I told my son about Anki and his response “I have been using it for 6 months” so he finds info on his own thru online or seniors. I am more focused on timelines and try to see if he missed anything. My contribution is less than 5%. I am more of administrative assistant 
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You can educate and provide facts to kids. Provide all pros and cons for all options on the table.
You don’t want to force your kid what he doesn’t like.
If things goes sour in 4 years from now, you as a parent will be an easy target to be blamed.
Decision making is a learning process at some stage of life and UG admission is perfect start point. If they do mistake, will learn from it. If don’t learn, glad that individual is not responsible for other people lives in future.
Fit is very important factor to attend any college, if your son sees college as unfit for him, don’t force him to attend that college.
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Which school are you referring to as mediocre? UCF? What are your son’s other options?
You should not be pushing him in any one direction. Give him a budget, discuss pros and cons about all of his options when all decisions are in, and let him decide. It’s his education and his life.
I went through this for engg. for my son with full rides at state and lower schools but he wanted to go to higher rated school where I had to pay huge.
He finally joined top school and has struggled through UG since most valedictorians in engg top schools. In engg., it is more easy to get a job from less known school but more $$ from top schools. Also like MD, if want to pursue PhD, top school matter. However, they get good jobs at 20s with most schools but more easy with FAANG with top.
If you do detailed analysis for life, top school matter even after paying 200K tuition in engg. They start at higher salary and continue all life ( most not All). They also have more managerial positions. Although many do well ( and even very great) with avg. schools, delta always remains.
Now with D, it is all over and we will see what happens- She doesnt seem to like UG part of MD schools.
Few more weeks and back to same kind of decisions.
+1 to this. My older D got into UTSW for BSMD and chose NJIT-NJMS over it because she felt it was a better fit for what she sought in UG school leading to medical career. We asked her yesterday if she had regrets and she said absolutely not, and that she may not even have matriculated into Medical school if she had gone to Univ. of Houston. If we had forced her to take the higher ranked school instead of letting her do her analysis and make her choices, we might have regretted it. Best to ensure the student has all the facts and is able to think through logically to make a choice. We find it helps to write down the pros and cons, likes and dislikes and give it lifetime-value-score or risk score and then have them use that to explain their decision to parents, but more to themselves really.
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You are classic example of tiger parent that’s constantly derided by adcoms on SDN 
What exactly is your rationale for wanting your son to go to BSMD program? Fear of failure? fear of gap years? want him to started making money early? cost?
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When he looks for 1st FT job, they may see his GPA some value, after that it is all about how he performs. Top schools name recognition provides a platform for top notch internships (e.g. FAANG) those are otherwise hard to get by lower ranked schools.
Finance is always a family decision, don’t want any parent to jeopardize their retirement savings for kid education.
It will be available to the public in 1 or 2 weeks.
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3.8/3.9 GPA and 517 MCAT are the minimums for T10s for ORMs. Research, Leadership, Community Service, Social Justice, D1 sports and Military service are the categories school use besides standard clinical and non-clinical volunteering. To get into T10s you need to excel in at least in 2 out of first 4 ( Research, Leadership, Community Service, Social Justice) or one of the remaining. Social Justice movement is strong now and some schools give more importance. I feel that was only weakness in my son’s application and may be the reason for not getting couple of T10 interviews. Lot of kids are taking gap years to get these experiences so that they can go to T5 or T10 medical schools not because of failures. This cycle 3 CC parents kids who took traditional path in 2017 got into multiple T10s with no gap years. That’s why I continuously encourage kids like yours to explore the benefits of traditional path and decide which path to take instead of falling for failure stories with no details.
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Nobody cares about GPA after 1st job but school name matters. Usually top school start at top places ( McKinsey, FAANG etc. ) and continue throughout career. The next job is even better.
Avg. School have to work harder.
Delta usually stays.
Now in both cases there are tonnes of exceptions- Many MIT/Harvard go nowhere whereas many Brooklyn make to top.
See all Bio companies CE0- Moderna, Pfizer etc- PhD from top schools. Google- PhD Stanford ( I know 3 top Stanford PhD and topnotch UG) at top Google- but many top people also from avg. schools.
Microsoft top is avg. UG.
Thank you for you kind words.
