Learn about the ways in which medical schools consider the prestige of your undergraduate institution when making admissions decisions
Part 1: Introduction
If you’re a premed student hoping to maximize your chances of getting into medical school, there are several aspects of your application within your control: your GPA, MCAT score, and extracurricular accomplishments are reflections of the time and effort you’ve dedicated to achieving in each area.
But how do those accomplishments look in the context of where you went to college? What if you attended a state school that’s not ranked in the top 20? Or a small liberal arts school? Will your medical school admissions odds be harmed if you didn’t attend an Ivy League institution?
On the other hand, what if you’re enrolled at a notoriously difficult school with a strong reputation, like Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Vanderbilt or the University of California, Los Angeles? Will slightly lower grades be looked over given your program’s rigor? We often hear from students who have, say, a 3.6 GPA at a rigorous school, but claim they would have achieved a 3.8+ GPA if had they attended their local, less rigorous state school.
Regardless of your context, you might be wondering: how much does the reputation of my undergraduate school matter when applying to medical school? We wish there was a table that could tell us what a 3.5 GPA at School A corresponds to at School B. Unfortunately, no such table or formula exists, nor will it ever.
The question of how the strength, prestige, and overall reputation of your prospective undergraduate institution affects your chances of getting into a good medical school is a complex one. The short answer is: yes, your undergrad matters for med school. While it does play a role in admissions, however, it’s neither the most nor the least significant factor.
Part 2: Where students at top medical schools did their undergrad
For a little bit of context, let’s take a look at a recently admitted class at Yale School of Medicine, which currently ranks #10 in the 2023 U.S. News & World Report medical school (research) rankings.
Of the 104 students who were admitted to Yale Medical School in 2022, 30 percent came from undergraduate institutions in the Ivy League. The next 13 percent came from the following ten public and private institutions, the majority of which are academically selective:
University of California–Berkeley
University of Southern California
City University of New York
Hunter College
Johns Hopkins University
Vanderbilt University
Stanford University
University of Chicago
Washington University in St. Louis
Duke University
The remaining 57 percent hailed from a number of other colleges, including smaller institutions like Kalamazoo College, Skidmore College, and Bowdoin College.
Here’s another example, this time from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, currently ranked #11 by U.S. News. According to WashU, the following undergraduate institutions supplied the most students to their entering classes between 2011 and 2020:
Washington University in St. Louis
Harvard University
University of California–Berkeley
Yale University
Duke University
University of California–Los Angeles
University of Pennsylvania
Vanderbilt University
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
Rice University
This list, comprised entirely of top-ranked universities, has a lot of overlap with the Yale statistics we viewed earlier. But WashU also lets us know that, over the years, they’ve matriculated students from all kinds of institutions: large and small, public and private, nationally prestigious and regionally focused.
Which colleges produce the most medical school applicants?
According to the AAMC, these schools produced the largest number of medical school applicants during the 2023-2024 application cycle:
University of California–Los Angeles: 1,199
University of Texas at Austin: 965
University of Florida: 872
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor: 863
University of California–Berkeley: 702
University of California–San Diego: 646
Texas A&M University: 594
The Ohio State University: 540
University of Georgia: 506
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 502
Although many of the above institutions are top-ranked schools, what’s perhaps more relevant is that they’re all large public institutions that produce many medical school applicants by virtue of their size. Unfortunately, this list doesn’t tell us much about each school’s yield (i.e., the success rate of its applicants).
How to think about undergraduate prestige and medical school admissions
Although students who have graduated from elite, large- or medium-sized universities are well represented at top medical schools, this doesn’t mean that students from smaller schools are at a disadvantage.
Keep in mind that smaller schools tend to send fewer students to medical schools, in part, because they have smaller student bodies. While some prestigious small schools, like Williams College or MIT, send relatively few students to med schools, that’s more of a reflection of either the student body size and the school’s focus. Williams, for instance, enrolls about 2,000 undergrads, most of whom are not interested in medicine. MIT, on the other hand, enrolled 4,657 students in the fall of 2022, but the majority of students at MIT pursue careers in areas such as engineering and computer science.
Therefore, it’s important to understand each school’s premed success rate—that is, the percentage of med school applicants from a given undergrad that get into med school each year. That’s the number that really matters.
