gonnif and Spector1 hit this on the head. On a similar note: I attended college in the South. There is a huge disparity in admittance difficulty between many southern state's MD schools (e.g., Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas) compared to many MD state schools in the north (e.g., Massachusetts, Pennsylvania) (can't even discuss up California). It's misleading for my southern college to say, as Spector1 says, "90% of their pre-med applicants are accepted into med school first try," mainly because they will literally not let them apply to medical school! "Oh, you have a 3.3 and a 26 MCAT. Well, how about you think about PA school, because not only will I not give you a committee letter for MD, but you are not allowed to even get LORs from professors without our committee's approval. Darnit!" So when you combine the fact that many of the kids from my college ended up going to southern state MD medical schools (still difficult, don't get me wrong) with the refusal of a committee to back many students, you really have to laugh at any of the statistics they provide. And as gonnif says, defining a pre-med itself is impossible! Incredibly, when parents get tours of the schools, they ogle when they hear numbers like "90% of our pre-med..." Just as MD admissions is a complicated game, so is undergraduate admissions.