I did not realize Sports or military matters for medical school admission. Do traditional students typically take part in college level sports, assuming military is personal choice and not so typical? How did your DS or other students make time for it? Both my kids did sports in HS, but it was too demanding and I cannot imagine them continuing that into college.
Enjoy!!!
Ellen Vrana
Updated January 23, 2017
What is it like to be an Ivy League undergraduate student?
Awesome, the best was when we’d cross the river and shout at MIT students “Oy!You aren’t Ivy League!! Pump my gas!!”
…Eh? What’s that? There’s no river between MIT and Harvard? Must have been BU then. I get all those non-Ivy league or “I didn’t work hard enough in high school” colleges confused.
Fact is, IVY LEAGUE means nothing in the U.S. Nothing. Except maybe bad football. What does mean something, however are top school rankings, of which many non-Ivy league schools are included. (Sorry, bothers me when people think Ivy League is synonymous with “top US education”. I mean, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn and Columbia are Ivy League, after all).
What is it like? It starts before and continues long after the actual 4 yrs at college:
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High School - I did everything and I did everything better than anyone else. And that is all I did.
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Freshman year - Overwhelmed by freedom and pissed at my high school for not teaching me critical thinking. Or writing. Or speed-reading. I start to doubt whether I know anything. Make a few friends, are they really friends? My parents write gigantic check to school.
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Sophomore/Junior year - Officially know I don’t know anything. Only hope is to be cute. Except, damn. Never-ending food buffet makes me fat. Which brings on unhealthy relationship with self-image. Why is everyone finding their cultural roots? Why is everyone going to Hillel? And how come there are no clubs for Midwestern farmers? In my self-pity, land boyfriend and learn true love. Parents cut more large checks.
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Senior year - Last chance, not failing, might graduate. Find job. Everyone is doing “recruiting.” Don’t want to do it, sounds hard. Learn bad side of true love - it ends. Get snogs on before graduation. Get job. Get the hell out of dodge.
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First job after school - “Oh you went to Haaarvard. You must be smart.” Start thinking “I went to Harvard, am I doing enough worthy of that?”
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Second job after school - “Oh you went to Haaarvard. You must be smart, but you’re not that smart” Am plagued by “I went to Harvard, am I doing enough worthy of that?”
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Rest of my 20s - “Oh you went to Haaarvard. You must think you’re smart. You’re not.” Am crippled by “I went to Harvard, am I doing enough worthy of that?”
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Turn 30 - It’s just like any school, we’ve all evened out now. Who cares. I’m happy doing what I do and who I am. Don’t need to prove anything.
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Join Quora - get to make ridiculous, asinine posts about myself swearing at Hillary Clinton and still sleep at night knowing that at one point, I went to Harvard.
You prepare for it, you suffer through it, you emerge, you get haunted by it, you get vilified for it, you get credit for it, you make peace with it.
(But I did get to eat here every day, that was awesome.)
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Agree one can succeed either way, but top schools provides a platform that is up to an individual to take advantage of. If they slack off or stay over confidence, they loose that advantage.
that is why they are called rock stars, not average Joe.
I didn’t say every kid needs to be D1 player that’s one of the categories. Getting the required MCAT and GPA while being a D1 player is extraordinary hence they are looked very favorably. Medicine is not for those who want to relax despite what some claim here. If you want to relax and make money do CS from T20 school
CS from top school do not relax sir- they are grilled all life. Many think of dropping while in school and many create FAANG and TSLA.
MD or top school always is hard work- folks enjoy working hard.
I know, but comparing it to do medical students it’s relaxing. I know CS kids from top schools and I see how successful they are while same batch medical students are still going thru the grind.
Yes we had been through this in my C’s high school batch. 3 of them chose to go to Princeton, but they were not really medicine focused. Of those who applied, 4 or 5 got into UT Austin (guess business and CS), but none got any price breaks and no one went. 11 got into UC Berkeley, only 1 went for CS. 10 got into GA Tech, no one went. (There may have been some overlaps, 4 or 5 who got into UCB may have also applied to GA Tech and got in too).
People were conscious of price, quality of student life in terms of both competition and grade deflation, though all these smart kids had rigorous grounding in the 4 years of high school.
I would argue that UG CS/ECE at top school ( Caltech/MIT/Stanford etc.) is the most fierce competition (perhaps best brain) on planet and perhaps no BS part of any BSMD is even close.
Now MD part is a different ball game.