Criteria/definition as top/2nd/3rd tier MD school?

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MedOldAge

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I have seen endless threads on discussion of GPA/MCAT scores with respect to school application options, possibility and strategy. In those threads, one of the center pieces discussion quite often was on broad application of "various level of tier schools namely top, 2nd, and/or 3rd" based on one's profile or score standing.

OK.....point well taken. However, when it comes down to execute the strategy, I seem to be having difficulties to specifically "locate" the so call 2nd or 3rd tier schools. I assume top tier probably meant top 25 or 30 schools on whatever the list one can search on the net.

So, what am I looking for if I wish to implement this "applied broadly" strategy to assemble a list of 2nd/3rd tier schools?

Very appreciate any comments 🙂
 
kyamh said:
You are looking for schools where the average matriculant GPA and MCAT are lower than yours.
Click to expand...

Hmm....I am not sure that is what I was asking for. May be the following examples can clear up some.

Ex 1#
GPA 3.4 MCAT 30
So I wish to apply broadly, what kind of 2nd and/or 3rd tier list I will end up with?

Ex 2#
GPA 3.7 MCAT 34
What kind of top/2nd/3rd tier list I will end up with?

I guess I just like to get a broad sense of an approximate list of so call 2nd and 3rd tier schools I can wrap my arms to as reference.

Well, am I leading everybody in a confused circle? 🙁
 
MedOldAge said:
Hmm....I am not sure that is what I was asking for. May be the following examples can clear up some.

Ex 1#
GPA 3.4 MCAT 30
So I wish to apply broadly, what kind of 2nd and/or 3rd tier list I will end up with?

Ex 2#
GPA 3.7 MCAT 34
What kind of top/2nd/3rd tier list I will end up with?

I guess I just like to get a broad sense of an approximate list of so call 2nd and 3rd tier schools I can wrap my arms to as reference.

Well, am I leading everybody in a confused circle? 🙁
Click to expand...

When people say apply broadly they just mean your list should include schools where you are an above-average applicant, schools where you are an average applicant, and schools where you are a below average applicant (your 'reach' schools). That's all. Look to the MSAR or US News for the data on accepted students to get an idea where you stand in terms of GPA/MCAT, and you can browse mdapps to get an idea of the ECs of people accepted at various places.

You also should factor in geography and your own specific interests to determine which schools are a good fit. For example, some schools have very strong public interest missions and substantial volunteering is essentially a requirement. Others don't have that. State schools will favor their own state to varying degrees. Etc.
 
MedOldAge said:
Hmm....I am not sure that is what I was asking for. May be the following examples can clear up some.

Ex 1#
GPA 3.4 MCAT 30
So I wish to apply broadly, what kind of 2nd and/or 3rd tier list I will end up with?

Ex 2#
GPA 3.7 MCAT 34
What kind of top/2nd/3rd tier list I will end up with?

I guess I just like to get a broad sense of an approximate list of so call 2nd and 3rd tier schools I can wrap my arms to as reference.

Well, am I leading everybody in a confused circle? 🙁
Click to expand...
There are multiple uses of the terms. When looking at your particular application, the tiers are applied as mentioned already, "reach" vs "average" vs "safety" schools for your particular stats. More broadly, the terms refer to national rankings. There is no hard-and-fast cutoff for these distinctions. Some people might call top 10 the top tier, the next 40 or so schools second, and the rest third tier, where others would call the top 20 or so top tier, the rest of the ranked schools second tier, and the unranked schools third.

In reality, there is not much difference between schools as far as how they compare to one another in quality after you get out of the top 20 or so, other than a few outliers, when you are talking about US MD schools. It comes down to what you want and what your goals are.
 
The way I made a 2nd/3rd tier list was writing down every school past the top 20 on an index card and throwing them all on the ground, like so:

tumblr_m4nu5nzapv1qd42lq.gif


After this, I took a laser pointer and had my cat chase the laser over the pile of index cards like so:

funny-gifs-crazy-crab-cat-chasing-laser-pointer.gif


It was very amusing. The first half of cards she went over were second tier, and the second half was 3rd tier. Any other system people tell you will likely be just as arbitrary as mine, so why not at least make it fun to come up with?

If you are looking to apply broadly, find schools in desirable geographic areas where statwise you fall into the top half and bottom half of their 10th to 90th percentile GPA/MCAT. Make sure they take a decent amount of OOS if you are OOS. They might have varying mission focuses for you as well. Don't rely on prestige tiers for anything other than selecting a few reach schools from top tier.
 
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Just apply to schools you would attend if you got in, then go from there. Who cares about tiers. Many prospective students who haven't applied yet get caught the rankings of schools and fail to get into any schools.
 
