<p>The discussion here lacks subtlety on both sides. Undergrad matters a little, but it isn’t necessarily the name-branding of it that matters. </p>
<p>1.) Excellent undergraduate programs provide excellent opportunities - opportunities that are technically available at larger schools (like LSU, or for that matter UC Berkeley) but are difficult to find and obtain.</p>
<p>2.) Being surrounded by talented peers also helps. Of course you can make contacts in medical school, but you’re still robbing yourself of four years worth of contacts. And you need some of those to write you letters of recommendation to make it into graduate school in the first place.</p>
<p>3.) The main point here is that if you go to a program like LSU, you will have to be one of the dozen or so most driven students in your entire university. You will have to be studying when everybody else thinks it’s ridiculous. You will have to have an MCAT score relatively high enough that it is embarrassing and will make you want to hide it from your friends, even your well-meaning ones.</p>
<p>If you are at a top school, your friends will be similarly talented and driven. They will help encourage you to perform at your best, and if anything they will express disapproval if they see you slacking off. This was very important for me, and it is very important for most people. Maybe you’re the exception.</p>
<p>Can you do this? I certainly could not have: the ostracization would simply have been too high. It would have made undergrad miserable. Most people cannot. But maybe you are the exception, since obviously some exceptions do exist.</p>
<p>4.) People who are trying to quantify the effect of a top-tier college education are ignoring the situational differences here. In general, I’ve found that name-branding matters only in situations where the candidate *already *has a high MCAT score.</p>
<p>High MCAT/High GPA: No need for top school
Low/Low: Top school doesn’t help
High/Low: Top-tier university helps explain why obviously bright student has poor grades; at a low-ranked university, you just assume he’s a slacker
Low/High: Again, top school doesn’t help.</p>
<p>So it doesn’t make any sense to suggest that it’s worth 0.3 GPA or 3 MCAT; it isn’t that simple. It’s situationally-dependent.</p>
<p>5.) And, again, it isn’t name-branding that actually does the work. Even after controlling for statistics, a couple high-ranked schools seem to do a little worse than lower-ranked ones. It is about the other opportunities, the peers, the advising.</p>
<p>6.) College is about more than getting into graduate school.
A.) For one thing, very few students stick to their plans. If you are blindly focused on one goal, it means you might get stuck without other options if you change your mind. Or if you are forced to change your mind.
B.) For another thing, college is also supposed to prepare you for graduate school – not just get you in.
C.) Finally, even if you get in and attend graduate school eventually, college is also supposed to be fun. Maybe you’ll like LSU; maybe you won’t. But you cannot ignore this factor.
D.) If you insist on being totally mercenary about it, going to a fun college helps you excel there. But more importantly, having fun in college is also an innate good.</p>