A family member recently graduated from an MD/PhD program. The medical school and MD/Phd program are in the top 20.
I could not find a listing of undergraduate schools represented for medical school only, but the undergraduate institutions are listed for the MD/PhD program.
While there are many highly prestigious colleges listed, there are also many well known “regular” schools as well as a few colleges that I have never heard of.
Stanford University Scbool of Medicine Class of 2021 - undergraduate institution of origin
Stanford — 30
Harvard — 14
MIT — 6
Yale — 4
Princeton — 4
UCLA — 4
UC San Diego — 3
WUSTL — 2
Amherst — 2
Dartmouth — 2
University of Chicago — 2
Georgetown
UC Berkeley
Carnegie Mellon
Oregon State
Wisconsin
Baylor
Middlebury
Carleton
Smith
Georgia Tech
Santa Clara
Boston University
US Naval Academy
William & Mary
Hamilton
Rice
BYU
University of Georgia
Johns Hopkins
Cal State–San Bernardino
Cornell
University of Illinois, Chicago
Cambridge University
University of North Carolina
Brown
Claremont McKenna
University of Colorado
Duke
Corrected numbers:
Total Number of MD Graduates (Class of 2022)129 Doctors of Medicine graduates were conferred degrees in 2022.
Undergraduate Schools — Frequency RankingBelow is the list of undergraduate institutions attended by the Class of 2022 MD graduates, sorted by frequency of occurrence:
| Undergraduate Institution | # of MD Graduates |
|---|---|
| Johns Hopkins University | 13 |
| Harvard University | 6 |
| Princeton University | 4 |
| University of California, Berkeley | 4 |
| Emory University | 4 |
| University of Florida | 3 |
| University of Pennsylvania | 3 |
| University of Maryland (College Park) | 2 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | 2 |
| Duke University | 2 |
| Northeastern University | 2 |
| University of Southern California (USC) | 2 |
| Stanford University | 2 |
| Brown University | 2 |
| University of California, Davis | 2 |
| College of William & Mary | 2 |
| All other undergraduate schools listed below | 1 each |
Institutions with a Single GraduateThe following schools each had one MD graduate in the Class of 2022:
If people are interested, there are a lot of fun visualizations here showing both where students from a certain college were going for med school, and where students at a certain med school came from in terms of colleges:
I don’t endorse all the reasoning in that piece, like I think they are sometimes confusing correlation and causation.
However, I do think they make an interesting observation about how a bunch of LACs seem to placing a lot of kids in med schools, including highly selective med schools, proportionate to their size. I actually think this is in some sense further confirmation of the idea undergrad attended is at most a tertiary factor. Like the list of LACs with relatively high placement percentages is again at least roughly correlated with things like the average test scores of matriculants at those LACs.
Still, I think it is worth noting that, say, forum favorite St Olaf has similar placement numbers to UVA, or Oberlin to UCLA, and so on. My point is definitely not that LACs are better, it is more that, say, chasing merit at such LACs is a viable alternative to even top flagship publics, if in fact that is the sort of overall college experience you would prefer.
from college transitions:
Our analysis begins with a look at the top feeders to medical schools across the United States. The data reveals a clear trend: prestigious universities dominate the list of institutions sending the highest percentage of their graduates to medical schools.
As shown in the visualization, Johns Hopkins University leads the pack, with an impressive 4% of their graduates going on to attend medical school. They are closely followed by Harvard (3.7%), Yale University (3.4%), and Rice University (3.1%). This data suggests that attending a highly selective undergraduate institution may provide a significant advantage in the medical school admissions process.
But these kids likely had that higher pre med intention from the get go. And these kids got into JHU, a feat in itself.
What would be interesting to me is if someone had TO vs test submitted data at the undergrad level, because for med school, law school and in most cases business school, one can’t escape the test.
It sounds like the author of the article needs understand the difference between cause and correlation. Note that in the earlier lists of what medical school admissions officers said where the most/more influential factors in admission, stat based criteria like GPA and MCAT scores were ranked towards the top of the list. Which types of colleges do you think would be most likely to have students with high stats?
Among highly selective colleges, I expect JHU would have an especially high portion interested in medical school due to relative strength/reputation of their medical program compared to other popular fields with students attending highly selective colleges (tech, finance, etc.). This also relates to why Stanford and MIT do not appear on the list in the quote. It’s not that medical schools prefer JHU grads to Stanford and MIT grads, or that Stanford/MIT grads have worse stats (aside from difference in grade inflation). It’s that Stanford/MIT grads are more likely to choose tech over medicine than the other listed colleges.
It does not exclude the possibility of preference for the listed colleges or students of the listed colleges having other indirect advantages (wealthier, better advising, more encouragement/support from students/mentors/family/…). However, the fact that a higher rate of students attend med school in isolation tells you almost nothing about whether med schools have an admission preference for (or against) students from that undergrad college.
