Princeton vs Yale

Wildwood11
Thu, 01 Sep 2011 05:57:13 +0000

The tradeoff is that it is very difficult to get in, and admissions officers do not care at all from which undergraduate institution an applicant graduated- whether Princeton or William Paterson. They also don’t care if you majored in chemical engineering or sociology. What they do care about is that you graduated in the top 5-15% of your college class. GPA is virtually everything, conditional on your MCAT meeting the threshold.



I believe this is patently false. From everything I’ve read on these forums and the Studentdoctoer network, Med school admissions DO take into consideration undergraduate institution, not as a prestige factor, but as a “rigor” factor. I know some like to say that its done all by the numbers, but many others with experience say that simply is not the case. But to be sure, no med school is going to take a disproportionate number of students from any single undergraduate institution, so they will probably favor the higher gpa applicants from any given school, all else being equal (which it often times is not). But this would make no difference overall to the number of Princeton students being accepted, as they are competing against each other. The same is true of Yale or Springfield U students. Again, the average MCAT scores are very important here as a point of comparison for the rigor of institutions and the general quality of its applicants.