<p>At least in my class at Duke – admittedly, not Yale – we had MORE people going to medical school than were declared such as freshmen, not fewer. This is why all this talk about weeding doesn’t make any sense to me.</p>
<p>Based on the link I provided, I see some applying with low scores and GPA who don’t seem to be successful at Yale. If there is weeding out, they should not even be applying.</p>
<p>That Yale pdf table from texaspg indicates large disparity in MCAT scores between successful and unsuccessful applicants (their own fault), to which I believe Yale is a better choice to OP, than meeting stringent requirement of WashU medscholar. </p>
<p>@Kdog, 60 of graduating class entering med-school seems a small #, considering they got their own med-school and research facility. You can’t help, but wonder upon entering as freshman, am I gonna be one of that 60, or gap year is in order.</p>
<p>“Weeding out or not”, we can only speculate, wish every school would become transparent in this regard, too much at stake for kids and parents. MIT pre-health site has a complete list of past applicants, # of accepted to EACH med school, avg. gpa/mcat to EACH med school, avg. gpa/mact of unsuccessful applicants, I applauded this transparency.</p>
<p>There are two early assurance programs that are discussed in this thread - WUStL Med Scholar and Northwestern HPME. They are vastly different.</p>
<p>1) According to the latest USNWR both med schools are in the top 20 in rankings (WUStL #6 and Northwestern #18).</p>
<p>2) WUStL requires that matriculants have 3.8 GPA & 36 MCAT where as HPME is pretty much no strings attached (I believe).</p>
<p>3) A GPA of 3.8 and a 36 on MCAT result in a LizzyM score of 74, which is more than the LizzyM scores of 73 for top medical schools.</p>
<p>Therefore, unlike Northwestern, WUStL is giving nothing away with its early assurance program while recruiting a top notch kid to their undergrad school.</p>
<p>Other things (like finances etc.) being equal, to me, in a HPME vs. HYPS decision HPME is an easy pick, where as in a WUStL vs. HYPS decision, I would rather take my chances at HYPS.</p>
<p>Because I didn’t get into Med school thirty years ago I always tell people to take the guarantee. My D’s dream school 4 years ago was Y where she was wait listed. It offered the only autism studies for UG 's in the country. They offered so many perks to their UG’s: unusual courses, broadway tickets, MS degrees in the same four years, vast amounts of money spent on each student and the best need based aid like H and P. All the other ivies can not compare with the aid. HYP for families up to 180k in income were charged 10 percent of that number for tuition plus room and board, There was even more aid toward R&B if families made less.</p>
<p>We went on two tours and were more amazed than any of the 5 other ivies we saw. I would without a hesitation take Y. P and another lesser ivy that my D was accepted to have real grade deflation issues.</p>
<p>That 3.8 with a 36 MCAT are very strident requirements and likely higher than the average accepted student at that medical school so,I don’t think it is quite the bargain as advertised. My D picked a 8 year combined with no MCAT, half merit aid, 3.5 gpa with her 30 AP credits being counted. The only school she would have taken over this program was Y. </p>
<p>The only caveat is New Haven is not Harvard Yard or the town of Princeton so don’t expect to be out very late at night more than 3 or 4 blocks off the campus but their is enough on campus to keep you occupied.</p>
<p>3 years ago Y bought the entire compound of a large pharmaceutical/ research company in New Haven which nearly doubles their campus size . Included in the bargain price was all the equipment in the buildings purchased so it will add to their research capabilities . </p>
<p>Medical schools all teach for the boards so their quality varies much less then state schools do with the ivy leagues in undergrad instruction.</p>
<p>Finally, as stated in an opinion piece in yesterday’s (Sunday’s) NY Times, the Ivies don’t teach you better but they give you the connections since half of life is who you know.</p>
<p>Sorry BDM but I simply don’t buy the idea that there are fewer freshman pre-meds than applicants at Duke. Including alumni, 360 people applied from Duke this past year (<a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/321458/data/2012factstable2-7.pdf[/url]”>https://www.aamc.org/download/321458/data/2012factstable2-7.pdf</a>). I can’t find Duke’s profile of accepted students’ intended majors but I bet there are plenty more pre-med hopefuls who for whatever reason (not saying it’s true “weed out”, could just be that they found a different path) don’t apply than the other way around.</p>
<p>It’s certainly possible that we had lots of folks who didn’t declare themselves as premeds during freshman year even though they were intending to apply to medical school. The declaration is just a heads-up for the advising office and has no bearing on future activities, so there wouldn’t be much point to declaring anyway. I don’t remember whether I declared during my senior year of HS.</p>
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You’ve been advocating programs like these for a while, but I didn’t realize until now that it was basically the MCAT that you’re worried about and trying to avoid.</p>
<p>I don’t think “guarantees” should matter at all, ever. With that said, Northwestern and WUSTL are both fine undergraduate programs and it’s perfectly reasonable to attend them on their own merits.</p>
<p>In my view, the sorts of students who get into these programs in the first place really shouldn’t have trouble with the MCAT. Northwestern’s average MCAT is what, 34? That’s high for a normal person, but it’s not astronomical for the sorts of kids we’re talking about here.