IMO data like these are difficult to place in context. I’m not sure how much we can learn from the number of applicants coming from a given school. There is so much we don’t know that is really important to know…what proportion were accepted to med school, what proportion did an post-bacc or SMP, which schools require committee letters/weed out applicants, etc.
All I know from that data is that more than 50 students who attended each of those schools applied to at least one MD program. Obviously, the larger the undergrad population, the more likely that school is to fall on the list.
Note, and to keep on topic with the thread, I am not saying that t20 med schools don’t prefer applicants from prestigious undergrad schools.
I do not find this to be the case. I looked into those statistics for multiple schools of different selectivity and found that average schools sometimes have higher premed MS acceptance rates than elite schools!
At the end of the day- what’s the takeaway from all this conjecture?
Plan A- kid works very hard to cover off the premed coursework, do the volunteering/shadowing, etc. Demonstrates a commitment to marginalized populations or vulnerable people.
Plan B– the same, only this time at a “prestigious” undergrad.
These endless arguments on CC ignore reality, which is that med school adcom’s aren’t admitting colleges, they are admitting students.
How do these statistics actually help a kid make a rational decision? There will always be “I have to become a doctor” students who struggle with the required courses. Does it matter if they can’t get a committee letter because they’re GPA suggests that science is not their thing vs. attending a college with no gatekeeping where they discover that their GPA is too low after applying to 25 med schools and getting rejected? The outcome is the same. Time to pivot.
And there are MANY satisfying careers for people interested in health care that don’t require the MCAT or jumping through as many hoops. And no, not all of them are RN, NP, PA…. many, many roles which require different skillsets.
To me, there is at least one very obvious and very important question, which is whether it is worth a family paying a really uncomfortable amount (like lots of extra debt or similar) for a more prestigious college in the hope that will boost the kid’s odds of making it to a prestigious medical school, or perhaps medical school at all. To be clear, I feel like that is likely to be a pretty bad idea even if there was some moderate advantage. But to the extent we can also sort of verify what medical schools are saying about this (that it just isn’t a big factor), that could help some families potentially avoid making a costly mistake.
Way more controversially, I also do think it is possible that some kids who start off overwhelmed by the premed classes at their very selective college and feel forced out of that track might have done better at a college for which they were better prepared. And that it would not be a bad thing if that happened, meaning I don’t think it is impossible for some kids to catch up and become excellent doctors, even if they are starting off behind some others when they are entering college. That doesn’t mean I think every pre-mid kid has to choose a college for which they are massively overprepared either. I just think some honest self-assessment about where they stand as HS is ending and what first-year college environment might be challenging but not overwhelming for them is a good idea–and honestly, not just for premeds, but kids in general.
So personally, I am very comfortable recommending that possible pre-meds prioritize: (a) not paying more than comfortable, and as appropriate actually making a point of conserving family financial resources for possible medical school costs down the road; and (b) choosing a college which is appropriate for their personal level of preparation for college. And I am in fact comfortable with that advice in part because even knowing most of them will choose something different anyway, inside or indeed outside of the health professions, it is still good advice!
And to the extent looking at these issues a bit can help kids and parents feel free to make such choices, without fearing they are missing out on some big advantage, then that to me is a good thing.
Philosophically, I agree with you. The New York Times did a fantastic profile many years ago of Xavier University in Louisiana (I think I have the particulars correct) and how and why they were achieving outstanding success getting their kids into med school. Outstanding.
But I don’t think their example is particularly relevant for most people thinking about robbing the bank of mom and dad to pay for “expensive school with a skootch better statistics”. A university whose mission is first Gen, overwhelmingly Black, disadvantaged students really isn’t going to help a family decide between U Conn and JHU– both fine universities, both with strong track records getting kids into ANY post-grad program.
So I see the debate as a red herring in many instances– more distracting than helpful. The fact remains that a kid who is struggling in college needs to figure out how to right that ship- and quickly. There’s a lot of magical thinking that goes on in these situations- kid is struggling at U Penn but would be Phi Beta Kappa at Penn State. Hey mom and dad- Organic Chemistry is Organic Chemistry. Or kid doesn’t have the time management skills at Penn State to handle a tough academic load AND the kind of EC’s/volunteer work that’s needed for med school. Time management skills don’t blossom overnight once the kid is in med school- that doesn’t happen.
So practically speaking, these debates devolve and don’t really answer a useful question. Except parents should ask themselves “If we go into debt for JHU because they have better admissions results for med school than a less expensive U– and our kid does NOT become a physician, are we going to resent the kid for the rest of his/her life?”
That’s a useful question IMHO. And I see this phenomenon a lot. The kids feel like failures (but after three attempts, a post-bacc program, and a gazillion hours working at a homeless shelter, what more can you do?) and the parents feel tapped out and burnt out and resentful.
Who wins here?
And then someone breaks an arm, and notices on the diploma wall that their orthopedic surgeon graduated from some random bible college in Indiana, a med school that nobody has ever heard of, and is likely making close to 7 figures a year and the resentment begins all over again….
That is actually very interesting.
