@WayOutWestMom has shared this link with much information on med school admissions:
I see that item A-2 lists which undergraduate institutions have 50+ applicants, and I see charts on GPA and MCAT scores for different institutions, and other information, though I’m not seeing a listing of the acceptance rates of applicants by undergraduate institution. Perhaps I’m missing it?
But there was someone who had a similar question as you, and this was her response:
This is very interesting. It says undergrad selectivity matters & the top feeder schools are all non-merit/expensive/highly-rejective schools. I keep hearing that medical schools don’t care where you did undergrad, they care about MCAT and GPA, go someplace inexpensive.
AMCAS publishes a document that includes a survey of medical school admission offices which shows what factors adcomms consider important.
See p. 15https://www.aamc.org/media/18901/download
This table–Table 1. Mean Importance Ratings of Academic, Experiential, Demographic, and Interview Data Used by Admissions Committees to Make Decisions About Which Applicants Receive Interview Invitations and Acceptance Offers – ranks academic metrics, experiences, demographics and other data into highest, medium and least important categories.
In the least important category under academic metrics:
Degree from a graduate or professional programSelectivity of undergraduate institution(s)
So the undergrad attended has some importance but isn’t a major factor in deciding who will be interviewed and accepted.
The initial round of applicant screening is tyically done a computer program which assigns a rank to the application based upon sGPA, MCAT score and demographic information. Highly ranked applicants are given priority consideration for a human eyes review. (Typically applications are sent to 2 volunteer readers for review and scoring… so the luck of the draw plays a part in how an application is perceived.)
While some selective undergrad institutions may have some name recognition among some application reviewers, how much that name influences their perceptions of the applicant is unclear and variable.
Adcomms are not a monolithic group, but a group of volunteer faculty, staff, med students students and community members which changes from year-to-year. The adcomm members use a scoring rubric to rank each applicant under consideration for admission on how well each fulfills the The Premed Competencies for Entering Medical Students and the institutional needs of the school.
BTW, the lowest acceptable GPA and MCAT score for a particular med school is proprietary information and not publicly available, but in general is much lower than most people think because med schools don’t want to screen out career-changers, military vets, low SES, disadvantaged, and other non-traditional applicants.
@DCDC , you may find the thread below interesting reading. It did not go as planned, but you will see a range of viewpoints.
Getting into med school is hard, and most students who think they want to become doctors never do, no matter how strong of a student they were in high school or what college they end up attending (@WayOutWestMom has shared data on this before).
But many students and/or families come to the board to ask about which colleges are especially good at preparing their students for med schools.
This website (which I found from a link on law schools shared by @NiceUnparticularMan ) lists 2024 data on the percentage of alums who attend(ed) any medical school:
To give some framing, here’s some ranges of percentages of alums followed by what “rank” of colleges there were for that range:
4.0%: #1 (Johns Hopkins)
3.1-3.7% #2-5 (Harvard, Yale, Rice, & Brown)
2.0-2.9%: #6-23
1.0-1.9%: #24-65
0.5-0.9%: #66-148
0.1-0.4%: #148-297
Students and families tend to have an easy time finding low probability colleges, which are those that have acceptance rate of 20% or less (i.e. rejecting at least 80% of …
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