It depends.
You will be a CA resident so long as your parents Iive in CA and you are still reported on their state and federal taxes as a dependent. And you only are OOS for educational purposes. (i.e. to attend college)
If you take a gap year, live & work in TX (or any other state), then you’ll be a TX resident (or whatever state you’re living/working in).
Read the TMDSAS residency determination requirements for medical school applicants.
From your reply and the stats you shared, it seems (correct me if I am wrong)
- even CA instate PreMeds have a less chance to matriculate from CA medical school
- Texas PreMeds might have much better chance of matriculating in Texas Med Schools but much worse chance to matriculate outside of Texas.
Texas state law requires that no more than 10% of the entering classes of medical and dental schools can be made up of non-Texas residents.
All of this is correct.
Is there any similar law in CA requiring priority for CA in-state students? It seems like there is no priority but some preference for In state in some of the UCs.
No. CA has no such regulation. Some CA public med schools may give some preference to instate residents, but they are not required to do so. It’s rumored that UCD shows some preference for its own grads, but I don’t know that I’ve seen this officially expressed anywhere. I suspect that any preference shown is for students who are committed to working in the Sacramento/NorCal area.
UCR does give preference to applicants who have grown up in the Inland Empire area and who intend to live and work in the region post residency.
Getting into a CA med school is difficult no matter where you go for undergrad. CA is just a really difficult state for premeds. The odds say that even if you attend UCD or UCSD you’ll end up going OOS for med school.
However, if you attend TTU, then take a gap year and establish TX residency, your odds of a med school admission don’t actually improve much, if at all.
65.5% of CA residents don’t get any med school acceptances.
But 67% of TX residents don’t either.
(Mostly because non-TX med schools are reluctant to interview TX applicants since they know they historically do not matriculate OOS due the low instate cost of med school in TX.)
(if you want to play the odds game, the state with highest instate matriculation rates are West Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina and Kentucky.)
Personally I would find it hard to pass up the big merit at Texas Tech, but that’s a decision only you can make based on your personal circumstances.
FWIW, has a friend who attended Texas Tech on big merit and loved her time there. But she wasn’t a premed; she’s a meteorologist.