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norcalguy- can you say that a school with as good of a premed program as UNC is at THAT much of a disadvantage for the top medical schools?
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<p>It depends on the "top" med school. UNC, Berkeley, Michigan, etc. are all respectable schools. If you apply to UC med schools in the West, you'll certainly not be at a disadvantage by going to Berkeley. If you apply to southern med schools, you won't be at a disadvantage by going to UNC. I think it's the Ivy League and top Northeast med schools that are the most snobby. When I attended my Michigan interview, there were 5-6 kids from Berkeley on that interview day alone. In all of my Northeast med school interviews combined, I saw maybe 1-2 other Berkeley kids. Meanwhile, 3 out of the 10 interviewees in my Columbia interview group were from Cornell. 5 out of the 20 interviewees at Penn Med were from Cornell, around 3-4 each from Yale and Harvard and Penn, a couple from Duke, a few from Stanford, and literally 2-3 from other schools. </p>
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i think those stats might be a bit misleading; it may be that Harvard prefers a fellow Boston area school to a California school. Even if your point is correct, it may not have a lot to do simply with the school that they are from but the caliber of the applicants.
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<p>You would expect an overrepresentation but not such a gross overrepresentation, especially compared with a top public school like Berkeley. The Berkeley data is not a small sample size but instead includes 6-7 years worth of information. If anything, the MIT acceptance rate is artifically low because MIT students display no self-selection when applying to Harvard Med school. </p>
<p>Only 70 out of the 750 med school applicants from Berkeley apply each year to Harvard Med. 140 out of the 194 MIT applicants applied to Harvard Med. Literally everyone applied and MIT STILL had an acceptance rate to Harvard that's 9x higher. Imagine if only the top 50 or so out of those 140 applied. We'd be seeing rates of 20%+. This is not just a Boston thing. Princeton used to put up the same kind of chart for its med school applicants and they're acceptance rate to Harvard was even higher than MIT's (MIT is not even a great premed school). Also, look at Berkeley applicants' success rate at other top Northeast med schools. Despite the fact Berkeley is in the top 1% of colleges in the US, their students success at getting into top med schools is actually lower than the overall acceptance rate of those med schools. </p>
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The question that MUST be asked is how an Ivy accepted student who instead attended a (UC, UVA, UNC, Wake, UCSD, NYU, Colgate, etc.) would do in Med School acceptance. Krueger Dale did not ask that specific question, only the related question of the financial success of that group of people between 1985 and I think 2000. This group was nearly identical to the Ivy acceptees who actually matriculated Ivy rather than another school.
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<p>That would be a supremely awesome study but unfortunately we don't have that kind of data for med school admissions specifically. I can only present statistics as I know and it's up to everyone else to draw the conclusions. </p>
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also my dad does interviews & admissions for Wash U med. maybe its because hes my dad, but the only time he makes a distinction between where his applicants are from is in looking at their GPA (ie a 3.8 at an ivy = 3.9 at a pub or something like that). to him, a Michigan grad with a 3.9 and honors is on about an even scale with your columbia grad with a 3.7/3.8
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<p>The issue isn't great school, good GPA vs. good school, great GPA. Everyone wants to compare the 3.9/35 from Michigan vs. the 3.8/33 from Columbia. Neither of those two students would get in! The student that goes into a top med school will have a 3.9/35 AND still go to a top college. You won't get an advantage in med school admissions by attending Harvard or Duke for undergrad only because everyone else interviewing at the same schools also attended Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Northwestern, etc. But, that just means, if you did not attend a top college, you will be at a disadvantage. This doesn't happen at every school or even with every interviewer or adcom member. But, you can't control who interviews you. If you read the interview feedback on SDN, you can see plenty of state school kids complaining about their "unfair" treatment at places like the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons during their interview day compared with their Ivy League peers.</p>