We also bring home-cooked food (that lasts couple of days) and occasionally cheer during matches for our student-athlete :-).
Again, for our family distance was a big bonus but not a primary factor.
@applepro
I think you have excellent choices. You can’t go wrong with either school. If your son equally likes all the schools on the list, I would closely look at prices (go with more affordable one because med school is expensive) and distance from home (if you want to be able to see your son more often).
Isn’t that the point of the committee though - they are protecting their interests too. They want medical schools to see who they recommend as reliable.
If it’s give everyone who graduates a letter, then what’s the point? I get it from the student/ parent perspective though too - I just spent $300 or $400K, I deserve a chance.
It seems that there are at least three ways that a school can “game” the statistics regarding the percentage of their students accepted to medical school. One is as you report, just refuse to give supporting letters of reference to students who they do not think will make it and then don’t count them in the statistics.
Also, in a sense highly selective schools skew this statistic just by the students that they accept in the first place. As one example, students generally are not choosing between arriving on campus at Harvard in the top 1/3 of the incoming class versus arriving at U.Mass in the top 1/3 of the incoming class. Any one particular student is more likely to be choosing between arriving at Harvard in the middle or bottom 1/2 of the class or arriving at U.Mass in the top 1/3 of the class (and U.Mass is a very good university). The consistent quality of students who start at Harvard or MIT or Stanford or Tufts or JHU in the first place will skew the stats regarding how many of them get into medical school, but that does not mean that any one particular student will improve their odds by attending these schools.
Also, weed out classes can discourage some students from applying to medical schools. Both daughters had majors where the classes they took overlapped a lot with premed classes. I have heard reports of mid term exams freshman year with class averages in the mid 40’s. I took this as the school doing premed students a favor – students who were getting 40’s on these midterm exams might get a hint very early (such as first semester freshman year) that they would either need to up their effort substantially or give up on even applying to medical school. However, assuming that some of these students did give up on medical school and pick a different career path, this would both help the students pick a realistic career plan early, and help the university produce a higher percentage “of those students who apply how many get accepted to medical school”.
As such for any high school senior who is thinking “premed”, I would just ignore whatever a school says about the percentage of their students who get accepted to medical school. Instead I would look for a good and affordable university that is a good fit for the student.
At schools that do committee letters, the percentage can indicate how much the pre-med committee does gatekeeping. A higher percentage indicates a higher level of gatekeeping (i.e. refusing committee letters to pre-meds who are less likely to get into medical school).
A pre-med who prefers no gatekeeping may prefer colleges with lower medical school admission rates, while a pre-med who prefers to be warned early that their chances are poor may prefer colleges with somewhat higher medical school admission rates (but probably not close to 100%, since that implies that pre-meds with good, but not certain, chances are screened out).
But what one kid experiences as “gatekeeping” may just be that the level of difficulty of college classes is significantly higher than HS- even AP’s, and even for kids used to racking up all A’s. So kids who complain about “being screened out” by Organic Chemistry- is that a concerted and organized effort by the university, or just the reality that the course is hard, the material needs to be mastered, and that the other students are just as ambitious and hard-working?
Should a B+ in organic chemistry disqualify a student from medical school? There are schools (often the ones that brag about their 100% acceptance rate to medical school) which will not give a committee letter to such a student, and there are other schools where such students get a letter and get admitted to medical school.
This is the first I’ve heard this assertion. Do you have a source?
My kid’s only B in college is in ochem and she already knows she will get a committee letter (from a selective LAC). I know many kids who have attended the selective schools listed in the t50 and have never heard of a letter being denied because of one B (much less a B+). I’m not saying your statement is inaccurate, but it would be beneficial for this OP to know more since it does not align with my own research and personal anecdotes.
We should have a thread on committee letters and processes! I want to out the schools that would not support a student who might be able to get into a DO school, as wayoutwestmom posted above.
@WayOutWestMom I do not see where you said this. Did I miss it?
What she did say was that HP advisors are often not familiar with med schools outside the ones they most know…and are not always familiar with the admission requirements for DO schools (which really are not all that much different than for MD schools these days…I think).
But yes…a different thread than this one would be more “on topic” to this discussion.
I have never heard of a single B±- in Organic Chem no less- keeping a kid from getting a committee letter. The kids I know who were NOT getting a letter were kids who were struggling in the required pre-med classes (and a B or B+ is hardly evidence of a struggle), demonstrating difficulty with time management (lots of requests for extensions, incompletes, a W or two during a hard semester) and the Pre-med advisors observing that if the kids were in over their heads during undergrad, spending the time, money and energy applying when the results were HIGHLY likely to be no med school admit-- that seems right to me. I’m not saying they have a perfect track record.
But which school knocks a kid out of contention for a B+? Never heard of that.
We were thinking about Plan B as well. It would be nice if there are options at school for students to undertake if pre-med does not work out. I’d imagine that universities have more options vs small LACs. For example, take Muhlenberg - they are great for pre-med and theater, but if a students drops pre-med - what else is there to do?
Looking at salaries of Biology majors (if they don’t make it to med school) is quite depressing, they certainly don’t justify high tuition that private schools charge.
What are typical majors/minors that students consider for plan B? Law? Business? Management?
It’s either early hint or maybe this student could be more successful academically if s/he was in a different classroom. I’ve heard some colleges put a cap on how many As students can earn in a particular class (ex., only 15% of students can get As. etc.). So sometimes students are weeded but their educational journey could have a different outcome in a different college.
Bio major has one of the lowest ROI. It usually requires grad school.
Many pick it because of bigger overlap with premed classes (plus some more classes that will be useful for MS).
Agreed. There are plenty of bio majors who have good careers without a masters. The starting salaries for bio majors are depressed because of the many premeds taking a gap year or two and working in relatively low paying jobs like CNA, scribe, EMT, etc.