Help Me? MD and Pre-med

mcat2
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 06:04:08 +0000

Many CCers seem to have mentioned various “good” colleges (including smaller colleges like LACs) for premed students. I recently read something about the percentage of students at top private colleges who qualify for Pell Grant. I am somewhat surprised that many top LACs do very well in terms of the percentage of their Pell Grant students. I assume that these schools may reduce the out-of-pocket price for these Pell Grant qualifying students significantly, otherwise these students will likely not be able to attend these private colleges.

Among the “top” colleges, the following 6 private colleges have > 20 % of students who qualify for Pell Grant:

Vassar: 24 %
Amherst: 22 %
Harvard: 20 %
MIT: 20 %
Williams: 20 %
Wellesley: 20 %

(Sorry, I read this article from a printed magazine. So I could not privide the link to the source.)

The above 6 colleges even beat the “working class” Ivy, Cornell! (which is 18 %.)

I guess Cornell is large so it can not afford to accept too many Pell Grant students, even though a part of that school is supported by the NY state government.

Six of the ivies are roughly in the bottom half of these 18 top colleges in terms of % of Pell Grant students. The bottom two are Middlebury and Princeton, at 11% and 12% respectively.

Brown, Dartmouth and Swarthmore do slightly better than Yale and Duke (at 15 % and 14 %.)

It is hard to tell how much student loans these colleges ask these Pell Grant students to get though.

If you 1) qualify for the Pell Grant and 2) are good enough to get into Vassar, Amherst, Harvard, MIT, Williams, Wellesley and 3) are capable of doing well enough to get the premed-worthy grades there, one of these colleges may give you a very cost-effective way to receive quality education.

Is it likely that, just like the fact that the mission of each med school may be different, the “missions” of these colleges are different?