Trying to decide between these 3 great LACs, plan to study pre-med.
They all have excellent reputation, Haverford is ranked higher, other two are comparably ranked.
We did tons of research and visited all these schools multiple times. Talked to pre-med advisors at all three.
Moneywise:
Haverford - no merit aid, so full price for us,
Lafayette and F&M - about $30-35K/yr merit. Laf’s merit is the best, it’s 50% of tuition, so it will adjust as tuition keeps going up.
We don’t want the decision to be just about money, but it’s $120-140K over 4 years and we’d like to be clear on the benefits/advantages of Haverford over the other choices.
At this stage we are kind of stuck with the decision. We thought Admitted Days would help to confirm/eliminate at least one option, but so far after F&M and Haverford days we are right where we were - both are solid options. Lafayette Admitted Day is next week.
I would wait until Lafayette admitted students day. What happened to Lehigh and Tufts pending visits?
What school does your S prefer? It is surprising to me that he could go to F&M and Haverford and not have a preference.
If this money is meaningful to your family, in the sense that it would impact other decisions and/or funding of retirement or med school, is Haverford really a choice? (I think you said on the other thread you can comfortably afford it but nice to save money.) And, I assume you are talking about benefits/advantages wrt med school, and IMO you won’t find any. You will NEVER be able to compare med school acceptance rates on an apples to apples basis. I also want to reiterate that the vast majority of first year pre-meds never go on to med school.
IMO for a student who is not top of their HS class who wants to become a physician, I would ALWAYS choose the college where they have the best chance to be at, or as near to, the top of the college class as possible.
So…Muhlenberg with the scholars acceptance seemingly fell off the list because of a lack of Plan B options…but what is the Plan B at the remaining schools? (You mentioned the low salary of bio majors but remember…those low starting salaries include a relatively high proportion of students who are working low paying jobs (EMT, Scribe, CNA, etc) to get clinical experience for a few years to strengthen their med school apps.) What if the highest possibility of your S making it to med school is actually at Muhlenberg and the scholars program? (I know you can’t really answer that question, but I’m trying to frame things differently for your S).
Overall, I would stop trying to handicap med school chances and let your S pick the best school for him…and that includes all considerations…the vibe, majors, where he wants to spend four years. Happier students do better in school. Give him the space to choose and move away from paralysis of analysis.
Where did you get this data? Do you know exactly what is included in med school acceptance rate for each college? Before stating this type of information you need facts to back it up. For example, do students applying after a gap year or graduate degree count? is the rate just for US based MD or does things like chiropractic, podiatry, overseas acceptances count? And do students need a committee letter to apply to med school?
First and foremost, they are all excellent schools so congrats are in order. After looking at LACs with D, my sense is that fit is very important. Therefore, a lot of the decision (assuming affordability) should rest on where you feel is the best fit both academically and socially.
My D graduated from Lafayette College a few years ago and had a fantastic experience in every regard. My sense is that Lafayette has found the secret sauce where students are academically challenged but still have time to develop close friendships, get involved in ECs, do research with professors, and relax a bit. I’m sure other schools on your list have found this balance but Laf is the only one I can speak to personally. My D was a STEM major who also loves Shakespeare, classical music, etc. She specifically wanted a LAC undergrad experience and felt that Laf had a great balance of academics and she also felt very comfortable with students she met on campus. If you have any questions about Laf feel free to PM me.
FWIW F&M was another one of her top choices, but Laf just felt right to her. F&M also seemed strong in STEM and I imagine it would be another excellent choice.
Personally, I’d save the money from Haverford for med school unless there is something that particularly draws you in to that school.
We like Lafayette a lot, it was one of our top choices through the application process. We even considered switching from RD to ED in Jan. Appreciate positive feedback from your D!
How much of an impact did Greek organizations have on her social life? Did the students outside of frats feel limited with regards of their options?
My advice hasn’t changed from the first thread…and please reread the answer you got from @WayOutWestMom
I’ll comment on this first…no, these stats cannot be trusted as they can be “manipulated” any number of ways. @WayOutWestMom can explain.
A few things:
I would take medical school out of the equation for now. Your student needs to find an undergrad school where they will be happy to be for four years. Medical school application decision can can and should come later.
Unless money is no object, please consider that medical schools will cost $100,000 a year or more by the time your student gets there. So…if you choose to, conserve undergrad monies for that potential cost.
