When everything else is equal, the person with the better school is going to get in before the other person [assuming interview is the same, etc.]. I think the point of what people have said here is that name advantage is not as important as people make it out to be. On the same note, not having that name advantage is not as much of a disadvantage as people make it out to be. And the truth of medical school admissions is that the kid from the state school with low stats is not competing with the kid from Harvard with high stats. Likewise, the kid from the state school with high stats is not competing with the kid from Harvard with low stats. Generally, people with low stats are below people with high stats in the admissions game regardless. Of course you have to include ECs, LORs, etc. The only truth that can be found in any of this is that people make too big a deal over it. It's a very complicated subject b/c there are tons of socioeconomic factors that come into play, and there is also the fact that you never know how you will actually do in any given situation. So each person has to decide what the balance between cost of education, access to resources, prestige, etc., will be in his/her own life. The more you pay, the better chance you have of having it work out the way you want it to work out. So what happens? Most people with the money to pay generally pay the big bucks to fund expensive educations. I think this leads to the elitist attitude that those that do not pay or cannot pay for the very best schools should be discounted as somehow inferior. Then what happens when you end up applying for medical school? You find out that Joe Blow from X State University ended up getting into WashU. You think, "Man, I figured Joe Blow must not be that capable. I mean, he DID attend X State University. Statistically he did not have nearly as much of a chance as I did." But then you finally make the connection that Joe Blow is not a statistic. He is an individual with his own scores, his own application, and his own experiences. And then you realize that it never really mattered where Joe Blow went to school, because he was pretty phenomenal. So how does this impact you? If you're loaded, you should obviously buy the best education money can buy. If it comes down to making huge sacrifices for that education, you have to decide whether you are good enough to ignore the hype, do the work, and excel. Not everyone can do it, obviously. But then again, not everyone from Harvard gets into Harvard Med either. You guys/gals are not statistics, and the admissions people know that much. They will evaluate you, your application, your experiences, the difficulty of your undergrad school, etc., without lumping you into some undesirable category simply because of the name on your transcript. If that were the case, I would have been screwed a long time ago.
