Chance Me / Match Me: Statistics/Biostatistics — Yale SCEA vs Brown/Duke ED? [MD resident, 4.0 GPA, 1550 SAT]

Chance Me / Match Me
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Brown’s medical school and many (not all) of the research labs are in the center of the campus. The weather is better at Duke. The much touted grade inflation at Brown isn’t much help when you are in organic chemistry surrounded by OTHER premeds… someone is getting a C. It may or may not be you.

Go where you think you’ll be happiest overall. You may or may not end up applying to med school so you might as well maximize your educational experience for the four years leading up to what comes next.

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This is the last thing you should be concerned with. Everybody uses college rankings as a preliminary guide for information & selection but they shouldn’t be a influencing factor in your decision on whether to apply or not. In Washington Monthly, Duke is ranked #16 yet Brown is ranked #57, therefore you should forgo applying to Brown. Bad strategy! I highly discourage it.

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Stronger in basketball.

Duke’s a great school. Brown is a great school. Most would say Brown is Ivy so is stronger.

US News meaning nothing. The schools are the same as yesterday. U.S. News tinkered with their methodology. Schools change - and like Wake Forest, Villanova and Wash U have climbed back from big falls the last time they changed methodology.

You could go to Kansas State and it might be better for pre med than these two or might not. Medical schools don’t care. Where can you excel ?

Can you pay eight years at $100k - for undergrad and med school ? Otherwise you should attend neither without aid. Let the money cover grad school.

There’s lots of schools with med schools adjacent. That doesn’t mean the undergrads get access. You likely have less chance of access at a top school because there’s more competition - than say UAB or VCU or College of Charleston, that also has neighboring med schools but less competition for access.

But if you’re not finding Brown worthy of full pay, then there are no schools worthy of full pay.

But forget rank, if you’re trying to buy cred, Brown beats Duke just as Ivy beats ACC.

Maybe a school like Wofford beats them all!!

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Are you saying that medical schools do not care at all about where a candidate gets their undergraduate degree?

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My two cents is if this is even a concern for your family, then as a premed you shouldn’t be choosing any such college, regardless of its latest US News ranking. Like some families can comfortably afford to pay for both college and med school with little or no debt at the end. Some will get so much need aid from these colleges that it is competitive on cost, or indeed lower in cost, than their in-state options. But if you have good undergrad options that would cost a lot less, and that would mean less debt for you coming out of med school, I would very, very strongly consider going with such an option.

So my understanding from the more scientific studies, surveys, and so on as to this issue is it that is kinda complicated.

Almost never will the name itself matter. However, sometimes they may take into account what they see as the relative selectivity and grading norms at your college when assessing your grades.

But even when they do that, I think it leaves two very important questions.

First: are they actually doing that ENOUGH to create a truly level playing field? I don’t have scientific proof of this, but to the extent I have seen the stats on who is getting admitted where from which colleges with what sorts of GPAs, I am not at all convinced whatever extra leeway they are giving to such applicants really makes up the entire difference in difficulty in getting those grades.

Second: even more fundamentally, lots of entering premeds, even at the most selective “good for premed” colleges, never end up applying to med school at all. Some of course simply decide they would rather do something else. However, some are “weeded out” by their early classes, mostly prereqs although gen eds may also play a role. And sometimes, a prehealth committee may also play a role.

Which leads to the second question–is it even possible for such leeway granted to actual applicants to make up for a heightened risk of being weeded out such that you never even apply? I again can’t prove this scientifically, but I think no.

None of which means highly selective colleges like Duke or Brown are ALWAYS a bad idea for premeds, but I think you are well-advised to be realistic with your level of preparation for your early prereqs and other first-year classes. Like if you are confident you are as well prepared as, or more ideally better prepared than, a majority of Duke or Brown first year students, OK, cool. But if you realistically are not really sure about that, I don’t know if taking the chance is worth it as a premed.

As a final thought, my experience is a lot of medical professionals are pretty remorseless about this. For that matter, many highly selective colleges are pretty remorseless. Got in over your head at a highly selective college? Oh well, you probably weren’t cut out to be a doctor anyway.

And maybe that is true. Or maybe you just started off a bit behind at your particular college, and you could have eventually been a great med student and great doctor, but didn’t get the chance. And maybe at another college, you would have gotten that chance.

And I personally think it is harder to rule that out than some people suggest.

