Direct Admit vs. Accelerated vs. Traditional

mcat2
Sun, 09 Dec 2012 15:34:09 +0000

Raycmr,

I read your post #30 and read one of your previous about the same student:

I also personally met a grad at Yale who received a bio BS and MS had to go to 24 Med school interviews before a lower Ivy med school spot opened up.

My wild guess is he likely had applied to mostly very top med schools. If he happened to come from a “difficult” state like California or those with very few hard-to-get-in in-state med schools, it could happen. (Actually, DS knew a similar case as well.)

If I remember correctly, BRM (a long-time CC contributor some time ago, who many of us have benefited from) once said many students from ivy colleges tend to apply to top medical schools mostly because of both their own inflated ego and the peer pressure. This results in top med schools being highly populated by those students – applicants as well as matriculants. (Many equally good students in academics who did not attend an ivy college may still stay in-state for their med school education.) Another side-effect is that those students put themselves in a situation that many of them could not get a seat at any (or at least most) of these very top med schools because of the simple arithmetic: The class at med school is just too small to take most of them. They crowd (the majority of) themselves out – their high stats from a brand name college is not as rare and valuable when we are talking about the admission to such a small set of top med schools.

Make the tuitions for med schools very cheap and also make all doctors just government employees. Most of these “admission-craze” problems will go away. (Am I dreaming?)