I believe all school admissions data includes DO unless specified otherwise.
I really won’t trust any survey of med school admission officers. Nobody is telling the truth. So race is not a factor in college admissions and schools are need blind. All the evidence suggests otherwise. WashU’s data is another proof that prestige does carry weight. However, just like in Princeton, if one can’t get at least a decent GPA at WashU, all bets are off. So going to a prestigious school for premed carries big risks. BTW, I have seen at least one state flagship med school boasts how many Ivy students they have. It is pretty funny. Also, my understanding is that folks from MIT and Princeton can get into medical schools with lower GPA. (you need at least B+)
Race and sex are factors in medical school admissions. MIT and Caltech students usually do well on MCAT but I wonder if it still holds true with the new MCAT.
From Univ of Michigan Med School’s top home states data, you can see that although the majority of applicants are from neighboring states, it ends up the majority of admission offers are given to applicants from both coasts and Texas. If you obverse the geographic data of Ivy League schools and other top schools, the majority of their students are coming from the same places. WashU has the majority of its students from Midwest and neighboring states, I guess their students are more successful at applying to their home state medical schools. WashU is one of the few elite schools not on both coasts.
Still, even if the admissions selection tries to be more friendly to applicants from non-upper-income backgrounds, wouldn’t the cost of the pre-med path (including pre-med extracurriculars taking up time that could be used for paid jobs, MCAT preparation, short-notice travel to medical school interviews, etc.) and the cost of medical school be significant barriers against those from non-upper-income backgrounds?
When I was in a discussion about this a few years ago I was told it’s because med schools want to provide doctors for the entire community - therefore they try to admit the “best” from colleges representative of the entire community.
This pretty much matches one of the reasons WOWM mentioned in her post on the previous page (#15). It definitely makes sense to me.
My med school lad went to a rigorous undergrad - loving the rigor - no regrets. Having finished his first year he now tells me he’s ahead of many of his med school peers in some topics as they covered things in undergrad classes that weren’t covered elsewhere, or not in nearly as much depth. All med students get to study and learn this material - it’s not necessary for them to have seen it before - but it sure has helped him with studying. There are perks.
Still, if one wants to get into med school and is not sure they can keep up in a rigorous school to get a terrific GPA, choosing a less rigorous school is pretty darn smart.
My lad definitely still studied to get his high MCAT score too. Classes only sort of prepare one for that. There’s no way anyone should take that test without studying for it IMO.
It’s still an issue, but one medical schools, LCME and AAMC are mindful of. AMCAS now asks about family financial background (parental education & job title, household income, dependence on government programs before age 16, how a student paid for college, age a student first began paid employment, how much of a student’s earning went to family support, grew up in a medical underserved area, etc) on the primary application form. AMCAS uses this information to rate an applicant’s level of disadvantage on a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 being no impediments to 5 being the most disadvantaged. This information is displayed on the first page of an applicant’s primary for all admission offices to see. The student is also offered the opportunity to explain any circumstances they felt affected their educational potential (attending underperforming local schools, the need to work their way through college, etc).
This information is used by individual medical schools to identify students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and their application is read in this light–that they have had a longer road to travel to become successful and they may be given some slack w/r/t to pre-med EC/MCAT/GPA expectations.
Medical schools view paid clinical employment and volunteer clinical experiences as equivalent–with neither one being preferable.
AMCAS also offers a Fee Assistance Program for applicants from low income backgrounds. (Family + student income information required for program consideration.) FAP gives a student reduced price MCAT sittings (up to 3 tests/year), up to 14 primary and secondary fee waivers, a free 1 year subscription to MSAR and free access to MCAT prep materials.
Many medical schools will pay for transportation (and provide free lodging with a current med student host) for low income applicants (ones who have applied with FAP).
LCME also mandates that medical schools, as part of the accreditation requirements, recruit and enroll students from diverse backgrounds (ethnic and SES) and to provide any necessary additional support for those students during medical school–including additional funding and individual tutoring. LCME audits med schools approx every 3 year to make sure they are complying with this requirement. The failure to do this is one of the main reasons why SLU was placed in probation last year.
Still the process is far from perfect and many lower SES students get shut out by the process.
wowmom - all of that is nice but the students still have to struggle through the entire undergrad trying to pad their resumes with relevant activities. They are usually stuck in labs or hospitals making little or no money while someone not aiming for medicine is trying to maximize their summer earning potential. My kids friends were and are making 5-10k per month in summer internships while their entire stipend with a paid research position for 8-10 weeks can be about 3k, barely enough to pay for rent and food.
@20177588 It works in three ways. 1. The student from the better school, gains more knowledge resulting in higher test scores ( all things being equal). 2. They get a boost from the name vs. a lower tiered student, and 3. when they enter med school they will have access to better tracks. The only downside to the highly ranked school is,that the student’s GPA may be lower due to a better pool of students. I went to multiple colleges including two A schools and it does matter. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. I know it’s not an option for all, however. The world is changing.
We need to recognize that many amazing students who are middle class are squeezed out of the universities they wished to attend and to which they were accepted. They may have attended a lesser school in terms of “prestige” but may have still learned a great deal. They may also have high MCAT and GPA scores as would be expected.
Some of the posts don’t take into account that even the medical school you attend matters in terms of where you will do your residency. Programs are going to accept the best candidates and that includes incorporating all factors into the equation. While it may be unfair or not equal access to all based on a pure a meritocracy, the system does allow many to become doctors. While a low GPA is unsurmountable to attend med school, the playing field is not level. It never was.
There are many who say that a medical degree is a medical degree. That is true. But many patients consider the education of their doctor before they decide on the procedure.
