<p>No. But, for those (and there are many) who failed to make a cut at a med school, they probably made a mistake in choosing a rigorous/tough undergrad. For those who still excel (just like Norcalguy) at Ivies and make it to a med school anyway, that’s great.</p>
<p>For prelaw - again, it doesn’t matter one bit where you go undergrad. If someone comes to an ivy with the falsified notion that the prestigious UG would give him an edge at a top law school, I feel sorry for him. Top law schools don’t care. And, legal employers don’t care very much, either. However, going to a top UG helps you land that first job fresh out of college.</p>
<p>I see, then everything else being the same, if a kid wants to go premed, he has the best chance you say if he simply goes to a state u or a school with easy grading??
if a kid is a top student in H.S. and wants to get into the best medial school or law school possible, you say go where you can get the highest gpa - is that what you are saying??</p>
<p>Yes. For premed, going to an Ivy is a risky decision - you never know if you will be able excel enough there to get into a med school. If you are a top student from hs, you would be a top student at an easy state school, more times than not compared to, at Ivies or MIT.</p>
<p>ok, I see your opinion
all those premeds at princeton or yale or cornell would have had a much better chance to get into med school according to you if they went a state u. maybe you are right, it just seems that it is hard to believe that so many kids would be misguided
I see your point, but it is difficult to reconcile with a statistic such as Yale which has over 95% admission to med school and say SUNY Albany which is an easy school with only about 50%. I know the applicant pool is different from each school
as for law school, I see your point, but at least in the top NYC firms, I don’t think you will find many graduates who did not go to an ivy or other top school for undergrad…
where are you looking at for college</p>
<p>lol. I am a senior at Cornell, graduating in May. I will be attending a top 6 law school this fall. (I might take a gap year and work for a year or two)</p>
<p>To be brutally honest, going to a top UG wasn’t worth it for me. I knew since I was in elementary school that I wanted to become a lawyer. Thus, I would have gotten the same result regardless of where I went for college. If I had to do it over again, I would have picked decent flagship State U’s that would offer me a full ride. If you are set on law school or Med school, you will realize the value of saving up the money. But, if you get a serious financial aid at an Ivy, that totally changes the equation.</p>
<p>Besides, I am not a big fan of Ithaca or Cornell. I wish I went somewhere more urban, warmer, easier, and party more and have fun with hot girls. Then, bust my butt when I am at law school.</p>
<p>Edit: Going to a top UG is totally worth it if you want to do consulting or finance after college. (not pre-law or pre-med track) Depends on who you are and what you want out of college experience.</p>
<p>Check out websites for V10-V20 firms (I have) - Davis Polk, Weil, Latham, Paul Weiss, etc.
You will see many associates who hail from ‘low’ ranked colleges. There are quite a few associates at these ultra prestigious firms who hail from ‘lower’ ranked law schools, as well, although that is not as usual.</p>
<p>I have talked to lots of lawyers and law students over the past year. Suppose there is 1)Yale grad –> Columbia Law –> top 40% class rank at Columbia. 2) Ohio State grad –> Columbia Law –> top 25% class rank at Columbia. Most firms would give the nod to #2. Undergrad prestige matters very little in law firm recruiting. It is just that people from top UGs are smarter and harder working on average, who go on to top law schools and get good grades at top law school in greater number. Be cautious of confusing correlation with causation.</p>
<p>I think the main point is that we hear about how Harvard or Yale is grade-inflated but we rarely hear about how Cornell is grade inflated. Well, Cornell is. Period.</p>
<p>Before you start throwing out stats like “Cornell gives out 30% A’s. Yale gives out 70% A’s.” you need to have sources. Clearly, we know this is not true or else the discrepancy in average GPA’s would be a lot greater. More likely, both Cornell and Yale gives out 40-50% A’s as this is the norm among top colleges. This is even true for MIT, another supposedly grade-deflated school. Brown seems to be the outlier as its grade inflation has gone rampant.</p>
<p>What’s interesting is that certain schools have reputations for grade-deflation (Cornell, WashU, UChicago, Swarthmore, MIT, JHU) while certain schools have reputations for grade-inflation (Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, etc.) when in reality the grading is actually very similar across all schools. The difference is that some schools have whinier students bent on perpetuating the myth in order to make their own grades seem more impressive than they really are.</p>
<p>ugh, this thread is just confusing me more and more. I want to be pre med and I also like Cornell. I would probably only go there though if I can be relatively sure that I will be able to do well enough to get into a med school because if I did a bio major and didn’t get into med school I would basically be F’d for life.</p>
<p>Can anyone actually give me as straight forward answer of about how many kids get A’s at Cornell or what that average gpa for a graduating bio major is? Can someone who goes there just tell me around what it would be because I am tired of all these people who don’t even go there trying to say what it is without even having a source.</p>
<p>Sorry, I made a logical fallacy in an earlier post. The average CUMULATIVE GPA of graduating seniors at Cornell is 3.4, not 3.7. The cumulative GPA of any single graduating senior is the average of his freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years which would be 3.4. The average senior year GPA (which is not the same as the average cumulative GPA of a graduating senior) is likely to be 3.7 while the average freshman year GPA is 3.1. This averages out to around 3.4. So, people are graduating Cornell with 3.4, not 3.7 GPA’s.</p>