This isn't law school it doesn't matter, there's basically these tiers:
1) US LCME Medical schools
2) caribbean tier
 
"I seem to be having difficulties to specifically "locate" the so call 2nd or 3rd tier schools."

yeah there's a reason for that. There are schools with better reputations than others but this whole obsession with tiering is a premed issue.
 
There are multiple reasons people use the term "tiers" and the way I use it to advise people isn't the definition based off of prestige or what school is "better" than another. More so, I see it as a use to define school's average acceptance stats, and how an applicant should aim for ones around their range. If someone is a 3.8/38/great EC's, I would say it is fair to shoot primarily for top/upper tier schools (ones with high gpa and high mcat averages). If someone has a 3.4/30 they should probably be shooting more for the "lower" tiers, or schools with acceptance stats that are closer to the applicant's and lower on average than many of the other schools.

I think this causes confusion in the fact that people like to attribute higher entry stats to a better/more prestigious school, and in some regards that might be true, great! Who cares? There is so much more that goes into deciding what is the best school for an individual, their situation, and their goals that make certain schools better to them than others and that is why the use of tiers to define prestige is flawed and immature imo.

Now do I think it would probably be better/more clear if we had better terms to define what types of schools people should apply to with their particular stats? Sure. But unfortunately I haven't seen any great examples, and nobody really wants to just hear "apply to ones close to your stats" alone as advice on where they should start looking.
 
MedOldAge said:
I have seen endless threads on discussion of GPA/MCAT scores with respect to school application options, possibility and strategy. In those threads, one of the center pieces discussion quite often was on broad application of "various level of tier schools namely top, 2nd, and/or 3rd" based on one's profile or score standing.

OK.....point well taken. However, when it comes down to execute the strategy, I seem to be having difficulties to specifically "locate" the so call 2nd or 3rd tier schools. I assume top tier probably meant top 25 or 30 schools on whatever the list one can search on the net.

So, what am I looking for if I wish to implement this "applied broadly" strategy to assemble a list of 2nd/3rd tier schools?

Very appreciate any comments 🙂
Click to expand...

I would strongly suggest that you either ask your pre-health adviser about the MSAR or purchase the online version for $15. It will give you a list of the GPA averages and MCAT averages for every school along with % of out of state and international applicants accepted. These numbers even more valuable for your purposes than the opinions of those on SDN. Apply to a majority of schools where your GPA/MCAT combination is above the mean for accepted students.
 
I look tiers as a subjective topic. For example, here are my tiers:
Tier 1
California
Tier 1a
Texas
But I'd be thrilled with almost anything else.
 
There is a continuum of medical schools. There will be academic, clinical, and research opportunities more readily available to you at some schools than others. That's a fact of life. I emphasized readily available to make a very important point. You can go to any medical school and end up where ever you want to be. There are are certain schools that will make that road easier. No school makes it impossible.
 
For your purposes:
look up the school's average (mean or median) GPA and MCAT.
if as school's average GPA(10)+average MCAT >74: Top tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT 67-73: 2nd tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT 60-66: 3rd tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT <60: habla español?

Some people might have differences of opinion about where to make the cuts but this is the way I'd break it down. USNews uses grant funding to a large extent to classify schools and grant funding isn't very relevant to the kind of education one gets as a med student.
 
LizzyM said:
For your purposes:
look up the school's average (mean or median) GPA and MCAT.
if as school's average GPA(10)+average MCAT >74: Top tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT 67-73: 2nd tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT 60-66: 3rd tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT <60: habla español?

Some people might have differences of opinion about where to make the cuts but this is the way I'd break it down. USNews uses grant funding to a large extent to classify schools and grant funding isn't very relevant to the kind of education one gets as a med student.
Click to expand...
This is why Harvard is the perennial "#1 school" in the US News rankings. According to US News criteria, they received over $1 billion in NIH grants in 2012 (this might be aggregate data from their affiliated hospitals). No other school was even close.
What if Baylor started to report funds for the entire Texas Medical Center?
I wonder if Cornell reports data from MSK, HSS, and Rockefeller. Would that make it a "top 5 school" if those research grants were not already counted?
 
Interesting. The avg medical school, if there is such a thing, (with a GPA of 3.6 and MCAT of 33) would be 69 = 2nd tier.



LizzyM said:
For your purposes:
look up the school's average (mean or median) GPA and MCAT.
if as school's average GPA(10)+average MCAT >74: Top tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT 67-73: 2nd tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT 60-66: 3rd tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT <60: habla español?

Some people might have differences of opinion about where to make the cuts but this is the way I'd break it down. USNews uses grant funding to a large extent to classify schools and grant funding isn't very relevant to the kind of education one gets as a med student.
Click to expand...
 
