I posted a similar thread on the general college board and others suggested I get input over here.
My daughter is a rising senior who plans to play basketball in college and wants to go to medical school. She has several full-ride scholarship offers for basketball from decent D2 schools in the upper Midwest. She is also being heavily recruited by several of the top NESCAC schools. However, she would not get a dime in financial aid from these schools. She has a 4.0 GPA with 31 on ACT.
Has anyone on this board had to make a similar decision? Does paying full fee at a top NESCAC school trump a full ride scholarship to a D2 state school? My thought is that the medical schools put more emphasis on GPA/MCAT scores than on the prestige of the school. I’d appreciate others’ thoughts.
We made the decision between D2 and D3, and the scholarship did have a lot to do with it. We weren’t thinking of grad or medical school, just paying for undergrad.
A lot went into the decision besides money, such as the strength of the teams at each school, the courses, the coach. One thing that didn’t matter to my daughter at all was the ranking of the schools, so it was an easy choice for her to pick the less prestigious school.
twoinanddone - thanks, that was helpful.
@Tawegian, it is great that your daughter finds herself in this dilemma of choices. There are several factors to consider in college choice, and finances is at the top of the list. I will throw a few more thoughts out there.
First, each school should have statistics on the percentage of students from the school who have applied to and were admitted to med school. Now these numbers are a bit misleading, because the data may be gathered well after the first year and some of the students who initially planned on med school will be “weeded out.” Still, it is a number that should be considered for comparison of the schools.
Another consideration is whether practice times at a D2 school are more demanding than a D3 so as to prevent taking lab science courses. If mandatory practices are year round, that could interfere with the labs. One way to find out is to ask the coaches about athletes who are science majors. At some schools, you can even figure this out by looking at the on-line roster. I am relatively certain that there are plenty of athletes that go onto become doctors, but also I know that it is challenging. I suspect that some take a post grad year to finish up the science requirements. Ask the coaches how many athletes from his or her program go onto med school.
Finally, you should allow for your daughter’s growth and change of plans. Today, she may want to become a doctor, tomorrow it could be a mathematician. In choosing the school, look to where she would be happiest if med school is not in the works – or for that matter if athletics is not in the works.
I have two sons, one a D1 athlete and a second who is now in med school, so I have been exposed to both worlds. The med school application process seems to place more focus on grades and MCAT scores than on prestige of the school. Our S in med school went to our State Univ. and is sharing an apartment with an Ivy League graduate who already has loans from his undergraduate degree, not a good space to be in. The debt racks up pretty quick in med school and the average debt at graduation for my son’s school is $120K. He even has an app on his phone that calculates what the real cost of what you are considering buying costs (e.g is that Starbucks really worth $9 dollars to you) since most of your living expenses are against a loan.
There are whole message boards devoted to topics such as whether or not med schools really care where you go for your undergraduate education, but I would suggest going to the school that gives the best undergraduate scholarship but only if she is certain that she will be able to maintain good grades and do all of the other things that are needed to apply to med school.
There is very little, if any, accommodation given to athletes. Athletes are expected to do all of the shadowing, volunteer, research work that the non-athletes do, to have a competitive application. Studying for the MCAT is a part time job in and of itself. So if she wants to be pre-med, consider taking some of the harder or weed out lab classes (Org Chem, BioChem, etc.) over summer school. Also maximize the opportunities and connections that being an athlete provides. e.g ask to shadow the team doctor, or ask the academic advisor to help her find a really good volunteer opportunity that will give her clinical exposure. In either school, it will be doable, but I would try to keep the cost of her undergraduate education as low as possible.