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I agree.

Also agree. To expand on this, these colleges are full of students who were in the top 10% of their HS class. If one doesn’t think they can be in the top 10% of the college class…go somewhere else where that is more likely. I’m not saying students from Brown and Duke who graduate outside the top 10% have no chance of getting into med school, but it is more difficult.

@wayoutwestmom Can you address whether one’s undergrad institution is an important factor in med school admissions, and also whether med school admissions staff consider whether the undergrad school has grade inflation, or not?

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That’s what various studies and info shown by @WayOutWestMom have said. And if you look at residents at top hospitals like Vanderbilt, they come from the unknown (Luther) to non selective Lipscomb, to non selective publics like Oklahoma State and yes some highly ‘ranked’ schools too. Don’t forget, rankings are made up, artificial etc.

Here’s radiation oncology undergrad at Vandy

Wisconsin
USC
Ole Miss
Lafayette
UMass
Rhodes
UCSB
UTK

Here is PMI Residents

Drake
Duke
SUNY Oneonta
Baylor
UTexas
UNC
UAH
U Nebraska Omaha

Northwestern PEDs

Hampton
Northwestern- several
Auburn
FAU
Alabama
UVA
Stanford
St Olaf
Gustavas Adolphus
U Chicago
Chapman
Notre Dame
Seton Hill
UT
UIUC
Wisc
Brown
Emory
And more

Emory Hospital

ASU
Vandy
Colgate
St John’s
Ga Tech
Penn State
St Louis
UT
Pitt
St Lawrence
Emory
Miami
U Wash

So yeah - I kinda am saying that. All these kids got into med school and now are residents at some of the top academic hospitals. Other med schools show similarly.

Yes some undergrad schools will have a higher % go to med school because higher achieving kids went to begin with. But no matter, where you go, if you can deliver, it’s clear you have a chance.

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A few T30 schools but especially Duke ED [VA resident, 1560 SAT, 4.0UW/4.9W GPA]
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Rankings change from year to year. You don’t change what university you are attending to accommodate any changes in rankings as they occur. Once you are a university student, you are going to be way too busy keeping up with class work to care at all what the most recent magazine says about the ranking of whatever school you attend.

And your chances of ever getting to medical school or to any other very good graduate program really will not depend upon whether you attend Brown, or Yale, or Duke, or Stanford, or UNC, or UMD, or UVM, or U.Mass Amherst, or most likely U.Mass Lowell. Some strong students might find themselves in the middle of the pack at the top ranked schools, and in the top 1/2 of the pack at the medium ranked schools, and the top 1/4 at lower ranked schools, but getting to medical school is going to depend a lot upon the student and very little on which undergraduate school they attend. Of course there will be someone who will be at or near the top of the class even at the tougher and higher ranked schools, but they would most likely have excelled as long as they attended any school that was a good fit for them.

As I see it, there are three possibilities:

One possibility is that you would qualify for a LOT of need based financial aid at Brown, and at other private schools that meet full need. It sounds like this is not the case.

A second possibility is that your family is perfectly comfortable paying somewhere around about $900,000 for eight years of university with no hardship at all and no debt at all. If this is the case, then really do not worry about the cost of Brown. Brown is a great university.

The third possibility is that you would need to take on some debt, or at least cause your family some discomfort, on the way to paying something like $400,000 for a bachelor’s degree plus something like $500,000 for an MD (remember that any graduate school is well into the future, and costs are going up over time). If this is the case, then right now is the time to be thinking about more affordable options.

Personally I was a much stronger student in my major and closely related fields, and a much weaker student in some classes that were required to meet the “general requirements” for getting a bachelor’s degree at the school that I attended. For me somewhere like Brown that allows quite a bit of flexibility might have been a better choice (but I went somewhere else, oops – too late to fix it now).

Rankings really do not matter. The difference between premed required classes at a school that is ranked in the top 5, versus premed required classes at a school that is ranked 16, versus premed required classes at a school that is ranked in the 100 to 150 range, is a lot less than you are thinking. At that last set of schools, there will be plenty of very, very strong students in the premed classes. There will also be plenty of homework and plenty of very tough exams at any of these schools. The top 10%, and probably more like the top 25%, of the students at the school that is ranked in the 120’s are going to seem very similar to the students at Brown or Duke or Harvard or Stanford. A lot of them will be very good students. They will however be human and subject to imperfections, and any of them might sometimes miss a question somewhere.