Re: committee letters…that’s a double edge sword. If you attend a college that does them, and you don’t get one, your application to medical schools will be doubtful. OTOH, schools without committee letters do not gate keep medical school applicants in the same way.
Most students who enter college with a premed intention don’t ever apply to medical school at all. They find something else that piques their interest. And of those who do apply to medical school, only about 40% get even one acceptance.
Every premed should be open minded and have a plan B in case they decide medical school isn’t going to be for them.
Your student has some very fine acceptances. As parents, you need to figure out whether the costs are OK for your family. We can’t do that…it’s a family decision. Some families do pay higher costs for undergrad…and if you can and want to (without jeopardizing your overall financial picture) that’s fine to do…and a wonderful gift to your student.
7. Re: shadowing and volunteering. Many students shadow during vacations from college. Volunteer opportunities with less privileged populations can be found just about everywhere. And some students do a year or two after undergrad to do these things as well as prep for and take the MCAT, and complete applications (do not underestimate the time it takes to complete applications).
Socially, there is plenty of opportunity to find friends and have a vibrant social life outside of Greek Life at Lafayette. First of all students cannot pledge until sophomore year so by the time that happened D had a very strong friend group in place – some pledged, others didn’t but they stayed very close for all four years (and remain good friends today). As the years progressed D developed additional friendships with people in her major, people from ECs, etc. Laf also has a number of living-learning communities which can be nice options outside of or in addition to Greek Life.
Seems like there are a number of wonderful acceptances so congrats!
I agree with the advice you are getting above. I will just note that I have observed there are some kids who form strong preferences after visits, others who more have the attitude they all seem fine.
I think on some level the latter kids are often being more rational–there is only so much you can really learn from a visit, and people are adaptable anyway, so the vast majority of kids at excellent LACs like these are going to end up very fond of their college.
I also think if you do form a strong preference after visiting, it is fine to go with that, assuming it is comfortably affordable and generally suitable academically as well. But if you don’t? No need to force it.
OK, so you are a rational kid who is looking at three or more colleges that would all be suitable academically. And you visited and they all seem fine but you have no strong preference. What now?
I mean, why not just go with cost at that point? Even if you don’t NEED to decide on cost, at least cost is a hard, ascertainable factor. So if nothing else is making up your mind in a compelling way, why not?
And I think sometimes there is this attitude that has to be wrong, that you have to carefully choose your college on other grounds, and if you don’t you must not be taking all this as seriously as you should.
But again, rationally? Kids are adaptable, predicting the future with precision is often impossible anyway, and so when you get to this point it is entirely possible there is no process that will show you that one choice is really a materially better choice than the others.
And at that point it may not be a romantic attitude, but money is a tangible and countable good.
One of our reservations with Haverford is that most of their students are from top 10% of their respective high school classes. I remember reading somewhere that around 90% of incoming kids are top 10% of HS class. Which means that our son will be part of super competitive environment. His high school is just like that - specialized HS where everyone is selected and all classes are at Honors level or above. It’s been extra difficult, lots of late nights and the grades reflect that, he’s nowhere near top 10% of his class, he’s more towards the middle.
In addition, Haverford’s average SAT is higher than his, which further confirms how strong his peers will be academically.
Do we want him to be in a super competitive environment like his HS again? Would it even be possible to raise to the top in terms of grades given such competition?
IF your son gets accepted to medical school someday, he will be there along with a lot of other high achievers. He will not necessarily need to “compete” with them, but he will need to do the best he can in order to set himself up for residency options.
I tend to agree with others that med school prereqs are usually hard (and often competitive) at most colleges, and then med school itself is very challenging.
That being said, I do know studies of why kids drop out of the pre-med track have found that kids who struggle more in the earliest classes are more likely to drop out (they did some complicated things to distinguish this from kids who were going to struggle consistently throughout college). Basically, being a relatively slow starter in college can maybe derail you for med school in ways it will not derail you for other professions (assuming you find your thing and/or just adjust to college generally).
So that’s a pretty nuanced point, but I personally think it is fine to think in terms of whether you are confident you are well-prepared to do very well in hard, competitive classes from the start. And again, you won’t necessarily be able to dodge this just by choosing a less selective college overall, because the med prereqs are a specific type of class. But if you are feeling a little more or less confident depending on the college, I for one would not ignore that feeling, I would at least take it into consideration.