[Entering</a> Class Profile : Admissions: Feinberg School of Medicine: Northwestern University](<a href=“How to Apply: MD Admissions: Feinberg School of Medicine”>How to Apply: MD Admissions: Feinberg School of Medicine)</p>
<p>None of these programs are EVER “giving anything away”, because they know there’s an extremely high chance that these students are going to be strong medical school candidates in a few years anyway.</p>
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Not unless it’s fallen recently.</p>
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Most of the amenities you’re discussing are meaningfully present at all the elite private schools and LACs, so really you’d be looking at something like 20 or 30 schools, not just one. At a bare minimum, even if you’re really set on the upper Ivies, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton are not so different that you should take a program over one but not the others.</p>
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This conclusion is true, but I’d strongly dispute the reasoning. Most of the elite research medical schools spend much of their clinical instruction on research topics that have nothing to do with boards (or patient care, for that matter).</p>
<p>Yale and Swarthmore both of which I toured twice spent tens of thousands more on kids than even. their full tuition would indicate. I never observed or was informed to the contrary that any other school spent more. It was that blatant. They were light years ahead of 5 other ivies and 4 " little ivies" I questioned in person and even Harvard had an article about the dining room food quality degrading a couple of years back. That is why Yale was the exception to the rule plus the " connections". Also by buying that drug company campus they have room to really expand which nobody else had.</p>
<p>Harvard and Yale both have grade inflation not deflation which is nice if you are trying to get into medical school. They appear to operate that if you manage to get in you should not be punished by only a limited number of A’s being given out. Makes sense if most of the kids are Val’s and Sals. They also have the biggest endowments in the country.</p>
<p>I am all for removing as much stress as possible to include skipping MCATS so kids can do research, more shadowing instead. They have already studied two full weekends to get A’s on each Orgo exams etc. so why require 200 to 300 hours more for MCATS. After seeing bio majors from the top ivies filling out 20 med school apps at a 100 a pop and fly all over the east coast what is wrong with wanting tranquility and certainty?</p>
<p>Also just like Ivy admissions, certain Med school admissions get involved with social engineering and I believe combines have less of that since the UG schools don’t want to be embarrassed with a grad failing med school since they are closely related to a particular school.</p>
<p>If you want to be a researcher go to MIT and get your PHD. What this country needs is more doctors with the shortage in health care. I did not look,up if the med school in question has an average accepted student MCAT of 36 but I will trust your word. Yale was the exception because it was so different and both my D and I noticed it right away. God bless you and your Blue Devils.</p>
<p>Does anybody know why this thread was moved? It is about a combined program so what’s the deal?</p>
<p>I had an interesting conversation with an orthopedic surgeon who attended Northwestern undergrad and Med school. He absolutely regrets doing that because he is saddled with debt. He wishes he stayed in-state (Kansas) for both undergrad and Med school. According to him, attending his dream school and getting a great education can not overcome the ire of decades of debt. I, fortunately, went state schools all the way and have enjoyed a lower stressed career.</p>
<p>So, I admire the OP for their accomplishments and for truly being so talented at this point in their education. But save your future career choices and sanity and keep your costs as low as possible. Becoming a physician is a long, arduous, and an expensive process. Anything you can do to minimize the cost will benefit you in the future. The best advice I received before medical school was, “Medicine is a business and everyone in the process worries about money. The patients worry about money, the hospitals worry about money, and the insurance companies worry about money. Make sure you worry about it too or you won’t be in business.” He wasn’t talking about greed but just a fact that people usually avoid talking about.</p>
<p>Sent from my DROID RAZR using CC</p>
<p>I totally agree that debt load is the main consideration in this time of fiscal turmoil. You don’t want to put off owning a house until age 50 because your student loan is as big as a house payment. My dentist’s personal physician is in his forties and got loans for both UG and med school and still must live in an apartment.</p>
<p>Second most important is less stress. No need of looking 50 years old at age 30!</p>
<p>To Blue Devil 34.6 average MCAT is a lot different than 36</p>
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If there is grade inflation it certainly is not in the pre-med required classes. My sophomore son (pre-med) can attest to that. :o I wouldn’t pick Yale because you think you will get higher grades. I would pick it because you love the culture and vibe of the school, not to mention the networking. ;)</p>
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<p>That is hard to believe… I guess the catch is in the phase “declared as such as freshmen”. May be at Duke students have to declare themselves as pre-meds…</p>
