maybe I am going crazy waiting...so here Is a crazy question: Do adcoms or schools talk to each other about applicant pools, esp schools in the same state? If a state has more than one state university SOM, is there any partnership or competition?
Informally, anything is possible since it's a pretty small and exclusive fraternity, they attend the same meetings, deal with the same issues, etc. Formally, AAMC cut off their detailed access to information on their applicant pools by discontinuing the Multiple Acceptance Report (MAR) a few years ago.
This is due to antitrust concerns. Regardless of what adcoms repeatedly tell us about it being a sellers' market, applicants being rejected until they are accepted, 60% being rejected each year, etc., it bears remembering that at the end of the day this is still a big bucks industry. Successful applicants make a ~$400K+ investment in an education (less any grants awarded), and schools really do compete with each other for attractive candidates.
This is why, after you have multiple acceptances, you can often leverage need or merit based financial aid offers to receive better offers elsewhere. Anywhere else, this would be called what it is -- price discounting (i.e., schools competing with each other for the most attractive candidates through discounting, just like Honda and Toyota do to get you to buy a car). The MAR was deemed to potentially limit this competition by allowing schools to see what other acceptances their pools had, which allowed them to tailor financial aid or acceptances off the WL accordingly. Really beneficial for the schools. Not as much for candidates, whose acceptances or fin aid offers could be dictated as much by where else they hold acceptances as by the four corners of their applications.
This no longer happens, but, of course, you can't control whether colleagues who are friendly with each other have informal off-the-record conversations. And, of course, if you open the door by discussing one school with another, all bets are off regarding what information they might share about you.
