There is a adult participant (Satisest) on the A2C subreddit who knows quite a bit about top medical school admissions, and his perspective is absolutely the strength of your undergrad program makes a difference in getting accepted to the top medical schools.
It’s not like the odds of getting into such a top school is zero from a weaker college, but he says the odds are significantly higher with the same “stats” from a top ranked college.
I would read some of his Reddit postings on this question if it is important to you.
Not to speak for someone else, but my understanding is their experience as an ad comm was they considered undergrad program when evaluating grades.
That’s not inconsistent with broader studies and surveys, but I think it is also easy to overread the implications of such experiences. Like to even benefit at all, you need to get to the point you are actually applying and being considered seriously by such an admissions committee. And then assuming you get that far, if they only correct appropriately for degree of difficulty, then you haven’t actually been helped by choosing a more difficult college, it is more that you were not harmed.
And if only some committees do this at all, and then some committees do some of it but often not enough to fully compensate for degree of difficulty (which is what I think the broader evidence suggests), then some people might well still be harmed, even if others get lucky and escape harm.
Some high school seniors’ idea of “fit” is mostly defined by rankings or what they see as prestige.
Beyond that, there are also various levels of pickiness that can make it harder for some students to find a good “fit” than others. A student interested in widely offered majors and extracurricular interests that are widely found around colleges may find a wide range of colleges to be good “fits”. A student interested in a rare major and rarely found extracurricular interests may find it more difficult to find good “fits”.
Parent-based cost constraints can also affect the difficulty of finding a good “fit”, since cost is the main factor for many students.
The poster doing medical school application reading seemingly gave very minor importance to college ranking per se (except for students applying from post-bacc pre-med programs), but did note that a top-end recommendation from a top ranked college could carry extra weight. But they also mentioned that “if the academics are there, I’m not really parsing much there. I’m using the other parts of the app a lot more.”
It’s obvious, like law, kids from a host of schools.
Duke says the 2025 class had interviews with kids from 138 schools and students from 66 schools enrolled in 2025.
Penn says 154 kids attended in 26/26 from 67 schools.
Harvard says
Harvard Medical School is looking for applicants with broad interests and talents regardless of their undergraduate institution. Ivy League applicants do not have an admissions advantage. Students should attend an undergraduate college that will challenge them both academically and personally.
U Kentucky interviewed a tad over 10% of applicants - and their 208 come from 64 schools if I counted right. Here they are.
Finally, this is from Vandy 2021 to 2023. Basically, it shows three years of applicants and how many were accepted. So UAB - 159 apps over 3 years. 20 Vandy kids were accepted - so 1/8 as an example. It’s at the bottom.
I think kids come from all sorts of schools - like law. I’m sure the MCAT is a huge determinant - one of many. But this entire you have to go to a top school is bunk.
The overrepresentation of students from more selective universities to medical school is not surprising. However, this does not necessarily indicate a treatment effect (that the more selective university helped the students get into medical school) versus a selection effect (that the more selective university students are already selected by the university for greater than typical academic strength).
To determine whether it is treatment effect or selection effect, one would have to compare students admitted to more selective universities, some of whom attended more selective universities and some of whom attended less selective universities, to compare their medical school admission outcomes. A significant difference would suggest a treatment effect, while similar outcomes would suggest only a selection effect.
Note that the result of such a study could differ for other post-graduation destinations.
This doesn’t mean that Harvard gives an advantage to Harvard or Ivy kids. They say they don’t so why wouldn’t one believe them. But they may have been the students that were most compelling to them. After all, naturally, Ivy league schools will have students of the highest caliber compared to others. That doesn’t mean they’re preferred.
@ucbalumnus showed from a blog that where you go is of very minor detail. Hence, I showed the U Kentucky image / profile of those who attend there. Others showed how many schools (like Harvard/Penn) but didn’t name the schools. UK did.
The point of showing the Vandy info is to simply show that even if you go to the most prestigious of schools, getting into med school is still really hard.
So I was simply trying to show - and while a few schools said 60 colleges represented, etc. that UK showed names which always helps. And these type schools jive with the info I put earlier on where residents at top academic hospitals went - sometimes to top schools but very often to not top and even unknown schools.
And that no matter how top a school you go to, getting into med school is still a slog.
I note one thing I am personally very confident about is that if you actually did such a study in a rigorous way, it would turn out any of what you are calling a treatment effect (I sometimes call it a valued-added effect, but same concept) would be small. It might exist, it might have the expected directionality, but I am confident the magnitude would be small.
In part that is just because that is the weight of what people involved in medical school admissions say, that this is a minor tertiary consideration at most. And I think believing them absent compelling evidence to the contrary makes sense.
In part it also just makes logical sense in light of their motives. Like, they have lots of reasons to want to admit people who will actually be good, persistent med students. Conversely, there really is no substantial reward available for just having more entrants from more famous colleges. So if they can find some of the med students they want at famous those colleges, then great, but they have no signifcant incentive to then load up on even more students from those colleges than the ones who meet that basic substantive incentive.
And finally, and understanding this is fraught, I think when you eyeball the raw admissions data, I think it looks about what you would expect if this was mostly a selection effect. That’s not proof per se, but to me it really doesn’t look like we have some big puzzle here about what is happening that requires hypothesizing any additional motives on the part of med schools.
Anyway, I am fine saying we don’t really KNOW. But I am also fine with suggesting that absent more compelling evidence to the contrary, no one should be sacrificing something we actually know is important on the speculation there is some sort of treatment/value-added effect.
We ultimately don’t know what goes through an adcoms mind but we know what Harvard says - bottom paragraph.
I tend to take people at their word. To me, their words that Ivy has no advantage is compelling enough. The reason I used UKentucky, by the way, was they showed the schools kids come from - which is extremely varied. Harvard and others do it at the law school level but I could not find it at the med schools I looked at, short of UK. I kept looking til I found one.
Harvard says this below. Why would anyone doubt that - no differently than why would anyone doubt in undergrad if a school says applying ED or REA/SCEA gives you no advantage?
Harvard Medical School is looking for applicants with broad interests and talents regardless of their undergraduate institution. Ivy League applicants do not have an admissions advantage. Students should attend an undergraduate college that will challenge them both academically and personally.