<p>But let’s take a look at a comparable school to Duke - JHU. I don’t know how many have heard of the infamous JHU 500. That is supposedly a reference to the roughly 500 kids (about 40% of JHU class) that consider themselves as pre-meds. In spite of that, each year only about 100-110 first time applications go out from JHU juniors. What happened to the other 400? By the time they are done with Orgo, quite a few figure out that medicine is not their calling anymore. The rest take gap years to repair the damage to their GPA and/or ECs done by JHU’s stingy grading.</p>
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<p>1) Off all the things I need to worry about, MCAT probably would be at the bottom of the pile:) Especially so, because my son is done with it and did reasonably well with a 38.</p>
<p>2) If you paid a bit more attention to my “advocacy” of early assurance programs, you would have realized that it is a lot more nuanced than you made it sound. Yes, I am all for early assurance programs where there is a reasonable amount of “assurance”. That assurance would let the kids pursue their intellectual curiosities, the one time in their lives they still can before succumbing to the more mundane things like paychecks and bills. They can go for that study abroad and take that interesting course not worrying about what a B+ means to the 3.8 GPA they have to maintain. For that reason, I am all for programs like HPME, Rice/Baylor and UCSD. WUStL - not so much.</p>
<p>Hopefully, that clears my perspective a bit :)</p>
<p>My analysis is based on the fact that the deciding factor for you seemed to be WUSTL’s requirements – maybe GPA, maybe MCAT, but either way it was the numbers that swung your vote. My position is that the numbers really aren’t that high – </p>
<p>– because kids like these are special. 3.8 is not that high for them. 34 (Northwestern’s mean MCAT anyway) is not that high for them. Even a 36 is not that high for them.</p>
<p>I don’t like early assurance programs generally, but getting a 3.8 is pretty easy for a smart kid if he’s able to game his courses a little bit and declare an easy major.</p>
<p>And for what it’s worth, you can get a B+ (or, in my case, a C and two B’s) and still score well above a 3.8. You can still go to study abroad as a normal premed (classes are easier abroad anyway). You can take the fun, intellectually interesting classes (again, they’re usually easier anyway).</p>
<p>I think programs like these are capitalizing on a very special pool of kids receiving a lot of advice that simply isn’t meant for them.</p>
<p>Premed is very difficult, no doubt about it. But programs are specifically choosing kids for whom premed won’t be all that hard, and it tells them that they will have all kinds of freedoms that these kids would have had anyway.</p>
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<p>Well, this gets at the heart of the other question. Do you only count junior/senior applicants because it’s a “failure” of the school if you take a gap year? Or do folks coming in after gap years still count as successful premeds?</p>
<p>Of note, the national average used to be higher but is now about 23 or 24 for incoming MS1 students. If all these students are taking gap years to “repair damage” done by their cutthroat undergraduate students coming from too-competitive programs, that’s an awful lot of “damage” in the aggregate.</p>
<p>The other thing to consider is that at a lot of the upper Ivies, and to a lesser extent at Duke, a lot of students could get into medical school but choose not to – instead working for Goldman Sachs or (now I’m showing how old I am) Bear Stearns or somesuch. In fact, I know several of them (not many, just a few) who went to medical school as their “fallback” option after the market crash.</p>
<p>What this says about our society, I don’t know. But it’s worth pointing out that a lot of these schools have a very small number of premeds because they’re so good at keeping “more desirable” options open. That’s why Yale sends 60 juniors a year to medical school. They could probably send 1200+ if they were really determined to do so.</p>
<p>^reminds me of the all ivy football player we had who tried to make it in the NFL but was cut right before the season and instead decided to pursue his backup plan…harvard law school.</p>
<p>I do work for that afore mentioned company. However, my parents considered me as a failure and an odd-ball for not being a doctor in a family full of doctors. My old man who is 94, god bless his soul, was thrilled to know that at least my son knows better.</p>
<p>Kal, If you ever read other college websites about JHU UG the kids complain about the extreme stress due to grading policy… Not surprised 80 % fall off the earth. The Med school is the reverse with people praising it. Why put yourself through a meat grinder voluntarily? ( I also recommend anyone considering joint programs or any med school read the Student doctor network to get a more unvarnished view ahead of time). </p>
<p>Kdog, even books about the ivies and the NY Times call it grade inflation. I did not invent the term. Again since most of the kids are high school Val’s and Sals, Yale does not get uptight if everyone who deserves it receives an A. The problem with the two deflation ivies is even if you deserve it, only so many A’s will be given out allegedly for the benefit of graduate programs everywhere.</p>
<p>The main complaint I hear about BS/MD programs is they don’t allow the students to take many courses outside of their major to broaden their education. This is also an issue doctors practicing for 30 years raise most. </p>
<p>However, in recent years most of these students are coming with 25 to 30 AP credits ( and one I know of with 48). Accordingly, since they can’t go to med school one year earlier than their reserved spot, they have a year to explore other interests.</p>