And many with the lower GPA’s apply to osteopathic medical programs, which have somewhat lower requirements. DO’s are fully licensed physicians and train in the same residency programs, take the same national board exams and sit for the same USMLE exams that MD students do. Chances of securing a residency are only a little lower - 77.7% in 2014 as compared to 94% for MD’s.
[/quote]
From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html
I’m with you on the selective LACs.
Miami, don’t forget to remind the posters that the reason your D graduated debt free from Med school is that you funded it by “borrowing” from your 401K, and that you paid all of her room, board, incidentals, etc. while she was in undergrad. Some financial planning experts might suggest that a 30 year old at the beginning of a promising medical career is the one who should be 'borrowing", vs. a parent who is close to retirement.
I would borrow from my 401k to fund a liver transplant for one of my kids… or something of that ilk. Not for an education loan for a high earning professional who has their entire career of income generation ahead of them.
But you’re the one with the MBA.
@MiddleburyDad2 Lol! I honestly have no idea how I would classify us, probably the parents who refuse to make the necessary sacrifices. 
We love our life and our lifestyle, and, no, we are not willing to sacrifice it for college tuition. Of course it has nothing to with vacations or cars, and everything to do with just raising our children, all 8 of them. Wouldn’t change a thing.
Equally, we actually would have to be wealthy in order to send all our kids to elite colleges bc over all the kids our current expected contribution would add up to close to $1,000,000. (My husband has a great engineering career, but it isnt close to being that great. 
)
Since we will have non-stop college kids for 25 yrs (our oldest started college in 2007 and our youngest is just finishing kindergarten) we would never be able to save for retirement.
So, no, their schools aren’t Dartmouth, but they are successfully meeting their career goals and with no debt. For us, that is the main objective. Life is good.
Kudos to the kids who can attend schools like Dartmouth bc that is a blessing.
I didn’t like the relative restriction of my choices at an elite LAC. They’re great if the student is more flexible about exactly what subjects they want to study, and with whom, and when. I’m not. Professor Y is on sabbatical this year, so there’s no one doing subfield Z. Course X is offered every third year, etc. When the Harvard course catalog, which was the size of War & Peace, came in the mail, I sat down and read it cover to cover. I still have it. I remember how happy I was holding all those possibilities in my hand. YMMV.
The above is why my oldest is trying to talk our youngest out of looking solely at LACs, and trying to get her to apply to Princeton, which in his defense is a pretty good mix of a wide range of course offerings/area while retaining an undergraduate focus. My wife is all for it because she already owns the college hoodie and would not have to buy another one. Our daughter would rather poke out her own eyes than go to her “brother’s school” though.
When I went to a small LAC back in the dark ages, if a class was not going to be offered one year or semester, I’d just go to the professors office and ask to be allowed to take the class early. Took senior seminars as a sophomore and classes out of sequence (eg even advanced classes before completing all the official pre-reqs.) The advantage of a small LAC is that many of the professors knew you (especially in your major) and would routinely let you take what you wanted. I never had a problem getting into a class I wanted, and was never shut out at registration. In contrast, that is a frequent complaint I hear from students today, especially if they do not have preferential registration. And then they have trouble with the sequence of their required classes for their major and the rest of their schedule. It was a pleasure to pass a professor in the hall, say “I’d like to take your advanced class in xxxxx” and they’d say “sure. Stop by my office and I’ll sign your registration form so you can register for it”. Yes, this was in the days before on-line registration, but it would be surprising if this kind of exception wasn’t still relatively easy to get, assuming there is room in the class. Actually, many of the profs at my LAC simply made room, even if it was a small colloquium .
My oldest D went to a small LAC. She had the same experience as you jym626! She loved the LAC and got an excellent education. Younger D went to Harvard and had a wonderful experience as well! Two different wants, needs and expectations!! They each thrived at their respective colleges!!
“I didn’t like the relative restriction of my choices at an elite LAC. They’re great if the student is more flexible about exactly what subjects they want to study, and with whom, and when. I’m not. Professor Y is on sabbatical this year, so there’s no one doing subfield Z. Course X is offered every third year, etc. When the Harvard course catalog, which was the size of War & Peace, came in the mail, I sat down and read it cover to cover. I still have it. I remember how happy I was holding all those possibilities in my hand. YMMV.”
This just hasn’t been our experience thus far. Granted, you’re not going to take an accounting class at Middlebury, and probably some other courses, but the idea that one would be intellectually limited in the highly selective LAC model is, to me, a stretch.
And, frankly Hanna, the picture you paint of the Sears Catalog of courses tells part of the story in, I would say, optimistic terms.
Bigger the school, bigger the scheduling hassle. You have priority registration and a bunch of other bureaucracy with which to contend. Sure, it’s going to be a bigger hassle at Penn State than at Penn, but even at Stanford I ran into some frustrations with course selection and availability. It’s not like you’re skipping around in an intellectual wonderland in which everyone is welcome to join whichever course they wish. Not my experience at all, and when it comes to resources and number of students, Stanford is up on the list.
My only real point, which I think is hard to dispute, is that at the LAC, the undergraduates are the show. Even at venerable Harvard, they are not. There is a lot going on there. It’s wonderful the things that are going on, but the focus is on many of those other things. Agree with @Ohiodad51 , not all Ivies are the same - Princeton and Dartmouth and probably Brown (I know less about Brown) seem to be more focused on undergraduates.
“but the idea that one would be intellectually limited in the highly selective LAC model is, to me, a stretch.”