Duke has better basketball. Brown will require a slightly better winter coat.

Both can be great schools for a premed student, but only IF the family can easily afford it and still be able to help a LOT with the cost of medical school. Both will have premed classes full of very, very strong students.

Welcome to any highly ranked school, or to premed classes at a rather wide range of schools.

Some students get into these tough classes and find it to be a drag. Some students get into these tough classes and find that they love it. For some students both will occur but in different classes. You sort of need to show up at university and just see how it goes.

Definitely if you are taking any premed required classes, you will want to show up on day 1 planning to put in a strong effort. Staying ahead from day 1 is a very good habit to get into. This also applies to students who are not premed students but who are in majors that overlap with premed classes. Mostly this also applies to university students in a wide range of majors at at wide range of universities.

I do not think that your chances of getting accepted to a very good medical school, or to a different very good graduate program, will vary significantly regardless of which of these two excellent schools you attend. The only exception would be if in some way one turned out to be a way better fit for you than the other.

Every medical school that I am familiar with, and every DVM program that I am familiar with (medical but with different patients), and every highly ranked graduate program that I am familiar with, takes students who graduated from a very wide range of undergraduate universities.

Finding an undergraduate university that is a good fit for you, and where you will be comfortable, and sticking with a budget, are important.

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The undergrad school one attends has only a very small, very limited influence on med school admission. While some med school admission offices do consider the prestige of the undergrad, that consideration comes after a very long line of other factors first (GPA, MCAT, quality and longevity of ECs, mission fit with the med school, demonstrated leadership ability, personal statement strength, purpose as in becoming a physician. See Premed Competencies for Entering Medical Students for more.)

Every 3 years, AMCAS surveys members of med school admission offices and has them rank the relative importance of various factors in a student’s application portfolio. (See p.15 of this document: Using MCAT Data in Medical Student Selection 2024) Selectivity of undergrad institution constantly over the last 20 years has been ranked by adcomms in “Lowest Importance” category, along with things like legacy status, age, language spoken at home, and participation in intercollegiate athletics.

RE: grade inflation/deflation. Generally speaking this isn’t given much, if any consideration. Nor is the perceived difficulty of the undergrad major. (Physics/math/engineering isn’t given any bump over gender studies, sociology or film majors.) GPA cutoffs screenings are managed by a computer program, not a human being. A few individual application readers might give a slight nudge in favor to a student from a famously difficult school (like MIT or Cal Tech, for example), but it’s on an individual basis for a particular student at a particular school with a one particular individual. There is no general policy that says Ivy+ students get a GPA boost. (In fact, if anything it’s the opposite. A number of highly selective schools like Harvard, Brown, Duke, etc.have a pretty strong reputation for grade inflation.)

Med school application readers are given an objective scoring rubric–which they are required to follow. They can’t just randomly add or subtract points assigned to an application because of their personal perceptions and prejudices. This is done to promote consistency in student ranking among different individuals.

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One one of my good friends went to Brown for undergrad and got accepted to medical school. He said they wanted to know the actual grades in all the classes he took. However with grade inflation as it is in these two colleges, and others as well, the lowest grade awarded is a B. So the MCAT will be the biggest academic factor.

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@BlueBudgie

So you are concerned with Brown’s US News rank? What in the US News criteria (and revised criteria) for this ranking worries you?

And why US News?

I mean,

Linkedin ranks Duke #2 and Brown #12

Time Magazine ranks Brown #25 and Duke #40

Neither is in the top 20 of the Wall Street Journal - but close to home Loyola of Maryland is. I can’t see the full rank so don’t know where either place.

So I’m asking because there’s a lot of rankings out there - why is US News potentially driving your decision and what is it about the US News ranking that would cause you to potentially change your mind on a school?

Thanks

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Honestly, U.S. News is just the ranking I’m most familiar with. I didn’t really know about the other rankings. Besides rankings, I’m not really sure how to tell which school is better. That’s why I’m asking here.

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Here is the NACAC published statement concerning rankings:

College Rankings: What Do They Really Mean?

For you, the final decision is going to boil down to both price & quality. Some of the colleges you plan to apply to don’t offer any merit aid while others do - and financial aid offers can vary considerably, even if little or no budgetary constraints. You may have a vague idea of which college seems like the best choice for you right now, but come next April, you could end up selecting a different option, especially if it makes more financial sense.

