Columbia or UChicago?

As someone who has directly dealt with medical students and medical education in my current and all previous University Hospital employments, I can tell you that there is negligible difference when applications are received from top schools (e.g. Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, Duke, Georgetown, Williams, Swarthmore, Pomona, Johns Hopkins, etc). We all know that students are bright enough to get into them. Name-wise, there is no advantage of Stanford over Yale; or Harvard over Swarthmore, Columbia over Chicago, Dartmouth over Georgetown, Brown over Amherst. I’m sorry to say. I can give you examples after examples. My best 2 best medical students this year came from U Chicago and MIT. I am heavily encouraging them to become neurologists.

At the post-graduate level, last year, my best neurology resident came from the University of Kentucky; the year before that, the best came from U of Pittsburgh. I am hiring the one from U of Pitt to join our faculty when he finishes his training, and next year, I intend to do the same for the UK graduate.

Finally, 2 students worked with me throughout the summer to do research to beef up their resume so they can get into medical school. One was from Ohio State and the other from Stanford. The one from OSU got accepted in 2 top 25 medical schools and the one from Stanford got wait listed in a good but not top 25 school.

The medical school where I currently work (a top 25 medical school) has admitted undergards from Harvard, Yale, U Chicago, MIT (as I mentioned my two favorites this year), Ohio State, UT Austin, Oberlin, Michigan, etc, etc. What got them in is what they did in college, not the name of their college. And a big predictor of how well you will do in college is how best the fit is and how happy you will be in those four years. It is almost never the name of the school.

There is nothing wrong with selecting a school because of its prestige. There are some advantages besides bragging rights, I’m sure. All I’m saying is that an “easier path to medical school” isn’t really one of them, especially when you are selecting between two Top 25 Universities. Maybe when you are comparing a state school versus a Top 25 university, there might be a difference. But in my experience, even that is questionable, as we would accept, in a heart beat, the exceptional student from Arizona State, Ohio University, University of Florida, etc, over an average or even above average student from a Top 20 University of LAC (including the HYPSM and WASP).