Yale (free) vs Harvard (125-135k in debt at 4 years)

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RAfisher1996

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Hi all - as the deadline to choose where I will be matriculating to medical school quickly approaches, I have narrowed down my options to two schools: Yale or Harvard.

Yale (Full cost of attendance covered: living, tuition, technology...EVERYTHING)
This seems like the safest option. I went to Yale for undergrad and currently do research here during my gap year. If I choose to stay here, I will be able to continue my ongoing research project and would have the choice to flex into the MD-PHD program in my PI's lab if that ultimately ends up being something I want to pursue. I believe the freedom that the Yale curriculum offers has both significant upsides and downsides. One one hand, I could pursue many other extracurriculars and research opportunities; on the other hand, they don't seem to conform or provide the metric statistics to residency programs that are traditionally used to judge applicants - to me, this seems to put additional stress onto the importance of impeccable STEP scores. Although this does concern me, the Yale match list is fantastic so I suppose it shouldn't even be in my mind? And Yale students also seem genuinely happy and not stressed which, of course, is important to me. Additionally my girlfriend will be located at Yale for the next four years.

Harvard (Would graduate with about 125-135k in debt)
I love the curriculum at Harvard. As someone who doesn't learn well just sitting there listening to people talk and mostly skipped out on lecture in favor of self/group-study during undergrad, the flipped classroom model really appeals to me. I also have no idea what speciality I want to pursue, I have like just about everything that I have seen. For this reason, the early clinical year here is appealing because I can get quick exposure and then have a full 2 (or 3 if I take an additional research year) years to focus on things geared toward the speciality I fell in love with. Additionally, I can't imagine there is a much better place to learn medicine than at Brigham and Women's, MGH, Dana Farber, Boston Children's, Beth Israel.....the list continues. I know Harvard is the most 'prestiges' but I don't put too much weight into that - it is definitely something I consider but I can't imagine the connections and name recognition at Harvard is THAT much more substantial than Yale. It's hard to gauge but at second look, I didn't get the ultra-competitive cut your throat to get ahead vibe that many people told me Harvard was known for. I know everyone puts on a special happy face for second look, but still. Additionally, while I love Yale and have an incredible support network of peers and professors here, I think a change of scenery could be beneficial. Lastly my brother and his wife live about 20 minutes from the HMS campus.

Overall, I could continue comparing the curriculums but I don't think it means much. I am confident that I will learn what I need to learn at either location. Most people say Boston would be a much better place to live and I don't doubt that, I'm sure I would love it there - but I also do really enjoy living in New Haven (crazy right).

I feel like my gut is telling me Harvard but my brain is telling me Yale. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
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HMS definitely doesn't have anything to offer you at the med student level that makes it worth $100k+ more than Yale. The only reason to hesitate would be regarding residency afterwards.

HMS could be worth it if you want to easily match MGH/BWH and start your career at Harvard. As with Hopkins and UCSF ("U Can Stay Forever"), inbreeding at these places is rampant and if you want to play the long game, could justify getting your foot in the door as early as you can.

Yale if you're fine with giving up the insider advantage/would want to match elsewhere anyways
 
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If you don't mind me asking, how did you get that kind of money from Yale? Was it a merit scholarship or all need-based? Thanks in advance.
 
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bluegray7 said:
But I thought Yale didn’t do any merit scholarships? I thought their policy was only need-based aid. Btw, Congrats on two awesome options!! I don’t think you can go wrong. 🙂
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So at Yale in order to be eligible for aid you need to take out a 15k/year unit loan. My aid covers all but the 15k and then I got a scholarship that wipes out 15k unit loan. I am actually not sure if was merit based haha - I don't know how I got that.
 
