What is the medical school acceptance rate for students from University of Texas at Arlington?

[Azulana]

Hello, y'all. I am a Public Health major in my freshman year in UTA. I have been trying to find some statistic information about Texas medical schools accepting UTA pre- med students and for some weird reason I am not able to find the info online. Has anybody have any info about this and is there anyone who graduated as a pre-med student from UTA and found success by getting into med-school in Texas or anywhere else? Please let me know.

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[KnightDoc]

Medical Statistics

Right. OP is looking for stats strictly related to his UG! And the answer is, while AAMC certainly has this information, they don't publish it by UG.

Unfortunately, the only place OP will be able to get this information is directly from his premed advising office. Some schools are very transparent and publish this information for all to see. Others only make it available to students and alums using their services. And still others claim to not have it at all, even though they almost certainly do, but just don't want to share it.

Schools gather the information either by surveying students using their services OR by obtaining it directly from AAMC from students who indicated they were willing to share. So, it's an incomplete data set, but it's pretty robust, especially at schools that require sharing information as a precondition to using advising services or getting a committee letter.

 

[KnightDoc]

Undergraduate Institutions Applicant Statistics

Texas is starting to do this for its system, but Arlington is not yet on their list.

What is the value of this, though, if it only includes TMDSAS matriculants? Or, do Baylor's and UT's numbers include AMCAS schools, and are they really that bad?

 

[chilly_md]

It means there were accepted students at all those schools and the rate is not drastically different from each other.

Most students attending school there would like to stay in Texas and AMCAS schools also know this. So that’s what’s important to residents there.

 

[KnightDoc]

Because Texas requires at least 90% of matriculants are residents, historically they matriculate 92%-93%. Baylor and UT's are state subsidized and require 85% state resident matriculants. The OP goes to UT/Arlington and would likely be going thru TMDSAS. Therefore it would be a reasonable model judge probabilities.

In that case, I guess the next question would be why the very best schools in TX have matriculation rates that are right around the national average, while top schools in the rest of the country far exceed those rates? Can it be that TX schools don't massage their numbers while everyone else does? Or do the top TX UGs really perform that much worse than their counterparts in the rest of the country (in the link, I am referring specifically to UT-Austin and Baylor)?

 

[chilly_md]

In that case, I guess the next question would be why the very best schools in TX have matriculation rates that are right around the national average, while top schools in the rest of the country far exceed those rates? Can it be that TX schools don't massage their numbers while everyone else does? Or do the top TX UGs really perform that much worse than their counterparts in the rest of the country (in the link, I am referring specifically to UT-Austin and Baylor)?

I believe they are massaged as top public schools in other states don’t have high acceptance rates either. We cannot see the process but Yale has posted some stats for their premeds:

https://cdn.ocs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/77/2021/03/2020-EXTENDED-STATISTICS_YALE-COLLEGE-MEDICAL-SCHOOL-APPLICANTS.pdf

37 people applying from their graduating class is tiny. Their MCAT average was 518 and funny enough the average for the few who were rejected is actually the same as the average of older alumni who got in. I suppose those are the students who fell through the cracks, aimed too high, bad essays etc.

While it could be due to the amount of opportunities applicants have at a top school, I believe it is the committee letter. While searching for schools with that process, Oregon State popped up:

Why choose OSU's pre-med program? | College of Science | Oregon State University

They don’t have a grid/dataset but claim the acceptance rate is 60-70%. Don’t mean to bag on them but that’s definitely not because of them preparing students better than hundreds of other colleges.

 

[KnightDoc]

I believe they are massaged as top public schools in other states don’t have high acceptance rates either. We cannot see the process but Yale has posted some stats for their premeds:

https://cdn.ocs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/77/2021/03/2020-EXTENDED-STATISTICS_YALE-COLLEGE-MEDICAL-SCHOOL-APPLICANTS.pdf

37 people applying from their graduating class is tiny. Their MCAT average was 518 and funny enough the average for the few who were rejected is actually the same as the average of older alumni who got in. I suppose those are the students who fell through the cracks, aimed too high, bad essays etc.

