Why isn't prestige taken into account?

Pre-Med & Medical School Pre-Med Topics
41

Since Univ. of Michigan Med School’s data is so interesting, I pulled out the data from previous cycle to confirm the trend (https://medicine.umich.edu/medschool/sites/medicine.umich.edu.medschool/files/files/tracker/md_five_year_admissions_snapshot_0.pdf). Does anyone know why UChicago is missing from both files? UChicago is supposed to be one of the closest elite schools in the region and has a large number of students from the region. Just by looking at the two files, if someone had a choice, I would definitely recommend him/her go to Northwestern University instead of UChicago for premed.

BTW, just for fun, you can see Duke’s med school student’s group pictures – https://medschool.duke.edu/about-us/news-and-communications/med-school-blog/welcome-class-2021

Just the Facts: About the Class of 2021

116 students were accepted from 7,030 applications
66 women, 49 men, 1 unspecified
13% underrepresented minorities
37 different states and **59 undergraduate institutions are represented**
Median overall GPA: 3.85

My guess is that ~40 institutions have just 1 accepted and ~20 institutions have an average of 4 accepted.

42

It’s because graduate or professional schools judge success individually. It’s not about where you go, it’s what you do with the opportunity you have in front of you. If graduate schools started to create multiple standards based on school prestige, they’d be sued. Not to mention, it would be a huge headache to enforce. Imagine the headache if undergraduate schools had to rank high schools. That’s why you have tests like LSAT, GRE, and MCAT.

43

One possibility is size. According to College Navigator, UChicago enrolls 6,001 undergraduates, while NU is more than 46% larger, at 8,791 undergraduates. So just on that basis, you might expect to see larger numbers of med school applicants from NU.

Also, it wouldn’t surprise me if NU grads were generally more professionally-oriented and more likely to apply to MD programs, and if UChicago grads were generally more research-oriented and more likely to target PhD programs. If so, that would further increase the discrepancy in med school applicant numbers. But I don’t have any numbers to back up that suggestion.

44

Duke had one of the worst applications to fill out. My D simply said it was not worth the time to write so many exclusive essays Duke wanted that no other school was asking.

45

@texaspg, my D said the exact same thing about Duke. She did go there for a residency interview and hated it.

46

“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.”

I just looked at the last 6 specialists that I visited (as a patient) at two very well ranked medical facilities in the Boston area. I did not see the same university twice, and I only found one Ivy League school. I did find some very good universities (McGill, Cornell, Tufts, UVA, John Hopkins), but other than one doctor doing both undergrad and medical school at the same university, I didn’t see any repeats at all. One of the specialists that I have seen recently told me (we were chatting about undergraduate schools) that the MD students where he studied had come from a very wide range of undergraduate schools – the same thing that I noticed when I was in graduate school in an entirely different field.

47

I think surgical oncology is pretty complicated. Let’s see from

https://nyulangone.org/doctors/results?specialty=surgical-oncology&original-criteria=specialty&pageSize=20&center-point=40.2786356,-74.62833160000002&address=Princeton%20Junction,%20NJ%2008550,%20USA&searchRadius=150&page=2&user-interaction=true

where the surgical oncology doctors at NYU Langone Hospitals did their medical school —

(total 22)

MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, 2001
Greece
Dominica
MD from Medical College Of Virginia, 2001
Czech Republic
MD from SUNY - Buffalo, 2009
MD from Columbia College, 1995
MD from University Of Maryland, 2008
MD from Northwestern University, 2001
Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine
MD from Rutgers State University of NJ, 2005
Italy
MD from New York University, 1986
MD from New York University, 1971
MD from SUNY - Brooklyn, 1991
Israel
MD from New York University, 1990
MD from New York University, 1983
MD from University Of South Florida, 1994
MD from McGill University, 1998
MD from New York University, 1982
MD from New York University, 1988

It looks like a doctor is more likely to stay around the medical school he/she graduated from for a long time. Other than that, I can’t find any pattern.