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HMS, much better location, appreciably better name in medicine. Give yourself as many options and advantages as possible. The residency match is super uncertain, and so is the future of multiple specialties
 
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The flipped class will suck I presume, but I really think the pros outweigh the cons of choosing HMS. The debt will be nontrivial, but you’ll be in the greatest position to pay that sort of debt off quickly
 
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scrapy said:
HMS, much better location, appreciably better name in medicine. Give yourself as many options and advantages as possible. The residency match is super uncertain, and so is the future of multiple specialties
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the US healthcare system will collapse entirely before Yale Medical Students struggle to match in residency. Unless the goal is residency at BWH or MGH - it isnt worth the price difference / leaving New Haven
 
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scrapy said:
HMS, much better location, appreciably better name in medicine. Give yourself as many options and advantages as possible. The residency match is super uncertain, and so is the future of multiple specialties
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Yah, Yalies are going to continue to be just fine. HMS is not in a league of its own. If you want to match at Harvard then go to Harvard but I would wager that 99.9% of people don’t have a good reason for wanting to match at Harvard that’s worth turning down Yale for free.

Also, is Boston appreciably better? I’m not so sure it’s obvious. I interviewed at both and honestly Boston isn’t exactly NYC (or even Philly for that matter...) but I’ll give that downtown and Cambridge are nice. New Haven is peaceful, cheap, very green, and well connected to the rest of the Eastern corridor when you need to get out or want to go into the city.
 
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Kracin said:
Unless the goal is residency at BWH or MGH - it isnt worth the price difference / leaving New Haven
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Agree again. Yale vs HMS isn't going to matter enough to residency directors elsewhere in the country to be worth it. Literally nobody is going to look at an app and say well, I'd interview them if they were from Harvard, but they're only from Yale. That's insane.

The exception is that MGH/BWH are always willing to take their own, for that particular target HMS really is in a league of its own, similarly to how UCSF/Stanford would be a league of their own for people that want to match at home and stay in San Francisco.
 
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It’s not about matching or not, it’s about giving as much of an advantage as possible. Yes, either school will give a much better shot at the match than the vast majority of allopathic schools, but PD’s have to pick and choose from many interviewees. I think it’s unclear how much more often people at top schools match into their number 1. The advantage might even only be for top 3 or 5 choices or so, but you never know. It’s a tough choice for a PD when they’ve interviewed people almost entirely from T30 schools.

In any case OP, there are other tangible benefits to choosing Yale, take all the advice here as you will, and keep in mind some people here might be dissuading you from one school to optimize their own waitlist chances. I really think the medschool subreddit should be allowed to give this sort of input.
 
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RAfisher1996 said:
Hi all - as the deadline to choose where I will be matriculating to medical school quickly approaches, I have narrowed down my options to two schools: Yale or Harvard.

Yale (Full cost of attendance covered: living, tuition, technology...EVERYTHING)
This seems like the safest option. I went to Yale for undergrad and currently do research here during my gap year. If I choose to stay here, I will be able to continue my ongoing research project and would have the choice to flex into the MD-PHD program in my PI's lab if that ultimately ends up being something I want to pursue. I believe the freedom that the Yale curriculum offers has both significant upsides and downsides. One one hand, I could pursue many other extracurriculars and research opportunities; on the other hand, they don't seem to conform or provide the metric statistics to residency programs that are traditionally used to judge applicants - to me, this seems to put additional stress onto the importance of impeccable STEP scores. Although this does concern me, the Yale match list is fantastic so I suppose it shouldn't even be in my mind? And Yale students also seem genuinely happy and not stressed which, of course, is important to me. Additionally my girlfriend will be located at Yale for the next four years.

Harvard (Would graduate with about 125-135k in debt)
I love the curriculum at Harvard. As someone who doesn't learn well just sitting there listening to people talk and mostly skipped out on lecture in favor of self/group-study during undergrad, the flipped classroom model really appeals to me. I also have no idea what speciality I want to pursue, I have like just about everything that I have seen. For this reason, the early clinical year here is appealing because I can get quick exposure and then have a full 2 (or 3 if I take an additional research year) years to focus on things geared toward the speciality I fell in love with. Additionally, I can't imagine there is a much better place to learn medicine than at Brigham and Women's, MGH, Dana Farber, Boston Children's, Beth Israel.....the list continues. I know Harvard is the most 'prestiges' but I don't put too much weight into that - it is definitely something I consider but I can't imagine the connections and name recognition at Harvard is THAT much more substantial than Yale. It's hard to gauge but at second look, I didn't get the ultra-competitive cut your throat to get ahead vibe that many people told me Harvard was known for. I know everyone puts on a special happy face for second look, but still. Additionally, while I love Yale and have an incredible support network of peers and professors here, I think a change of scenery could be beneficial. Lastly my brother and his wife live about 20 minutes from the HMS campus.