While it could be due to the amount of opportunities applicants have at a top school, I believe it is the committee letter. While searching for schools with that process, Oregon State popped up:

Why choose OSU's pre-med program? | College of Science | Oregon State University

They don’t have a grid/dataset but claim the acceptance rate is 60-70%. Don’t mean to bag on them but that’s definitely not because of them preparing students better than hundreds of other colleges.

I'm not so sure the 37 is as tiny as it first appears. Those are people applying straight through with no gap years, and they are around 25% of all applicants after backing out BS/MD candidates.

Assuming Yale has decent premed advising (why wouldn't it?) why wouldn't Yale premeds follow the national trend and take at least one gap year? I think 37 out of 181 Yale applicants applying with no gap years is right where it would be expected to be. It's worth keeping in mind that Yale's entering class typically has around 1600 students. 181 applicants, including 25 reapplicants, represents a pretty healthy fraction of that class, considering all the opportunities Yale grads have.

With respect to the MCAT number you are talking about, it is 513, not 518, and, again, it is not surprising, at least to me, that Yale applicants with at least one gap year and a 513 would be successful while applicants coming right out of UG with that score would not be. I don't think they necessarily fell through the cracks, or anything, other than not taking the advice to wait at least a year with a barely above the mean MCAT. They must have figured that the rules don't apply to them because they go to Yale, and they learned the hard way that wasn't the case, and were successful on reapplication.

I agree that the numbers are massaged everywhere, due to gatekeeping such as committee letters. That still doesn't explain such a divergence, from >80% to <40%. If nothing else, it suggests that top public schools just don't attract above average students, since they have large classes, lots of applicants, and seem to consistently perform right around the national average, while that just does not seem to be the case at top private schools. I totally agree with you about OSU. My bet would be that they not only massage, but also include DO and Caribbean in their numbers. Lots of schools do.

 

[chilly_md]

I'm not so sure the 37 is as tiny as it first appears. Those are people applying straight through with no gap years, and they are around 25% of all applicants after backing out BS/MD candidates.

Assuming Yale has decent premed advising (why wouldn't it?) why wouldn't Yale premeds follow the national trend and take at least one gap year? I think 37 out of 181 Yale applicants applying with no gap years is right where it would be expected to be. It's worth keeping in mind that Yale's entering class typically has around 1600 students. 181 applicants, including 25 reapplicants, represents a pretty healthy fraction of that class, considering all the opportunities Yale grads have.

With respect to the MCAT number you are talking about, it is 513, not 518, and, again, it is not surprising, at least to me, that Yale applicants with at least one gap year and a 513 would be successful while applicants coming right out of UG with that score would not be. I don't think they necessarily fell through the cracks, or anything, other than not taking the advice to wait at least a year with a barely above the mean MCAT. They must have figured that the rules don't apply to them because they go to Yale, and they learned the hard way that wasn't the case, and were successful on reapplication.

I agree that the numbers are massaged everywhere, due to gatekeeping such as committee letters. That still doesn't explain such a divergence, from >80% to <40%. If nothing else, it suggests that top public schools just don't attract above average students, since they have large classes, lots of applicants, and seem to consistently perform right around the national average, while that just does not seem to be the case at top private schools. I totally agree with you about OSU. My bet would be that they not only massage, but also include DO and Caribbean in their numbers. Lots of schools do.

You are confusing Baylor for the rest being below 40. Their undergrad has nothing to do with the med school, it is private and isn’t a traditional top undergrad. UT Austin has around 45%, Michigan in the 50s if you don’t look at their honors college specifically:

Honors Pre-Med | U-M LSA Honors Program

lsa.umich.edu

The top public schools attract a lot of high performers. You just don’t see that since these schools have nearly 1000 people applying to medical school.

The MCAT is surprising because the average of students applying from most schools is usually never around the 90th percentile. The point is look at the top performers from larger schools and then compare to make it apples to apples. Michigan further breaks down numbers for their school as a whole:

UM graduates’ medical school application statistics | University Career Center

The data below applies to individuals whose primary undergraduate degree came from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. It only includes seniors and alumni/ae applying to allopathic and/or osteopathic medical school who released their information to their pre-medical advisor/counselor via the...

careercenter.umich.edu

DO acceptance rates aren’t higher since we can see those accepted there have lower stats. Michigan has a considerable amount of students (in part because they are a large public school) who probably are advised to apply to both based on their numbers. Yale is essentially the top quartile or whatever of that and probably rarely has students below the aforementioned 513 or 518 (I did not equate these two, I talked about each of them individually in the prior post). 37 is tiny because Yale is a small school compared to schools pumping out 500-1000 applicants each year.

