Berkeley's placement into top medical schools

Colleges & Universities University of California - Berkeley
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<p>Uh, no, you are not looking at ALL of the data. Look again.</p>

<p><a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/2005seniors.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/2005seniors.stm&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/national.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/national.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The data on Berkeley’s page of which you speak is a reference to * only graduating seniors *. Not all applicants are graduating seniors - in fact, a sizable chunk from any school tends to be former alumni who have either gone to the workforce or gone to graduate school (but in another area) and then later decided to apply to medical school. The AAMC data is regarding * all * of the premeds of a particular school, whether they are graduating seniors or alumni. </p>

<p>Here is the data for Berkeley’s “one-year-out” applicants, meaning those premeds who had already graduated the previous year. Notice that in 2005 there were actually more of these applicants than there were graduating senior applicants.</p>

<p><a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/2005seniors.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/MedStats/2005seniors.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>And that doesn’t even capture the full extent of the phenomenom - there are ‘2-year outs’, ‘3-year outs’, etc. etc. </p>

<p>Now, in the sense that those particular applicants are not included in the data, I agree with you that the Berkeley data is ‘incomplete’. In fact, I have never disputed this. But I am saying that, if anything, the “real” data would almost certainly display a * lower * rate of admission than what the Berkeley data is showing. Why? Because, let’s face it, the more years out we’re talking about, the lower the placement rate tends to be. A lot of 1-year-outs were former graduating seniors who had applied to med-school and didn’t get in anywhere, so they decided to apply again the following year. Many of these applicants will get rejected everywhere again, and then apply again as a 2-year-out applicant, whereupon many will get rejected again, etc. Hence, if Berkeley were to include these applicants in its data, the overall placement rate would probably be lower than what they are reporting.</p>