Overall, I could continue comparing the curriculums but I don't think it means much. I am confident that I will learn what I need to learn at either location. Most people say Boston would be a much better place to live and I don't doubt that, I'm sure I would love it there - but I also do really enjoy living in New Haven (crazy right).

I feel like my gut is telling me Harvard but my brain is telling me Yale. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
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Do I have to reach through the electrons and give you a dope slap??

Yale!!!!

How is this even a question????
 
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scrapy said:
It’s not about matching or not, it’s about giving as much of an advantage as possible. Yes, either school will give a much better shot at the match than the vast majority of allopathic schools, but PD’s have to pick and choose from many interviewees. I think it’s unclear how much more often people at top schools match into their number 1. The advantage might even only be for top 3 or 5 choices or so, but you never know. It’s a tough choice for a PD when they’ve interviewed people almost entirely from T30 schools.

In any case OP, there are other tangible benefits to choosing Yale, take all the advice here as you will, and keep in mind some people here might be dissuading you from one school to optimize their own waitlist chances. I really think the medschool subreddit should be allowed to give this sort of input.
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You are INSANE if you think a PD's decision to interview or rank would ever come down to the difference in name between Harvard vs Yale/Columbia/Penn. Absolutely bonkers. Doubly so if they get to list a Yale merit scholarship on their app.

Also that's straight up paranoid to think people advising against HMS are on the waitlist trying to get advantage from OP turning it down. Having that kind of hyper-vigilance for potential gunning is going to make med school miserable dude

And lastly reddit is a cesspool echo chamber because people vote up what they want to hear or is popular with the hivemind. Like, for example, people's worship of "top 5" med schools as if they give you $150,000 more value than the schools ranked 5-10. Thank god SDN doesn't let your visibility rely on that
 
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scrapy said:
It’s not about matching or not, it’s about giving as much of an advantage as possible. Yes, either school will give a much better shot at the match than the vast majority of allopathic schools, but PD’s have to pick and choose from many interviewees. I think it’s unclear how much more often people at top schools match into their number 1. The advantage might even only be for top 3 or 5 choices or so, but you never know. It’s a tough choice for a PD when they’ve interviewed people almost entirely from T30 schools.

In any case OP, there are other tangible benefits to choosing Yale, take all the advice here as you will, and keep in mind some people here might be dissuading you from one school to optimize their own waitlist chances. I really think the medschool subreddit should be allowed to give this sort of input.
Click to expand...

If OPs SO was tied down to the Boston area, if being in New Haven for even 5 minutes caused them extreme depression, if they wanted to do a PhD with specifically one faculty member at HMS/MIT then I’d be telling OP 130k is not so bad over the lifetime of a career.

However, most of the people telling Op to go to Yale ITT have either been accepted to or currently attend T5 med schools lol.
 
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You'd match well from either, though since HMS has multiple top-tier home programs and Yale is a smaller and slightly less-renowned system, you'd match marginally better from HMS. The first-year HMS curriculum is kinda a drag (flipped classroom is inefficient), but there's only 1 year which is nice.

I'd say the biggest differentiator is what you are trying to get out of your career. With the cluster of HMS, MIT, MGH, BWH, etc... there is an unparalleled amount of research diversity at HMS. The biotech sector in Boston is bigger than anywhere else in the country. Four of Harvard's schools have top programs in healthcare management/policy/global health. Yale has top people/departments many of these categories, but it's a much shallower pool. The real question is whether you think the access to that network, the perks of living in Boston, and not having to ask "what if" are worth $100k.
 
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