I only have one space left on my common app! Which undergrad would be the best for pre-med and give me the best shot at getting into a medical school? I'd like to keep costs ( and stress!) low. Parents make 200k in total per year so not getting any financial aid, but parents would still prefer not to break the bank before med school.
Cornell or Vanderbilt or Dartmouth or Georgetown?
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You can be successful as a premed at any of those schools. Cornell has a placement rate of about 67% as per their website and Dartmouth has a placement rate of around 85%. Dartmouth also doesn't screen people who apply to medical school. Not sure about Cornell. I don't really know that much about premed at Vamderbilt or Georgetown. In terms of how hard it is to get in to these schools, Dartmouth will be the hardest, Cornell and Vanderbilt will be slightly easier, and Georgetown will be the easiest (but still hard).
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Cornell is deflated to an extent, Dartmouth is inflated in its humanities and about average in the sciences. Not too familiar with grading at the other two.
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Not cornell! High stress/cost
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Depends to which college at Cornell you are applying...Cornell's overall admissions rate for 2015 was 14% . (Dartmouth's was 10.4 %.) However, the college of Arts & Sciences, Engineering, and Architecture all have admissions rates below 10%; the statutory colleges (ILR, Human Ecology, and Agriculture and Life Sciences), are higher, particularly if you are an in-state applicant.
Cornell does grade deflate, but everyone seems to know it. From my class alone, I knew of three, non-URM students, accepted to Harvard Medical School but N=3. Also, I had several friends skip taking Orgo at Cornell to take it over the summer at Harvard's extension school because they thought they could get better grades there. Again, n=my small group of neurotic premed friends.
To be fair, it's not any more expensive than the other three school's the OP is considering. That being said, if your goal is to achieve the highest overall cumulative and science GPA possible, Cornell may not be your best bet. Not only is there grade deflation, but there is stiff competition for grades from premeds AND prevet students who are all trying to get into the Cornell Veterinary School.
Best of luck.
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No, the A&S admit rate was 14.8% last year while overall combined was 15.1%, you can check it out yourself on their nifty web tool here.
Between Vandy and Dartmouth it's going to depend on what's strong about your app more than the couple percent difference in accept rates, with the former more heavily favoring high SAT/ACT scores.
Cornell is known for being rigorous/deflating for sciences, in contrast to Brown the great inflator. Dartmouth and Vandy aren't particularly famous one way or the other, but really there should be a clear preference for you between them unless you're totally indifferent to living in a city in the South vs very small town far in the North.
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Thank you for the correction on the A&S rate and the tool (that's great that it is so transparent)...although, and I could be incorrect, but I think that rate is the 'overall' rate and includes early decision. I assumed, perhaps erroneously, based on when the OP made this thread that there was no way he/she/they were applying ED. I believe the overall acceptance rate, without ED, for A&S is lower. I think they're accepting something like 30% of their class now ED to protect the yield.
Again, I could be wrong, but I have conducted interviews for A&S as an alumni so I am basing my assumptions on the information I was provided...
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Yep it's for overall stats. ED admit rate schoolwide is 28% and composes 22% of the class, which means for normal decision admit rate is almost exactly at 10%.
Pretty crazy when you think about it, their yield overall is ~50% despite filling more than 20% of the class with binding early decision. Wonder who tends to steal away their acceptees the most.
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And there we are.
As for your last statement... I think it's a couple of things.
1) It is just my personal opinion, but the student population, in all colleges at Cornell, has continued to skew wealthier and wealthier, over the past decade; I would argue that this has something to do both with changes in the administration (more conservative) and the economy. When I was a freshman there a decade ago, it was stilly pretty normal to meet students from lower income schools from urban and rural areas (i.e. upstate NY and NYC) especially in the statutory colleges. That has definitely changed. The university realized, like many other universities, that you could still fill the same disadvantaged/URM slots with better prepared (wealthier) students who you'd ultimately spend less money on in terms of needing to provide supplemental enrichment programming to ensure they performed well. I think this strategy ultimately means that Cornell is competing against more 'prestigious' schools for the same student population.
2) Despite everyone's perception that students are willing to take on tons of student debt, it has been my experience that more students from middle income families are making more prudent choices when it comes to where to attend college. Cornell used to be a mecca for some of the brightest students from NY state, but as the economy tanked, more students have decided to matriculate to cheaper in-state schools like SUNY Binghampton.
I have some other thoughts but I don't want to derail the thread any more than I already have...
OP best of luck with your decision. Most of the responses you got in this thread were pretty solid.