One daughter who was pre-vet years ago was deciding for undergraduate schools between McGill and UVM. UVM was closer to home and has a very good animal sciences program. McGill was further away, higher ranked, would have been less expensive for us, and also has a very good animal sciences program at their Macdonald Campus. She went with UVM. One thing that has occurred to me more recently: McGill is known for grade deflation and tough classes. Perhaps this would not have been a good thing.
I have long felt that attending a highly ranked school does not actually help any one particularly strong student get into medical school. Being in the top 1/3 of the class at UVM might be better than being in the bottom 1/2 or even the middle 1/2 at Harvard. However, it had not occurred to me that attending a prestigious school might actually hurt a student’s chances. It has occurred to me that sitting in the front row of a very tough premed class at Princeton or Harvard or MIT or Stanford surrounded by students who have never had a B in their life might not necessarily be the best way to pull off medical-school-worthy grades in the toughest classes.
Perhaps more importantly, being in the bottom 1/4 of the class at MIT or Harvard seems like a miserable way to spend four years. Someone has to be near the bottom of the class.
I think that my daughter made the right choice, or at least a very good choice, going to UVM. Some of her premed friends seem to have come to the same conclusion.
What is right for some other student might vary. However, paying an amount that the family finds uncomfortable to chase “prestige” seems more likely to come out badly than to come out well in the end.
I don’t think this is true.
The kid in my son’s MIT frat with the lowest GPA (they made fun of him, of course) was the first startup multi-millionaire in the cohort. Sold his company to one of the FAANG’s before he turned 29, had a pretty awesome time as an undergrad if the frat lore is anything close to reality. The stories of the “bottom of the barrel” group at Harvard includes some very famous comedians, writers, performers, entrepreneurs, corporate disrupters, educators, etc.
What is miserable to YOU (getting B’s and C’s in college) is actually fine for a lot of people in the real world. Not everything is a competition; not everyone is gunning for med school or Goldman Sachs.
So yes, someone is near and at the bottom of the class. And they aren’t worrying about protecting their GPA. They are taking interesting and challenging and life altering classes and they are prepared to spend their adulthood explaining “Yes, I got a C in Topology which at the time was considered one of the hardest math classes at the university. It didn’t come easily or naturally to me, but it was a fantastic intellectual challenge and I’m so glad I did it”.
There are a lot of employers who would rather hear that then interview yet another perfect candidate who is still grinding over the A- they got in a freshman literature class.
In the Harvard senior survey, the median GPA was 3.9/4.0, and bottom 1/4 of class started at 3.75/4.0. With the vast majority of students in these groups receiving A grades, I doubt that most feel “miserable” from an academic perspective. 3.75 to 3.9 type GPAs also are unlikely to end med school hopes, when combined with the high MCAT scores that are typical of Harvard premeds.
I attended Stanford. In my personal experience, the students who appeared least content were generally not the students I knew who had the lowest GPAs. Instead least content persons were more likely to be the type of kids who got stressed over receiving anything less than a A grade. Stanford had GCs come to our freshman dorm as a preventative measure after the first midterms because a good portion of students had this struggle. I knew one premed who went so far to repeat the few classes in which she got an A- to improve her grade because she thought anything less than a perfect 4.0+ would be a problem for medical school, and as such was extremely stressed if receiving an A- grade on an exam.
I’m not sure if attending UVM would reduce this type of stress. With far fewer portion high achieving students, UVM gives a far fewer portion of A grades. Only a small minority of students often get A’s, rather than vast majority like typical Harvard/Stanford classes.
I expect it depends on the individual student and related personality, rather than a general rule. Some students function best when they are among the highest achieving groups in the class/school/dorm. Some students are pushed to new heights when they are surrounded by high achieving peers and/or get bored if not offered sufficiently challenging/rigorous opportunities.
Yes. Exactly.
And this is the case for MD and DO students as well. But those grads are still “doctor”.
My opinion, with the new federally funded student loan changes, we will be seeing a lot more wealthy families represented in medical schools than those in lower SE classes. And I find this sad. But this will likely skew these so called statistics even more.
One does not need a prestigious college to get into a top medical school (or any medical school). And attending a top college does not guarantee acceptance.
I, too, am very sad about the changes to the student loan program. It favors wealthier students who can pay or who have parents who are able/willing to co-sign loans. It’s horrible.
Let’s go back and ask: do graduates of T20 med schools have a higher chance of getting a job? While it may be true that graduates of T20s are more likely to get teaching positions at T20 medical schools, it really doesn’t seem to be the case for most medical schools, and is definitely not the case for the positions that most MDs take, which is working as physicians at hospitals, clinics, private practices, etc.
If a person wants to be a doctor and work as a doctor in their specialty, practically any medical school is great for that, and any undergraduate at a respectable college is good for that.
Seriously, for a kid who “wants to be a doctor” any one of the 158 or so medical schools in the USA will be great, and for vast majority of these, the “prestige” of an applicant’s undergraduate degree isn’t important.