@emorynavy : Why are you saying all this stuff? Both can be great for a pre-health. Who cares which one gets a somewhat different level of students as based upon whatever? Okay, Vanderbilt has really high scoring and great students, maybe better than Emory, but I would send my child to UMD Emory, Tulane, Rochester, Berkeley. Duke, UCLA, Tufts, or WUSTL for pre-med if they wanted to major in a life science area before I would send them to Vanderbilt knowing what I know. This argument over prestige, rank, and which one has the “better” students is irrelevant if similar(or more than enough) resources are available at both, the academics, are good, and both would still have very competitive students. This is the case. And I know Emory doesn’t list UR as a peer mainly because there probably isn’t much overlap in applications, and because it is straight up more similar to the places it lists as peers in terms of how it functions/what research areas it is good in, etc. But we are talking pre-med undergrad. here. If schools have remotely similar competitiveness, then they have a shot at being comparable for pre-health. After that point, I go past “Do they consider each other peers?” and "what can a pre-med do at each and how is the coursework/'. Sometimes peer listings do not even account for relative caliber accurately as schools will list aspirational peer schools that they, other than undergraduate admissions share little similarities with in terms of overall caliber and impact.
I mean, UR is very similar to Emory in some ways (I don’t think it is as similar as WUSTL for something like pre-med, but that is mostly based on how the academics are designed and not on prestige). You basically are doing the same thing that folks like to do to Emory. The schools perform similarly to near and higher ranked schools, and then the near and higher ranked schools pretend they are so much better and take jabs at it even though the data and performance suggests that they are nearly identical caliber regardless of differences in incoming stats and things manufactured by their marketing and admissions departments. I wouldn’t do this to any school unless I thought it was dramatically different or doing something wrong. I know for a fact that UR has a very good track record with producing “prized” students and those who go on to enter their desired profession and whatnot.
Overlapping students consider these similar: https://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=Emory+University&with=University+of+Rochester
I don’t know what the sample size is (I suspect it isn’t as large as what Emory lists as its peers), but they are considered both worth going to by people who are cross-admitted. What you are doing to it is what others have unfairly done to Emory and it has worked, where Emory can’t really compete that well against those it lists as peers except maybe Dartmouth (which I do not think is listed as a peer tbh) because idiots act like you and jump to emotional and shallow conclusions about prestige, subtle differences in rank and student body quality versus actual quality and performance, etc. What goes around comes around. I personally recommend humility on this issue.