<p>As a person who worked in a Medical School Admissions Office for the largest medical school in the country, and who married a doctor, I have two points to make. You need to have both very high grades AND very high MCAT scores to get into good quality medical schools. Kids who came in from top state schools, quality liberal arts colleges and Ivy League schools generally had good MCAT scores. Poor quality schools generally produced poor quality testers.</p>
<p>Second point. If you want to teach at a top tier medical school, a top tier medical school education matters. Otherwise, who gives a flip? Doctors all get reimbursed the same. It doesn’t matter what medical school you go to.</p>
<p>A third point…if you go to a top undergrad and have poor grades, you are left with the combination of grades that won’t get you into medical school…and a lot of debt.</p>
<p>Hey mmmc, I thought it was you (or someone else?) who posted a comparison of upenn and harvard representation in your p&s med class (on sdn). You basically disproved your own argument. Cuz there, you pointed out that there are three or four times more people in your class from H than Penn. Given the reasons you listed, both UG schools are very similar, and differ only in name. Then, according to many people, the admit rate should be similar right? Nope. </p>
<p>Thus, even a minor name difference can actually mean a lot. Compared with lesser schools, the name effect is even more magnified. True, scores can be a factor, but if we look at the MCAT means for both H and penn, they differ only slightly (1 or 2 pts). On both Vandy and JHU’s class list, H overreps almost all other schools. Same goes for Y and P as well. I couldn’t find more lists, but if we look at mdapp, that should normalize the data. There’s simply more people at H getting accepted everywhere compared with similar people with similar stats at different UGs. </p>
<p>PS: High grades? doesn’t 40-50% of HYS’s science classes get A/A- anyways? Wayyy easier than at public UG, or heck, even some other ivies (i.e. cornell, princeton?)</p>
<p>Ok, this is getting ridiculous. So you look and see that there are more who attended Harvard for undergrad at P&S than Penn, and then you jump to the conclusion that it MUST be due to Harvard’s better name. There are many, many other factors to consider. </p>
<p>I have not seen the statistics that you’re talking about, but if you’re talking about the number of students in a single medical school class, there could be 1 from Penn and 4 from Harvard and then there, that’s three to four times more people! This kind of stuff can vary from year to year. Maybe the next year there are 3 in the entering class from Penn and 3 from Harvard. That doesn’t mean all of a sudden Penn and Harvard’s reps are equal. </p>
<p>There are so many things wrong with what you said it’s hard to begin. For example, “Given the reasons you listed, both UG schools are very similar, and differ only in name. Then, according to many people, the admit rate should be similar right? Nope.”
You don’t know the admit rate for H vs Penn for P&S, what you’re seeing is the students that end up choosing to matriculate there. </p>
<p>And looking at the MCAT means for the undergrad schools doesn’t mean anything, because they aren’t the MCAT scores for the students in the P&S class. You can’t assume they’re going to be the same as the mean.</p>
<p>I agree with schrizto. You need to take a course in statistics. You so obviously already had your opinion and before you even looked at the study you decided it would confirm what you already knew. You came into this with such biases you can’t even see how narrow your view is.</p>
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<p>All that says is something about Harvard, not any other undergraduate institutions. I’m also not surprised by that statistic. It has much more to do with the students getting into Harvard than the institution itself.</p>
<p>I did post that on SDN, and it is indeed true. Harvard has a much larger representation at P&S (please, btw, do not identify medical student’s schools in the future) than Penn. I posted that because I’m willing to examine everything in all lights. Ultimately though, it was only a comparison and does not prove that name matters (and besides, once again it only points to the idea the HYP have some boon. Penn, for example, does not have the same advantage over Dartmouth that Harvard has over Penn, despite the fact that Penn has a LARGER applicant body than Dartmouth). Numerically the applicant bases are pretty equal stat for stat. However, this doesn’t account for ECs, race, or gender to name a few. Most of the students in my class from harvard are non-white, non-asian or female. Everyone from Penn in my class is white, asian, and 3/5 are male. They also come from very different backgrounds and ages and probably a billion things that I haven’t thought of.</p>
<p>My advice to you is to go to Harvard and never look back. You’ll be happier there. Just don’t think that just because half of the kids ear As that it is EASY to earn an A. This is the same faulty reasoning that attributes school prestige to applicant success because you assume that all schools have equivalent student bodies. If you take MDapplicants for an even distribution of applicants, Harvard’s average applicant has a 36 on the MCAT where as ASU’s is sub-30. There’s a reason why a lot of my Harvard class mates are years out of college, it aint because they were lazy.</p>
<p>You took one example between Penn and Harvard and lept to the first conclusion. You didn’t even bother to try and prove the second assertion.</p>
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<p>At Harvard you are competing against other students who are also of the caliber to have been admitted to Harvard. Everyone earned As in their high school science classes, now only half will. Science classes at Harvard are not easy.</p>
<p>I don’t know about Cornell but Princeton doesn’t have the grade inflation. Medical schools know that and they take that into account when reviewing applications from Princeton. You’re not expected to get all As coming from Princeton.</p>
<p>Hmm… OP, I would question your original point. If the so called top schools all have such a high rate, why does stanford (which is on par with HYP in name) only have around a 75% acceptance rate?</p>