LizzyM said:
For your purposes:
look up the school's average (mean or median) GPA and MCAT.
if as school's average GPA(10)+average MCAT >74: Top tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT 67-73: 2nd tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT 60-66: 3rd tier
if GPA(10)+MCAT <60: habla español?

Some people might have differences of opinion about where to make the cuts but this is the way I'd break it down. USNews uses grant funding to a large extent to classify schools and grant funding isn't very relevant to the kind of education one gets as a med student.
Click to expand...
So these tiers are based more on selectivity, right? With this formula, it doesn't look like UCSF is in the top tier. The same applies to UW, UCLA, and UCSD. And those are all very prestigious schools, but seemingly not as selective as others.
 
Cyberdyne 101 said:
So these tiers are based more on selectivity, right? With this formula, it doesn't look like UCSF is in the top tier. The same applies to UW, UCLA, and UCSD. And those are all very prestigious schools, but seemingly not as selective as others.
Click to expand...

Exceptions to every rule right? haha. Also with regards to UCLA and UCSF, it almost seems like they throw darts at applications from the ridiculous range of scores they accept. UCSD seems a little more consistent
 
Fabio Lanzoni said:
Exceptions to every rule right? haha. Also with regards to UCLA and UCSF, it almost seems like they throw darts at applications from the ridiculous range of scores they accept. UCSD seems a little more consistent
Click to expand...
As long as they throw a dart to my score. That's all that matters to me 😎
 
tantacles said:
69 is definitely a 1st tier number. Let's bump that average down to 68 for the sake of fairness.
Click to expand...
I was going to say 66 seemed ridiculously low, off the top of my head I can't even think of many non-special mission schools/IS only schools that have scores that low, other than DO. I think 74+ is fair for top tier, not necessarily sure if that translates equally in meaning to 1st tier.
 
tantacles said:
69 is definitely a 1st tier number. Let's bump that average down to 68 for the sake of fairness.
Click to expand...

69 is first tier? So 3.6/33, 3.7/32, 3.8/31 are first tier stats?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, just trying to make sure I understand what you said. Thx.
 
lmn said:
I was going to say 66 seemed ridiculously low, off the top of my head I can't even think of many non-special mission schools/IS only schools that have scores that low, other than DO. I think 74+ is fair for top tier, not necessarily sure if that translates equally in meaning to 1st tier.
Click to expand...

Again, 69 is a sublimely important number that deserves special scrutiny due to its "cultural" significance.
 
Cyberdyne 101 said:
So these tiers are based more on selectivity, right? With this formula, it doesn't look like UCSF is in the top tier. The same applies to UW, UCLA, and UCSD. And those are all very prestigious schools, but seemingly not as selective as others.
Click to expand...
I'd never thought about it before but schools that have a strong preference for in-state applicants will have a smaller pool to choose from and may be less selective in terms of grades/scores/ECs. Applicants with the strongest numbers choose to apply to what they perceive to be the top schools and those schools can pick from the cream of the crop so that the selectivity becomes cyclical.
 
LizzyM said:
I'd never thought about it before but schools that have a strong preference for in-state applicants will have a smaller pool to choose from and may be less selective in terms of grades/scores/ECs. Applicants with the strongest numbers choose to apply to what they perceive to be the top schools and those schools can pick from the cream of the crop so that the selectivity becomes cyclical.
Click to expand...
That makes sense. On the other hand, it's often more difficult to gain admissions to these schools if you are OOS. So this factor may change those numbers for certain candidates.
 
Cyberdyne 101 said:
That makes sense. On the other hand, it's often more difficult to gain admissions to these schools if you are OOS. So this factor may change those numbers for certain candidates.
Click to expand...
Washington University Missouri
Johns Hopkins University Maryland
Harvard Medical School Massachusetts
Duke University North Carolina
Baylor College of Medicine Texas
New York University New York
Vanderbilt University Tennessee
University of California--Los Angeles California
University of California--San Diego California
University of Chicago Illinois
University of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania
Yale University Connecticut
Cornell University New York
Stanford University California
University of California--San Francisco California
Northwestern University Illinois
University of Michigan Michigan
Emory University Georgia
Columbia University New York
University of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania

So there are the top 20 schools "by the numbers" based on a somewhat old list I had lying around. Only 4 of the 20 are state schools and three of them are in California meaning that they have a very "rich" pool of instate students to draw from. I don't know if Michigan strongly favors instate students or if they cast a broader net. I would venture that none of the school on the list with the exception of the California & Michigan schools (maybe) have a strong preference in admissions for instate applicants. Where applicants who have choices choose to matriculate is the other side of the equation and those students may choose to matriculate at a top 20 in their home state for personal reasons which could be misinterpreted to mean that the school favors instate applicants when it is really students who favor schools close to home that happen to be in-state.
 
