PRE-MED HANDBOOK

Where to Apply

"There are no bad US medical schools" is a statement often heard. The accrediting agency for medical schools (the Liaison Committee on Medical Education composed of representatives of both the AAMC and the AMA) ensures that every medical school adheres to high standards in order to remain accredited. Furthermore, the USMLE is given to all medical students and this has the effect of ensuring that all medical schools cover certain fundamentals well in their curriculum. There are, of course, strengths and weaknesses in individual medical schools and differences in the difficulty in obtaining admission to different schools.

For most medical schools, the chances for admission are determined in large part by the applicant’s state of legal residence. This is true of both private and public schools. In all cases, state supported public medical schools give preferential consideration to residents of their state. There is usually an upper limit imposed by legislation or administrative edict on the number of non-resident students accepted in a class in a state school. This is commonly ten percent, but in a few public schools no non-resident students are accepted. In many private medical schools, preferential consideration is given to residents of the state for at least a portion of the class. Emory accepts Georgia residents to fill half of its class and Wake Forest accepts half of its entering class from residents of North Carolina. Baylor gives preferential consideration to Texans and Miami (a private school) often enrolls about the same percentage of Florida residents as the University of Florida. Many other examples could be cited, but complete information is available in the latest MSAR (There is a table citing these figures in Chapter 4 plus a further breakdown with each school listing in Chapter 10).

A number of private medical schools recruit from the national pool of applicants. This includes many "prestige" schools such as Duke, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Vanderbilt, Washington University (St. Louis), and Yale. As might be expected, the credentials of students accepted at these prestige schools are outstanding. All things considered, the chances for acceptance are lower for a typical applicant at a school that recruits primarily from the national pool than at a medical school which gives preferential consideration to students from its home state. This certainly does not mean that all the best students go to the prestige schools. Many facts determine where a student will matriculate, particularly cost, and the qualifications of many students in public medical schools will be higher than in some private schools.

When deciding where to apply, the latest edition of MSAR should be carefully studied, especially the section on selection factors and the breakdown on state of legal residence of the latest class. If you meet their requirements and appear to have a reasonable chance of acceptance, you should then further investigate the school by reading the latest catalog or bulletin, which is available via the Internet. An application to an out-of-state medical school should be made if you have a particular interest in some program at the school or some personal or professional preference for the school or the region of the country. The reason that a student applies to a school will be of more than passing interest to the admissions committee. If it appears to be a "shotgun" application, made only in a desperate effort to be admitted anywhere with little knowledge of or interest in the specific school, the chances for a favorable decision are poor. If you fail to apply to those schools at which you will receive preferential consideration, you are being naive and perhaps foolhardy, no matter how strong your academic record or how much you have dreamed of graduating from some particular prestigious school. Competition is at an all-time high and in the top-rated medical schools, high grades and MCAT scores alone are not sufficient to obtain an interview. They are looking for the student who shows evidence of unusual promise as a physician. Unless you have excelled academically and personally, it will be very difficult to be admitted. Occasionally a student is admitted to an out-of-state school after being rejected by his/her home state schools, but this is rather rare for residents of South Carolina.

State supported medical schools usually admit a few non-residents, but these will typically be people who have some strong ties to the state and/or the school. The credentials of non-residents are usually above the average for the class. A typical state supported medical school may invite non-resident applicants for an interview only if they have a cumulative GPA of 3.6 or more and scores of 10 or more on all areas of the MCAT. A new trend that appears to be gaining in popularity for public schools is to require that non-residents apply through the Early Decision Program. If accepted, these applicants must matriculate. Such a policy ensures that the only non-residents who apply have the medical school as their first choice.

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