I seem to recall this study- and I think you’ve cited the finding correctly (early struggle means more likely to drop pre-med) but perhaps have misconstrued the cause? I’ll try and find the original study but I think the focus was on kids who were not well prepared coming out of under-resourced high schools. So the question was can these kids catch up and if so, how do they do? Again, trying to remember- there are places like Xavier which have a fantastic track record supporting kids and getting them into medical school, even kids who are struggling and even kids whose college prep was a little shaky.
I don’t think this is at all what the OP is talking about (OP, correct me if I’m wrong). OP’s kid went to a competitive HS, was not at the tippy top of the class but has some fantastic college choices. So the question is- will a super competitive undergrad derail her kid? And I’m not aware of any study that specifically focused on that. And moreover, the data (if it exists) will be very muddy. The kids I know who have dropped off the premed track early have done so when they discover another field they knew nothing about. To quote a young family member of mine- “Why treat 20 patients a day when you can be helping tens of thousands?” as the answer to “why epidemiology”. Kids don’t learn about the vast majority of health care careers in HS- they know nurse, doctor, physical therapist, dentist and depending on their family/their own needs, speech therapist or occupational therapist. But that leaves dozens of terrific careers which have some overlap with premed but typically more math (for the analytical professions), or more policy or management or CS depending. Who interprets clinical trials of new devices to figure out safe/not safe, or efficacious/not efficacious? Who crunches large global datasets to understand if early detection of stage 1 breast cancer means longevity- or just more surgeries/chemo?
So many interesting health care careers pursued by people who are not named “Doctor”!
So there have been different studies of this looking at different questions, so it is possible we are thinking of different studies. But here is the one I at least had in the back of my mind:
I don’t want to suggest interpreting all this is simple, but at least for me, part of what I found interesting is they separated out what they called “academic preparedness before college” and “college performance”. As they note at one point, there had been prior studies on academic preparedness factors (with some mixed results), and also on grades in what they call “gateway” courses (others might use the term “weeder”), and studies finding things like “gateway” courses were disproportionately discouraging URMs and women.
What this particular study tried to do is look more closely at the different course steps in the premed track, what they called “Milestones,” controlling for different factors like demographics, SES, intended major, HS GPA, SAT scores, and AP courses. Here is how they represented those Milestones:
OK, so they found pretty much all the general correlations you would expect with the different factors, but once you carefully controlled for other factors it got a lot more complicated.
And this is the complication I was alluding to earlier:
When examining the predictive validities of academic preparedness measured by variables prior to college (SAT and high school GPA) and college performance (course grades), an interesting pattern is observed. For predicting completion of the first semester of coursework in the absence of any college grades, higher academic preparedness was associated with a greater likelihood of completion. However, the predictive validities of such more distal, pre-college factors were overtaken by that of the more proximal college grades. The exception is whether students complete the first organic chemistry, for which academic preparedness rather than college grades was predictive. This may be due to the notoriously difficult organic chemistry being overwhelmingly identified as culprit in the leaky pipeline [3,11]. Students might be extra cautious in deciding whether they would be able to succeed in the course and resort to information about their academic effectiveness over a longer period of their lives from the past rather than grades from the recent one or two years to make the decision.
Again that’s pretty complicated and subject to possibly different interpretations, but the way I read it, measures of pre-college preparation did matter at the beginning of the track, and for the first semester of Orgo, but then became less relevant for other later courses.
So to me, this is why it might be really important to self-assess your relative preparedness for a quick start in college (and I guess the first semester of Orgo). The study uses HS GPA and SAT scores, which is understandable for a study like this, but I think on an individual level, we can probably do better than that with careful self-assessment.
And I absolutely agree this also happens, a lot. In fact I’ve mentioned my S24 is a possible premed at WashU, and among other things they encourage the kids to take a 1-credit pass/fail discussion class about different professional paths in the health industry. I think part of the not-so-subtle messaging is you do not all have to think of this as med school or bust! You may indeed carefully assess the pros and cons of the med school path and conclude it isn’t a good idea for you even if you could in fact do it.
So I do think kids should be very open to the idea they will opt out of premed voluntarily, not because they are forced out.
But I also think this study indicates that performance in gateway/weeder courses performs a role as well, and that academic preparedness particularly matters at the beginning (plus first semester Orgo).