I’m not arguing for or against the current system. I just think it’s disingenuous to lead people to believe that all education is the same. It’s not. Ask a doctor from a prestigious hospital in a specialized field where he/she went to school, it’s likely you’ll end up with the same answers over and over. If you don’t believe it, why are the best hospitals in the US connected with the best medical schools? Chance. Not likely. Teaching hospitals teach their med students and the cycle repeats.
This is a misunderstanding of match process. There are 3 aspects to successfully matching into a medical residency. One you have to apply and be offered an interview. Two, how the residency program director (PD) ranks you post interview (ie are you the PD’s first choice, second choice, twentieth choice, not ranked (ouch)). Below is a survey of PDs that show the weight they give to various factors in deciding to offer an interview (fig.1) and two, in deciding where to rank an applicant (fig 2). To translate, Fig 1 shows that the factors that are most important to the PDs who replied are performance of applicant while in med school (graduating from a highly regarded med school was much less important). Fig 2 shows the that the factors that are most important to the PDs when deciding where to rank an applicant are interview performance combined with performance of applicant while in med school (graduating from a highly regarded med school was again much less important).
The third often overlooked aspect of matching (and perhaps most important) is a student’s rank list. The survey below shows the most important factor for applicants is geographical location (Fig 1). And when both PDs and students submit rank lists, a computer program decides where the applicant is matched AND the program is set up to favor the applicant’s rank list choices.
^^^ My understanding for the matching processing is the same as what stated above. The name of the med school is actually less important for the residency matching than the name of the college for med school admissions since getting into a medical school itself is a big filter and the “rankings” of med schools are just crap . Well, I guess in terms of “prestige”, the gap can’t be too big. I have recently read that Odette Harris was named America’s second female African-American neurosurgery professor at Stanford (https://www.stanforddaily.com/2018/03/09/odette-harris-named-americas-first-female-african-american-neurosurgery-professor-at-stanford/) (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/how-stanford-neurosurgeon-odette-harris-promotion-just-made-history.html). I guess without her Dartmouth credential, it is probably hard for her to get into Stanford Med. Medicine is “family” business. We are not within the “family”. If you go to UMKC thread, you would read a kid there boasts he got into the 6 year program with pretty low stats. (his “family” is there) I have no doubt that plays a big role in med school admissions. However, enough spots still open for the rest of us.
And often, it’s not a medical school you’d expect. I did a random stroll through doctors on staff at Mayo, Yale, Harvard/Mass General and WashU (I assume those are sufficiently high powered programs) and looked at where specialists in oncology and cardiothoracic surgery went to med school ( I assume those are competitive enough specialties) and looked at where the physicians on staff went to med school. Medical staff came from a wide variety of medical schools–most of which were NOT elite schools. Places like Univ of Oklahoma, Howard University, SUNY-Stonybrook, University of Utah, Wayne State University, University of Connecticut, Albert Einstein, George Washington, University of Rochester, Univ of Massachusetts, Robert Wood Johnson, etc…
People rarely ask what med school a physician graduated from before deciding to accept treatment from the physician.
Discerning patients, however, will ask about their familiarity with the procedure, how often they’ve performed it, when they last performed it, and their success rate.
I don’t know anyone, ever, who makes a decision on a doctor based on where the doctor graduated. Most people go based on recommendations from friends or other physicians. My daughter recently had surgery. We only learned later that the surgeon was a DO and not an MD. We wouldn’t have cared either. He was well recommended by people we trust.
If by elite, you mean with admission rates under 30%, then yes.
If by elite, you mean the US New Top 10 research schools, then no.
Einstein has 2.2.% acceptance rate? Source, please.
According to US News (which gets this data from MSAR), the 10 med school with lowest acceptances rates (all under 4%) are:
Mayo, Stanford, FSU, Wake, GW, Georgetown, UC-Davis, UCLA, Brown and UCSD.
Acceptance rate isn’t necessarily a measure of elitism/prestige–it’s a measure of how big of a mismatch there is between the # of applicants vs # of available seats. The mismatch is largely due to a) being located in a desirable area and b) being a school without a strong instate preference with mid-range GPA/MCAT stats. (
@gallentjill Back in the bad old days, the "old boys network" w/r/t residency placement was alive and well and it determined where you went for residency and often what specialty you matched into. I have a friend in a competitive specialty who tells me he interviewed at only THREE residency programs, all interviews his specialty mentor personally arranged by making phone calls to his buddies. My friend was told weeks in advance of official match results what program he would be matching to.
The new double blind match algorithm has eliminated this kind of cronyism. It has, however, not done away with all of it. Applicants first have to <em>get</em> an interview with a residency program in order to be ranked. Residency PD tend to select applicants from programs they are familiar with--esp. through programmatic or personal experiences with previous grads.
About 20 years ago, there was a lawsuit involving admissions practices at Boalt Hall (the Berkeley law school). Boalt was forced to disclose the way that it handled undergraduate GPAs from different schools. Basically GPAs from some schools were adjusted upward, while GPAs from other schools were left unchanged or even adjusted downward.
You can see that in general, more selective and prestigious schools were more likely to get an upward GPA boost. The maximum weights were given to GPAs from certain top LACs (e.g. Swarthmore, Williams, Carleton). Some top private universities (e.g. JHU, Dartmouth, Princeton) had very high weights as well. Boalt did not give an upward adjustment to GPAs from Berkeley or other UC schools.
Don’t know if grad schools still do this. If they do, they probably protect their documentation in such a way that it won’t be introduced as evidence in a lawsuit.
More like elite in that, from the perspective of a pre-med, all US medical schools are either reach or super-reach for admission (there are no matches or safeties).