Stanford vs. Duke vs. Harvard. vs Northwestern vs. Penn

[ezbreezy]

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@Dad2

It is well known by professional schools that a 3.6 GPA at Swarthmore is more like a 3.9 at Stanford or Harvard

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@Dad2

Swat is, actually, a tougher school than Stanford et al and deans of admission at med and other graduate schools do take that into account in looking at GPA’s.

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<p>That’s funny because according to the WSJ feeder school study (<a href=“http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf[/url]”>http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf&lt;/a&gt;), a higher percentage of Stanford (and Harvard) students get accepted into top tier professional (including medical) schools than Swarthmore students. I shudder to think how Swarthmore would fare in professional school placement if their GPAs weren’t taken into account and given a .3 point boost.</p>

<p>(Note that due to lack of available access to information, both Stanford law and business schools were excluded from the WSJ survey. Otherwise, the percentage of successful top professional school applicants for Stanford would’ve been even higher.)</p>

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@Dad2

Given that 25-30% of Stanford pre-meds aren’t accepted to medical school anywhere, it seems a bit haughty (and unfeeling to their pre-med classmates) for posters to be whaling on medical schools with reputations falling short of the top tier.

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<p>First of all, no one’s “whaling” on anything (except you). </p>

<p>Second, can you be more hypocritical? You’re the one who’s constantly lurking the Stanford forums just so you could whale on Stanford.</p>

<p>Last but not least, it must be convenient for you to throw around a lot of numbers without actually understanding their meaning or context so that you can spread your agenda. Here, let me do the analytical work for you (this is what I posted elsewhere):</p>

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@ezbreezy

There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for [Stanford’s med school admissions rate, assuming it is what has been stated] if you think about it and it is the following: the medical schools in the state of California in general (and in the University of California system in particular) are among the most competitive ones in the country with respect to admissions.</p>

<p>Many pre-meds at Stanford and its peers tend to apply to top 10 medical schools as reaches and top 20-30 medical schools as matches and the public medical schools in their home state as safeties. So for example, anecdotally, I know upperclasspersons at Stanford from Ohio who are applying to Ohio State as a fallback option or those from New York who are applying to one or more of the SUNY’s as fallback options and so on. The problem that a significant number of Stanford premeds (i.e. the California residents) face is that they need to treat UC affiliated medical schools as fallbacks. To many of them, the least acceptable medical school to which they will apply would be UC schools. From a ROI point of view, it makes a lot of sense. It may not be in their interest to go deeply into debt for an OOS state medical school or a much lower ranked or unranked medical school.

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