Last edited:
Cyberdyne 101 said:
This is why Harvard is the perennial "#1 school" in the US News rankings. According to US News criteria, they received over $1 billion in NIH grants in 2012 (this might be aggregate data from their affiliated hospitals). No other school was even close.
What if Baylor started to report funds for the entire Texas Medical Center?
I wonder if Cornell reports data from MSK, HSS, and Rockefeller. Would that make it a "top 5 school" if those research grants were not already counted?
Click to expand...
The way Harvard games the NIH funding numbers is something that annoys me greatly. If you look in the NIH Reporter tool, Harvard by itself gets >$350M, which is a large number. If you include the research institute of its primary teaching hospital Mass General, you get >680M, which already puts it in first place, but not far ahead of Hopkins and UCSF. But once you add in all "affiliated" (such a loose term) hospitals, you get some ridiculous number like $1.3B. I suppose it doesn't make a difference in the end, since HMS students can access all of these hospitals, so it's not really unfair to include them in the total number.

It's a unique situation that Boston has all these research-heavy hospitals that are all affiliated with the same medical school (no love for BU or Tufts), I don't see anything like it anywhere else, even in the Houston (remember that Texas medical center shares affiliations with Texas A&M, UTH, and UTMB, as well as Baylor). And for the record, Cornell does not report research funding by MSK or Rockefeller, at least not in the MSAR.
 
Underu said:
The way Harvard games the NIH funding numbers is something that annoys me greatly. If you look in the NIH Reporter tool, Harvard by itself gets >$350M, which is a large number. If you include the research institute of its primary teaching hospital Mass General, you get >680M, which already puts it in first place, but not far ahead of Hopkins and UCSF. But once you add in all "affiliated" (such a loose term) hospitals, you get some ridiculous number like $1.3B. I suppose it doesn't make a difference in the end, since HMS students can access all of these hospitals, so it's not really unfair to include them in the total number.

It's a unique situation that Boston has all these research-heavy hospitals that are all affiliated with the same medical school (no love for BU or Tufts), I don't see anything like it anywhere else, even in the Houston (remember that Texas medical center shares affiliations with Texas A&M, UTH, and UTMB, as well as Baylor). And for the record, Cornell does not report research funding by MSK or Rockefeller, at least not in the MSAR.
Click to expand...
It's not like US News will put out a disclaimer saying that it's mathematically impossible for HMS to be removed from the top spot. They want ppl to refer to their rankings as a "true scientific" list. I see ppl in the school specific boards refer to these rankings all the time as if they're actually official.
 
Underu said:
The way Harvard games the NIH funding numbers is something that annoys me greatly. If you look in the NIH Reporter tool, Harvard by itself gets >$350M, which is a large number. If you include the research institute of its primary teaching hospital Mass General, you get >680M, which already puts it in first place, but not far ahead of Hopkins and UCSF. But once you add in all "affiliated" (such a loose term) hospitals, you get some ridiculous number like $1.3B. I suppose it doesn't make a difference in the end, since HMS students can access all of these hospitals, so it's not really unfair to include them in the total number.

It's a unique situation that Boston has all these research-heavy hospitals that are all affiliated with the same medical school (no love for BU or Tufts), I don't see anything like it anywhere else, even in the Houston (remember that Texas medical center shares affiliations with Texas A&M, UTH, and UTMB, as well as Baylor). And for the record, Cornell does not report research funding by MSK or Rockefeller, at least not in the MSAR.
Click to expand...
This study was cited the in the link that @breakintheroof provided. Apparently Harvard advocates for a more cohesive 3rd year. And as a result, its students rotate at fewer sites within the HMS system.
 

Attachments

Underu said:
The way Harvard games the NIH funding numbers is something that annoys me greatly. If you look in the NIH Reporter tool, Harvard by itself gets >$350M, which is a large number. If you include the research institute of its primary teaching hospital Mass General, you get >680M, which already puts it in first place, but not far ahead of Hopkins and UCSF. But once you add in all "affiliated" (such a loose term) hospitals, you get some ridiculous number like $1.3B. I suppose it doesn't make a difference in the end, since HMS students can access all of these hospitals, so it's not really unfair to include them in the total number.

It's a unique situation that Boston has all these research-heavy hospitals that are all affiliated with the same medical school (no love for BU or Tufts), I don't see anything like it anywhere else, even in the Houston (remember that Texas medical center shares affiliations with Texas A&M, UTH, and UTMB, as well as Baylor). And for the record, Cornell does not report research funding by MSK or Rockefeller, at least not in the MSAR.
Click to expand...

You only rotate at one hospital in third year but 4th year electives are open to all the hospitals. Also, you can do research with anyone from all of these hospitals.
 
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