<p>As for the average GPA of a bio major, there are a few bio courses curved to a B (3.0) while the majority is curved to a B+ (3.3) or A- (3.7). I would guess the average bio major graduates with a 3.3.</p>
<p>This is all bullcrap. There have been plenty of studies and articles that have shown that highly motivated will do well at any school and will end up with a good life. Obviously the name of your undergraduate institution will impress admissions committees. If you go onto the Cornell HCEC website, you can view a table of med school acceptance rates based on GPA and MCAT scores. It shows that 67% of applicants from Cornell were accepted to at least one medical school during the 2010 application cycle. This is significantly better than the national average of 44%. </p>
<p>I would say that this reflects the quality of applicants from Cornell. I think that more highly motivated and hard-working students choose to go to Cornell rather than their state-school because of the prestige, history, and networking opportunities. I think that was my main reason of choosing Cornell over a full-ride from my state-school. </p>
<p>@Premed4: I don’t think you would be in horrible shape if you went to Cornell and got a mediocre GPA. There is always the option of going to a D.O program or studying in the Caribbean. As long as you’re hard-working and successful, you’ll end up as a doctor either way. And for most patients who are in the ER, as long as you’re a doctor, it doesn’t matter where you got the degree from. Of course, if you want to be a hotshot plastic surgeon, then going to Yale would do better for your long term prospects. But as an exception, I know of one famous celebrity plastic surgeon who went to Michigan State for medical school and makes a ton of money. </p>
<p>And to continue on this topic addressing concerns of premeds, there is no golden GPA or MCAT that will guarantee your acceptance into any medical school (unlike law school it seems?). One of my classmates in my MD/PhD program had a 3.8 from a state-school in California and a 39 on his MCAT and is at the same school with me. I definitely have much lower stats than that. Your MCAT/GPA will get you interviews, but your interviews and recommendation letters will be the factors that push you into the door of any specific medical school (take this with a grain of salt please). I’m just trying to say that there is no tried and true way of getting into a prestigious medical school. You have to work hard, impress the right people, and hope the cards fall correctly. You can accomplish this at a state-school, or at a prestigious ivy league school, there are many examples of both. I will just say that going to Cornell helped me to get into multiple MD/PhD programs and that may have not been the case if I had gone to my state school.</p>
<p>As for GPAs, remember Cornell is 20% engineering majors, a field in which grading is somewhat more stringent at most places including Cornell, and probably has proportionately more science majors than many schools as well.</p>
<p>D2 thinks grading is a little tougher than at Columbia, but her sample of courses is statistically insignificant.</p>
<p>Again, I disagree with LazyKid, it matters where you went to UG if you want to go to toppy top law school. His opinion is based on very few data points. One needs to look at HYS admission data to get a full picture.</p>
<p>Many people believe that fewer kids will choose to be premed, due to the new health care legislation that passed last year. Therefore, it would make sense that fewer kids would apply, making chances of admission a little easier. There will definitely be a “doctor shortage”, especially in the family practice field. Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants will fill some of the gaps, but, overall, admission to medical school will be easier than it has been historically. Not easy, just easier.</p>
<p>Also, the so-called “Golden Age of medicine” is over. Unless someone wants to work hard in college, get admitted to medical school, spend 4 years there, spend 4 to 5 years in a residency, have debt up to his eyeballs, and then make a mediocre salary once health care legislation is enacted - it’s just not worth it. However, if that’s the contribution one wants to make, then it’s all worth it. Hopefully, a lot of people will it is…</p>
<p>True, but the general consensus is that the quality of applicants will drop overall, in terms of test scores and grades. Some say that many of the best and the brightest will choose other fields, as they will not want to work for the government. This isn’t me - but the general medical community. If we had come up with a better solution to the woes of our current health insurance system, none of this would have happened. Too bad if you get sick or old! I think it will be easier in the future (generally) to get an admission to medical school. You may not like the field you end up in, but it will be easier overall to be an M.D.</p>
<p>Harvard undergrads are more likely to apply to HLS and enroll at HLS than others from different undergrad. From the Harvard Law enrollment chart that you uploaded, there are over 200 H undergrads at H law, 100~ Yale undergrads, and 50~ Princeton undergrads. A person who is knowledgeable about Law School admissions wouldn’t believe it to be the case that Harvard Law ‘hugely’ favors its undergrads, to the point that it admits its undergrads at 4 times of a higher rate than a kid from Princeton or Stanford. Because, even a State U grad with high numbers can get into H law most of the times, given the predictable nature of top law school admissions. You look at the raw data, yet need to distinguish between ‘correlation’ and ‘causation’ with caution. You really believe that HLS admissions folks are this irrational? Get real.</p>