Med School Admission is really this competitive?

Calcruzer
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:21:42 +0000

IU Jacobs,

Yes, the IU-B graduate admissions rate is lower at most schools than the IU-B undergraduate rate. This is because IU-B is geared to serving the general needs of the state of Indiana–meaning that it needs to primarily provide a bachelors degree for most of its citizens who choose to attend college. IU-B doesn’t play the games that you see played at most of the Ivy league colleges and at the other highly-rated private schools. Let me tell you how this “game” works.

Let’s take Stanford as an example:

Stanford–being a private university–does two things to improve its stature in the world and to get the big research dollars:

(1) They keep their undergraduate admission rate low–thus making them appear “selective”–and thus, by inference, a better school than other schools in the country. How does Stanford do this–first, they split the enrollment at their school so that less than 50% (and actually only about 40% of their students) are undergraduates. Are you aware that in the past 22 years, the number of undergraduate students at Stanford has increased by only 2% while the number of graduate students has increased by over 22%?

http://facultysenate.stanford.edu/2007_2008/reports/SenD6031_vpge.pdf (Check out slide #5)

Since almost every school in the country is getting a greater amount of applications each year, this results in the acceptance rate for Stanford (for undergraduates) is going down every year–and goes down even when it is already quite low simply due to the lack of any increase in openings. In fact, Stanford’s acceptance rate for undergraduates is about 5% less than for graduates (just the opposite of Indiana University’s rates–where graduates have a much harder time of getting in than undergraduates.).

(2) Stanford’s other reason for increasing graduate students is that this allows Stanford to put more of their emphasis on hiring “high-end” professors and on focusing on building high-tech research centers specific to a particular field of study. This, in turn, attracts lots of research dollars to the university–both from the government–but more particularly, especially from the private sector and from investment people (venture capitalists). IU-B gets lots of research dollars from the government also, but next to none from private businesses relative to what Stanford gets. This is almost entirely because Stanford has 60% graduate students, while IU-B has about 4% graduate students.

The result, of course, is that to the typical person, the programs at Stanford appear to just be head-and-shoulders above every other school (except possibly Harvard and Princeton and Yale–who play the same kind of games)–while in reality, it is just the result of manupulating the numbers and of being located in a high-tech area where there are many venture capital dollars looking for somewhere to go.