As I said, it’s relative, and it depends how picky you are. There are objectively a lot more liberal arts choices every semester at Harvard than at Middlebury. There may be more at Ohio State than at Harvard. How much value you place on those additional choices – especially once you are advanced in your field – is subjective.
@MiamiDAP actually quite a few students get into med school with less than a 3.0 GPA. I don’t know if they attende Yale. 
The higher the MCAT score the more you can make up for getting less than perfect grades. I know that when my husband looks at MD/PhD applicants (he doesn’t do the regular MDs) he gives some weight to having heard of the college you attended when evaluating the GPA. And he cares much more about grades in science courses than the overall GPA. The data is right here: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/ Table A-23.
FWIW, 93% of Harvard kids with a 3.6 GPA or better got into med schools a few years ago.
Oops @jym626 beat me to posting the link~
This is not my experience at Stanford, nor is it the typical experience I’ve read from others. Instead Stanford, and several other similar schools, try to expand class sizes/numbers/faculty/resources to support increased demand, so students can register with any nearly class they’d like and meet prerequisites without issues of limited spacing. For example, in recent years there has a CS boom at Stanford, becoming Stanford’s most popular major and increasing in size by a factor of >4x during a small number of years. Rather than restrict the major or limit the number of students who can register for intro CS classes, they let intro CS classes grow to record sizes. The article http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/06/04/cs-popularity-reaches-record-high/ mentions the intro CS class CS106a had 1,817 registered students during the 2012-13 year, which posed a variety of organizational problems including safely fitting so many students in a lecture hall. To avoid similar problems in future years, the article mentions plans to hire more CS faculty and split the class in 2 halves, with a morning and afternoon lecture that cover the same material. Instead of trying to limit CS enrollment, they mention plans to offer a new CS+humanities dual major to better accommodate current student interests, which may further increase enrollment. The only class I can recall ever having limited enrollment involved studying anatomy with human cadavers. They had to limit the number of students to match the number of available cadavers.
Can we suggest a few folks to be offered up as cadavers, @Data10? 
@Mom2aphysicsgeek , yes, I understand. But your reply illustrates a point that I, and others too, have been trying to make in this thread: the general conversation it isn’t all about, and in this case, at all about, you. Several people in this thread can’t get out of their own way to understand that point. For purposes of the discussion,geting into everyone’s particulars isn’t really relevant. Does anyone want to read me write that I can afford it 3x? No.
And it may be “of course” for you and your husband, but there are those among us who might think those things (cars, vacations) reasonable to prioritize, while many among us might think it absurd to go discount on your kid’s education for those reasons. People are all over the map.
Also, wow, you left out a big detail. Eight kids? On even a typical engineer’s salary, I’d doubt you will be able to handle in-state tuition without making some cuts. That is, unless you make a whole lot of money.
Good luck!
Why is far more likely:
a.) Student ends up at a non-elite college, then earns a terrible GPA relatively speaking…then rallies and achieves a 99 percentile MCAT score
b.) Student ends up at an elite college, earns a so-so GPA relatively speaking…earns a 99 percentile MCAT score
Actually, my point isn’t about “me” at all. It is about the perception of some of the posters on this thread about need based aid, income, and “affordability.” The comments about UMC, saving $$ instead of going on vacation and not buying new cars, etc are all stereotyped generalizations. My posts have been meant to be directly pointed to those stereotypes b/c there are a lot of people who find themselves in the financial situation of not being able to pay what colleges expect them to pay. Maybe sometimes the choices are frivolous spending, but the number of posts echoing that sentiment on this forum in general is all built around a stereotyped assumption.
In the real world, there are countless things that can impact financial stability and inability to afford what a college determines the family should pay. Classifying their comments about not being able to afford their expected familial contribution as “whining” is derogatory. They are on the other side of a screen, and there is no telling the true reasons as to why that is their reality.
And, yes, when they find out that schools like Alabama and Kentucky recruit high achieving students and pay their bills when they attend, they are thrilled that their kids are able to get a good education. A Dartmouth education? No. But, they are sharing that their kids’ careers have not been hampered by taking that path. It isn’t demeaning a Dartmouth education. It isn’t raising their UG education to the same experience as an elite school. It is just sharing that it was still a successful choice for their kids.
FWIW, I wouldn’t have even posted in this thread if it weren’t for the FA comments, b/c the entire elite vs. state flagship conversation is a moot point. 
@OldFashioned1
re: #375- Its important to think much broader than that. There are many reasons a student can have a weak GPA – many, many reasons:
They might be an engineering major, or even double major, or major and minor and have a very rigorous class schedule; they might have had family or health problems that affected their performance, maybe even had to take time off from school (but their GPA is their GPA unless they withdrew from their classes), maybe they tried to take too many difficult classes in a semester and got a few weak grades that significantly pulled down their GPA (some classes are more hours and may affect the GPA more than others).
There are many very good, very academically challenging colleges. Some of the elites may engage in grade inflation (a few were accused of that) whereas less “elite” schools were very tough graders.
Maybe a student attended CC for the first 2 years while holding down 2 jobs and caring for an ill parent-- and that affected their grades (and probably what 4 year school they were able to transfer into). There are MANY reasons a bright student may have mediocre grades at a “non elite” school yet pull out a great MCAT score.
…which would go against the advice often given for a pre-med to choose a less challenging school to maximize GPA. Though to be fair that advice is often because that school costs less as well.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: I think this thread has outlived its usefulness, so I am closing it.