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At this point, you’ve made your list and are trying to decide where to ED, correct? Rankings are somewhat useful to build a list, but you need to now make your decision on other factors. Rankings will not really tell you which is better for YOU. Did you visit all the potential ED schools? Which did you prefer? Which school’s curriculum appeals to you most? Where do you feel you would be happiest and have greatest success? Those are the questions to figure out now.

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Have you visited these colleges? IMHO the school that is “better” is the one you can see yourself being happy at for four years…where you get accepted…and is affordable for your family.

Believe it or not, there are many (if not most) college students who choose their colleges without looking at any published rankings at.all.

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This is the issue. A rank isn’t telling you which is better. A rank is using a methodology someone created, that may or may not be relevant to what you are studying. And many schools are ‘better’ and it often depends on the student themself.

You are full pay. I hope you can get a chance to go visit colleges. You likely have the $ resources to do so.

You can likely see from the above post #67 where you go is unlikely to impact med school chances other than at some you may stand tall vs others gpa wise based on the list of undergrad schools I provided of residents at top academic hospitals.

These schools on your list may very well be perfect for you. Or may not be.

If you are serious about graduate school and mom and dad can’t help, you might ask them if they can use savings vs these toward grad school, to help minimize your debt later on which will be the biggest impact of your experience (if you will have to take loans). In general, loans can be life altering.

I’m biased. Both mine chose safeties. They chose, not me. I’m full pay and set a $50k budget. They both chose much cheaper after visits with my daughter, by US News choosing #16 of 17 she got into. It just felt right. Both are doing the same, I think, as if they chose higher ranked schools with one an engineer making more than the average from top schools and the other in a selective public service role that attracts many from the Ivies - but really from all corners.

None of what I said doesn’t mean one or both of your top list won’t be right for you. But given it sounds like your family has the means, I’d get out and explore not just these top schools but others in a variety of settings (urban, suburban) and costs (if that will help you down the road). See if you want to be on these campuses, in their surrounds, for four years of your life.

I figured it was the ranking and no doubt US News is the most well known but better is in the eye of the beholder, not a magazine/website. At my daughter’s lower ranked school, she was in a sub group of Honors and the attention, enrichment and mentorship from the school was incredible. She started a club still going today to help assimilate refugees into society. She was able to make an impact but that’s likely due to her, no matter where she attended.

Again, these might be right for you. But keep your mind open and go visit, even close to home, schools if you can. Learn that at Duke, for example, you’d take a bus from the dorm to campus every day, at least the first year - things like that. Is that ok? It was a dealbreaker for mine so she didn’t apply. You will be somewhere four years day after day. Learn up front if you can.

Here’s the US News criteria. There’s 6 pages of metrics to flip through so you can see how they came to their rank. Others like Time, LinkedIn, WSJ, payscale and more have their own proprietary methodology. Hence different rank. But you might look at theirs - why for example does Loyola outrank Duke and Brown in the WSJ. But the best rank will be yours. Just make sure any you attend is affordable - not just today but through grad school.

I look forward to watching your journey.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights

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One issue is that rankings are on an overall basis, and based on the university as a whole. However, every university has a very large number of different programs. How good a school is for you, or for me, or for someone else, is going to depend upon the program or programs you (or me or someone else) are interested in.

There are hundreds of schools that are excellent for something. Which ones are excellent in the something that you care about? This is not an easy question.

Also, different people will feel more comfortable in different environments.

One thing that you can do is to visit multiple schools, and see how you feel. Take a guided tour. Some schools will allow you to talk to a professor in your intended major. Some will allow you to sit in on a class. We started with schools near us just because they were easier to get to, but we did end up visiting a few schools that required an overnight stay near the school (we drove there one day, stayed overnight, and visited one or two schools the next day).

You can also look at the graduation requirements for each school. Usually there are general requirements that all students need to fulfill to get a bachelor’s degree, plus major-specific requirements. Look at how this varies between schools.

If you are interested in statistics, then see how the school is for mathematics. If you are interested in biology, then see how the school is for biology. One possible issue here is that there are a lot of schools that are very good for both mathematics and biology.