 

[KnightDoc]

You are confusing Baylor for the rest being below 40. Their undergrad has nothing to do with the med school, it is private and isn’t a traditional top undergrad. UT Austin has around 45%, Michigan in the 50s if you don’t look at their honors college specifically:

The top public schools attract a lot of high performers. You just don’t see that since these schools have nearly 1000 people applying to medical school.

The MCAT is surprising because the average of students applying from most schools is usually never around the 90th percentile. The point is look at the top performers from larger schools and then compare to make it apples to apples.

Well, yeah, I think we're kind of saying the same thing. The top performers at all schools, public or private, T10 or T500, are apples to apples.

What makes the true top schools special is that a decent portion of all of their applicants are top performers. That's how, with a little massaging, they get to 80%+ acceptance rates. Top public schools don't get close, because they are so large, and because their applicant pools mirror the country at large, with a few top performers, a lot of average perfomers, and plenty of poor performers. This is why their numbers, even with massaging, aren't that much above the national averages.

What schools have nearly 1,000 people applying? I count 3 in the entire country at 1,000+, and only another 2 are above 800! That's 5 schools out of how many thousand?

Hopkins had 568 applicants last year. No public school in the country, including UT-Austin, UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, etc., comes close to its acceptance rate, grade deflation and all.

 

[chilly_md]

Well, yeah, I think we're kind of saying the same thing. The top performers at all schools, public or private, T10 or T500, are apples to apples.

What makes the true top schools special is that a decent portion of all of their applicants are top performers. That's how, with a little massaging, they get to 80%+ acceptance rates. Top public schools don't get close, because they are so large, and because their applicant pools mirror the country at large, with a few top performers, a lot of average perfomers, and plenty of poor performers. This is why their numbers, even with massaging, aren't that much above the national averages.

What schools have nearly 1,000 people applying? I count 3 in the entire country at 1,000+, and only another 2 are above 800! That's 5 schools out of how many thousand?

Hopkins had 568 applicants last year. No public school in the country, including UT-Austin, UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, etc., comes close to its acceptance rate, grade deflation and all.

Michigan, UT Austin, Berkeley and UCLA are usually schools that Ivy League hopefuls also consider. They do not typically massage numbers at all since they don’t do committee letters and they are the ones who have 800+. The rest of the hundreds of schools are not typically considered peers of top schools. I did want to point out that Honors students at Michigan (who probably would be the ones to most likely end up at an Ivy) have the 80% acceptance.

Now, it is from 2010, but MIT had an announcement that differentiated acceptances between students who had used pre-professional advising (pg 2):

http://web.mit.edu/annualreports/pres10/2010.01.02.pdf

It is not the cleanest approximation for the difference between committee letter and not, but the acceptance rates are about 87 vs 56%, respectively.

 

[voxveritatisetlucis]

I feel like if you’re talking about Texas undergrad schools, none really stand out enough (except maybe Rice?) to give a material advantage. Therefore, I doubt that UT Austin grads have an advantage over applicants from satellite campuses and or other schools in the state. Also I feel like state medical schools value residency far more than prestige.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

It is a tricky question. the application services also don't make it that easy to calculate if you are on the admissions side trying to identify your feeder schools. You can do some sorting based on the "primary college" designation, but there are limits in the analysis. It is tough to sort out applicants with gap years since you don't have a nice query that indicates someone takes a gap.

But that said, admissions and prehealth advisors can find out some limited information about students from their programs with or without committee letters. Can numbers be a little massaged? Sure. But the overall rate isn't so important since not all applicants are identical. The nuances with holistic review and program fit will still matter.

It's not impossible to figure out but it may take a year or more delay to figure this out (after a year of matriculation to count for retention, which is just as important).