<p>Now, I think you are pushing the argument too far. I believe you get a bump for going to a top 20 or so undergrad but I don’t think med schools are splitting hairs b/w Penn and Harvard. There’s simply not enough good applicants from Harvard alone for them to be that picky. My own med school has essentially equal representation from the top undergrads (Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Duke, etc.), around 2-5 or so from each of the top undergrads.</p>
<p>Woah wait, I think I remember you once saying on this forum that only top 10+ schools get a bump?</p>
<p>@OP:
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<p>^^^ This is not true at all, the reason it seems that kids at top schools get more As, is because MOST of them are working harder to make good grades. They wouldn’t have gotten into a top school if they weren’t extremely motivated as high school students. Kids at State schools contain SOME less selective students which are the ones that make lower grades, which brings down the average grade distribuations at state schools. This is because MOST state schools tend to be less selective when it comes to picking applicants.</p>
<p>Actually no, D2 is a premed at one of these schools and many of her science classes are curved so that no more than 20% get As.</p>
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<p>D2 spent fr year at a top 5 public and then transferred to one of those easy Ivies you mentioned above. While at the public she was in the top few percent of her cohort, at the easy school she’s more in the middle of the pack, so which school do you think she finds it harder to get As at??</p>
<p>debrockman,
"I have two points to make. You need to have both very high grades AND very high MCAT scores to get into good quality medical schools. "</p>
<p>-What do you mean by good quality medical school? Most MD’s in my city (around 80%) graduated from local Medical school (off charts, not showing in any rankings). Do I need to care about it when I see a doctor?</p>
<p>No, My point really, after all is said and done, is that going to the state u for medical school is just fine, and frankly, the state u often has access to a lot more through state funded teaching hospitals. Unless you want a fancy credential because you want a top research or teaching position (which will pay you way less than a private practice position…except in a handful of corporate positons), paying for an elite medical school is really kind of silly. There are a few exceptions to this. There is a big name radiologist who is at a big name school who charges docs all over the country to send him very specialized cases and he charges a big fee to read them. He also produces a lot of education videos that he charges for. These kinds of people who turn their elite medical educations into profit are few and far between.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice and especially the 3rd bullet from your earlier post. I do not have $200K set aside for sending my son to a private UG school. Fortunately, we have a good state school and a decent medical school he can try. Also, I really do not know how the healthcare reform is going to shape up the medical field. Could it be possible that PA’s/RN’s would take more responsibilities away from doctors. He will have to play it safe.</p>
<p>There is no doubt that physicians will earn less in the future, and spending an insane amount of money is no longer a (generally) good economic choice. If you HAVE that kind of money, and the credential in itself is meaningful to you, more power to you. If you want to teach in an elite institution, and you’re not motivated by money…maybe. PA’s, Nurse Anesthestists, Nurse Practioners…all will be utilized more and physicians will carry a larger oversight role…further requiring the need for tort reform, I think. Everyone stay healthy…lose the weight, exercise more and stop smoking :)</p>
<p>One small caveat. I think that some kids REALLY struggle to stay on track at the big state schools because of the out of control environment that some administrations allow. I know that kids party at all schools. But one of the things I noticed while working in the admissions office of our state med school…although there were lots and lots of Purdue and IU acceptances, proportionally, some of the small LACs seemed to have more than their share of acceptances…and some of those schools give very good scholarships. Bottom line, grades and test scores matter.</p>
<p>I know that most here will disagree, but science classes at ANY UG, including state schools are not easy at all. How one who is not familiar with state school. who went to H. argue that state UG pre-med courses are easier. I do not argue one way or another. But D witnessed good number of valedictorians from private HS’s who were Ivy caliber students, changed their proffessional goals from becoming MD to something else after very first Bio class, that they were not allowed to skip at D’s school despite “5” and “A” in AP Bio in HS. None of D’s science classes were easy at all (except for GChem. jiust easy for her for some reason, but by far not for others, which has led to her position as Chem prof. Assistant, since all her grades were over 100% in this class). She had to work very hard to get her grades in all other science classes. She graduated #1 from small private school that sends couple top kids to Ivy’s every year and science classes were not hard for her in HS. D. never applied to Ivy, I cannot tell if she whould be accepted, but others with lower stats in her class did.</p>
<p>ace550.
" I do not have $200K set aside for sending my son to a private UG school. "</p>
<p>-Very good point. We are not paying any UG tuition - all covered by Merit $$ and opportunities at state school for academic stand out are awesome, they get hand picked, they get easy way for internships…so forth. at least at my D’s school. I do not think she would have the same chances at elite UG being among others just like her. So far we have been very happy as long a she has smooth transition to Medical School. Now all she needs is to get MCAT=27, then she is there.</p>
<p>Had a chance to have dinner with my MS2 son last night and he was talking about an opportunity he just learned about to take an extra year between MS3 and MS4 that would allow him to spend a year working/doing rotations abroad. He is very interested.</p>
<p>When I mentioned the extra year’s expense he said “since I graduated debt free I am already $200-250K ahead of most of my classmates so what’s another year of this tuition?”</p>
<p>He turned down Yale and other “more elite” schools to go to UNC as a Morehead Scholar and is now realizing what that "free"undergrad education really means to him.</p>