I have seen discussion here that medical schools look at GPA and MCATs and don’t adjust enough for the level and difficulty of the school. There have been negative comments about MIT, Caltech, JHU and Ivies in general in this regard.
So what level school is optimal? Is about a number 70 school best? Is it best to go to a party school? What about a school with like 25 average ACTs. Is this good for medical school if you study hard?
I agree with this thinking and after a visit encouraged my DD to be thoughtful about GT engineering. You have to manage your GPA and this is clearly easier some places then others.
That said I think the mist important success factor in looking at a school is to understand what services they offer their pre med students and how many successful pre meds they produce. The stats on this are notoriously ambiguous school to school but just the fact that they care enough to have staff focused on pre med support who have put time and focus on success is important. It is crticial to think beyond GPA in a world of holistic admissions where the appliciation requires research, clinical experience, volunteering and shadowing. These tables from Aamc are interesting data on the topic both the list of schools producing canidiates and the stats by major.
Is there any data like the above that shows what undergrad schools the applicants and matriculants are from?
The school really doesn’t make a difference as long as you have top grades and a strong MCAT score. Medical schools get applicants from a huge variety of backgrounds across many colleges. The focus is really on the applicant. There really is no correlation between a particular school and how prepared you are for medical school. They’ll know how prepared you are when you go to the med school interview. Just choose a good affordable school that you like and get top grades.
I think it could be helpful to get an idea of the strength of the pre-med advising, course strength and general resources at a particular school. If nobody ever gets into med school (or maybe 1 a year) from “school A”, maybe school A’s prereq courses aren’t all that great or their pre-med advising is lackluster, for example.
Not really. Some undergraduate institutions will post their statistics, but those are pretty much worthless because of the amount of data massaging that goes into them.
There is no standardized reporting of pre-med outcomes anywhere.
AMCAS provides a limited amount of information here: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/86042/factstablea2.html
These data tables list colleges that supply X number of med school applicants/year, broken down by ethnicity. As you would expect the school listed are all large public institutions with many undergrads. (Or in the case of black applicants, the HBCUs.)
Its hard to say which group of UG is more friendly to premed. IMHO, premed is a difficult subject and it is hard to enter a med school anywhere you go. The general rule of thumb is that if the applicant is in the top 25% of a University’s entering class, chances for this applicant succeed in med school application is much higher. The higher level of UG, the less chance to succeed as a premed, because of the competition is much tougher in a top school. OTOH, there are plenty top UG school graduates got into top med school, if you check with the profile of a top med school student profile, 60-70% of those med school students are from top UG schools.
All my D’s options aren’t in yet, but she’s working on all the possibilities ahead of time. The “worst” case is that her remaining 4 colleges are all “no’s”, and she’s left with Rowan vs Stockton.
Both are the same cost to us (very cheap, close to free), but Rowan seems to be much better from the logical point of view (in my opinion) - The honors college gives you great benefits (early registration for example), very good pre-med advising (prob since they have 2 med schools), all classes taught by faculty (no TA’s). She’s also been given a lot of individual attention already (meeting dept heads, tours of labs and things not on the normal tours, invited to a new major they just created in Molecular and Cellular biology (it will be limited/small classes, and all high academic students))… but at the moment she does’t “feel” it there (the nebulous “fit” you hear about).
She loves the Stockton campus and just “feels it” there, but I don’t think they come close on the other stuff. I have no idea how to compare, for example, the rigor of the same major at each. Knowing that similar # of kids apply to and get into med school from both would be a good thing to know, as would knowing if one was way above the other in that same stat… but I get the data massaging - it’s what they told anyone who asked during tours “what % of your kids get into med school”… that they couldn’t really give an accurate/meaningful answer.
I’m sure she’ll love wherever she chooses, just gathering as much info as possible so she can make informed decisions. If she gets accepted into any of the remaining 4, that’s gonna throw in wrench in everything, lol.
Thanks!
I would just go with the most affordable option with the honors program so that she gets priority registration and other benefits. Ideally it would be great to graduate without any debt. The initial premed classes are weedout classes so most premed freshman will no longer be premed in senior year as more drop out. Also would look into a school which has other interesting majors should the student decide they no longer want to pursue medicine. Best of luck.