A big issue is that there are hundreds of very good universities in the US. This does make it difficult to figure out which school is right for you. However, this also means that the difference between a school ranked 5 versus 16 versus a school ranked 55 is likely to be much smaller than you think (particularly since the school ranked 150 is also excellent).

I might also mention a few examples of schools being good at different things. Suppose that you want to major in desert biology. Arizona and Arizona state are two of the very top schools for this. Why? Because they have deserts nearby. Therefore top researchers who are working on issues related to deserts want to be there. If you are interested in estuary biology, you would need to go somewhere else (a small school in Nova Scotia might be a good choice, because that is where there are a lot of estuaries). Great Lakes Marine Biology? A different school altogether. Alternately, if you want to study large animal veterinary medicine, then Harvard and MIT might be a bad choice because there aren’t any large animal farms nearby. Colorado State (overall ranked in the mid 140’s the last time I looked) on the other hand is superb for large animal veterinary medicine, and it does have both cows and horses at least somewhere very near campus (and I have seem photos of alpacas and camels on campus there – at least one of whom had just had its life saved 24 hours earlier). It is also one of the top research schools for veterinary oncology.

You might not be interested in these specific specialties. However, my point is that the top experts at different specialties will be at a wide range of different universities in a wide range of different locations. There are a lot of very, very good professors in the world, and they are working all over the place.

Generally you can get a great undergraduate education at any one of at least several hundred colleges and universities. If at some point you want to apply to graduate programs, then you will want to focus very carefully on precisely what you want to study (but graduate school would be many years into the future and you do not need to think about it right now nor for several years). Also, medical school might not be quite as specialized as many PhD programs could be.

I think that some of us are encouraging you to try to figure out which schools are better specifically for you. This is indeed a tough question to answer. The various ranking services will not know which characteristics of a school are important for you.

One thing we did was to specifically NOT apply ED anywhere. Instead both daughters applied to a range of schools. Then we saw where they got in and what sorts of financial offers they got. Then we visited a few of the top contenders to see what we thought of it.

We did something similar. Both daughters chose schools that they felt would be a good fit for them (with a budget limit). For both daughters this required some visits and some careful thought and was not easy. Neither daughter chose the top ranked school that they got into for undergrad. I think that both chose correctly, and both did well in terms of admissions to graduate programs. Helping to pay for one daughter’s graduate program was a lot easier because they had both chosen affordable undergraduate universities.

However, they also picked schools that were a good fit for them, and this is not easy to determine.

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BlueBudgie, are you aware of this program? For both Duke & UNC Chapel Hill first-year applicants. There is an early notification deadline of October 15 & a regular application deadline of November 15. You should definitely consider applying to this program.

The Robertson Scholars Leadership Program

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So the good news is I think there is actually an abundance of colleges in the US that are very, very good, so good that they have way more opportunities and resources available than most of their students could possible exhaust in four years. If you will allow an analogy, this is sort of like when people try to rate the restaurant scenes in different large cities. Once there are so many restaurants near you that great new ones are opening, having a successful run, and closing before you can even get around to trying them, adding even more isn’t really going to change things for you. You are already living somewhere that there are plenty.

Part of the problem with rankings is that they basically foster a zero-sum mindset. In order for one college to be higher, another college has to be lower. But if both those colleges are more than good enough, what does forcing that other college to be lower even mean? How is that useful information to you?

None of this means you have to make college choices randomly, but I think you can maybe reorient to other ways of thinking. Like affordability. For most people, paying less for college is a real, concrete benefit. So you can take that seriously.

And then not all colleges offer every possible program. Some don’t offer some fairly large categories of programs. That can be fine if you are sure you won’t want to consider such programs, but again it is worth being sure that a college has the academic programs you even might want to consider.

And then you can start considering other things that address various practical needs, as opposed to wants. That’s a somewhat oversimplified framework, but still helpful, to ask what do you really need, as opposed to merely want.

OK, then if you have a long list of colleges that would be affordable, academically suitable, and have everything you actually need, NOW you consider additional wants. And since you already took care of the big stuff, this can be pretty much whatever you really do want.

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I’m not really sure about that, but in this case the OP has looked at the rankings and said it will impact where they apply, along with costs.

Agree, fit can be a vague term to teenagers, whereas rankings and costs are not.

Anyway, OP can still apply to Brown and Duke RD, and apply SCEA to Yale or Stanford and not do ED anywere.

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