perception is widespread.</p>

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<p>btw: Holy Cross appears to conduct a hard screen… reading between the lines: don’t waste your time applying without our letter. But HC is even more strict: upon acceptance as a Frosh, they’ll tell you if you are on (Health Committee) Program track or not. If not, one has to “apply” to get in Program track at the end of Sophomore; success is rare, however, according to students who have visited. No wonder HC claims an 82% success rate [with Committee letter.</p>

<p>“Students who wish to apply to medical and allied health professions schools do not have to be evaluated by the committee, but it is very unusual to apply without the committee’s recommendation. It often sends a “red flag” to medical schools, as almost all Holy Cross medical school applicants apply through the committee. If you decide to apply without the committee’s support, the health professions office will forward your recommendation letters to medical schools for you.”</p>

<p>[Health</a> Professions Advisory Committee](<a href=“http://academics.holycross.edu/healthprofessions/committee]Health”>http://academics.holycross.edu/healthprofessions/committee)</p>