But then how much of the “top undergraduate school” bias is due to selection effect (that those “top undergraduate schools” admit the strongest students to begin with, who would be more likely to be the strongest applicants to medical school), rather than treatment effect (that, for the same student, they would improve chance of admission to medical school in some way)?
Excellent points and analysis!
The one thing I want to mention is that sometimes top HS students want to challenge themselves against other equally bright students and faculty. They are not going to shy away from a college being “very hard” and in fact welcome the challenge.
One of my close friends who is now a pediatric ophthalmologist went undergrad to Yale and then Yale Medical School. He will flat out tell you that his Yale undergrad experience helped him get accepted to top medical schools.
Could he have taken the “easy way out” and attended his local public state university, to get a great GPA, sure. Would he still be an MD today, yes. But would he have received the same world class undergrad education and medical school training, no.
As he has told me, a great education can never be taken away from you.
My last point is, that many aspiring MDs don’t actually get accepted to medical school and don’t become doctors. Choosing an undergrad education just because it’s cheaper and might give you a higher GPA might come back to hurt you if your career path changes.
Just some things to think about…
I was hyper focused on this topic when DS18 was applying a few years ago. I read every thread I could find on this and weighed the advice I found on this site and elsewhere. My conclusion then was while there could have been a lot of good reasons for DS18 to attend a more selective undergraduate option, increasing his odds of getting into one of our instate medical schools in KY wasn’t one of them. I imagine this is true in many other states as well (perhaps not all).
In the discussion above about Michigan, given there are several other instate options (5 I think?), is the conventional advice totally invalid for an instate family with an aspiring MD?
UMichigan’s admission process is unique–although the medical school is technically “public”, the med school functions more like a public-private hybrid with most of the school’s funding coming from the UMichigan’s private endowment. (Back when d2 was working at the med school circa 2012-15, there was a very serious discussion going on about taking the school private since the amount off funding being received from the state of MI was so low.)
Instate applicants are subsidized by monies from the MI legislature and are segregated into one application pool; OOS applicants are placed into a entirely different admission pool and their education is not subsidized by state money. There are different admission criteria for each group and there is a loose cap on the number of instate students accepted.
In this sense UMichigan’s admissions are more like Pennsylvania public-private hybrid med schools–Temple, Pitt and Penn State.
Based on the above, I would imagine most in-state applicants would have an application strategy of applying to several of the other in-state options. Accept that admission at U of M is a lottery no matter how strong their application is. If I get in there great but if not I would happily attend where I do get in. I’m still just not sure that for a family where finances are a factor the pure financial ROI would ever be there when it comes to paying full boat for an elite undergraduate school for whatever bump there may be for it at only a handful of medical schools. Now there may be other good reasons to attend an elite undergrad, especially if finances are less of a factor. Just not for the bump in med school admission.