Unfortunately, not every undergraduate institution reports their students’ success rate. Moreover, even schools that report high percentages might not be telling the whole story. Over the years, we’ve observed a tendency among certain schools’ pre-health advising committees to discourage students from applying to med school unless they have perfect or near-perfect stats. By doing this, many undergrad institutions protect their medical school acceptance rates.
That being said, the fact that about 45 percent of Yale School of Medicine’s students in the 2022 entering class came from Ivy League schools and a handful of other top colleges, demonstrates that undergrad prestige does matter for med school.
However (we weren’t kidding when we said earlier that this question is complex), you should keep in mind that top students tend to attend top colleges in the first place. They also tend to be better, on average, at performing on standardized tests. Therefore, there is a confounding question here: does undergrad prestige matter or have top colleges already pre-selected top-performing students? It’s probably both.
Let’s try the following thought experiment: imagine you planned a research study where you gave a bunch of people the exact same CV and asked them to rate a candidate’s strength. The only variable you manipulated was the candidate’s undergraduate institution—half of your study participants receive a CV from a Harvard grad and the other half receive a CV from a University of North Dakota grad. Which candidate would you expect to be rated more highly? Probably the Harvard candidate. That bias, created by Harvard’s powerful brand name, is the type of bias that med school adcoms likely have, too.
Regardless, we want to make it clear that you can make it to medical school from a variety of undergraduate institutions. Attending a small liberal arts college or a state school—many of the schools we discussed earlier are considered Public Ivies—is no detriment to getting into a good medical program, particularly if the college has a strong academic reputation.
Part 3: What do medical schools look for?
It’s useful to think of factors that medical school admissions officers consider important through a tiered lens:
Tier one of importance: GPA, MCAT score, medical school personal statement
Tier two of importance: letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities including clinical or service-based volunteering and scientific research
Tier three of importance: undergraduate institution reputation (particularly when it comes to perceived academic rigor and grade inflation), undergraduate major
The ideal med school candidate needs to have something beyond stats that meet or exceed a school’s average GPA and MCAT score. Those two factors are a given and should be considered the bare minimum of the rigorous demands U.S. medical schools make of their prospective students.
As such, top medical schools also want students who clearly demonstrate tenacity, intellectual capacity, an understanding of a physician’s responsibility, clear communication skills, sterling moral character, a real understanding of hypothesis-driven scientific research, and leadership.
An undergraduate school, then, is important because it determines the kinds of experiences a premed student can carve out. So, rather than asking simply if a school is “good enough” to get you into medical school, ask:
Can I work on research that excites me at this school?
Can I take courses that will leave me with exceptional reading and writing skills, and the ability to gracefully communicate who I am and what I care about?
Are there hospitals and clinics attached to the institution where I will be able to find internships and physician shadowing opportunities?
Through extracurriculars for medical school, will I be able to carve out leadership roles that show future medical schools I’ll be an innovative, compassionate physician of the future?
The importance of your MCAT score
One last consideration is how medical schools evaluate the meaning of your GPA given your undergraduate institution’s reputation. A 3.79 from MIT, a school notorious for its grade deflation and for giving out very few As, might register as more impressive to an admissions committee than a 3.85 from either the University of Iowa or Dartmouth.
However, if our hypothetical MIT student with a 3.79 also gets a 503 on the MCAT, that will factor as a real deterrent to his chances. No undergraduate institution’s reputation is powerful enough to make up for a poor GPA or MCAT score.
The MCAT functions as a great equalizer in the eyes of medical school admissions committees. It offers a standardized context for every applicant regardless of which school, geographic area, and walk of life they come from. That’s why scoring well on the MCAT is essential to getting into the med school of your dreams.
Part 4: Ivy League vs. state school: Which is better for medical school?
Imagine this scenario: Shailaja, a high-achieving high school premed applied to several colleges. She received a free ride to her state school and an acceptance from an Ivy League with only minimal financial aid. Knowing she was headed to medical school, which route was the better one?
Scenario A: Let’s say Shailaja decided to go to the prestigious Ivy League school. By her senior year, she has a GPA of 3.5. She takes the MCAT and her score is 510. During her undergraduate career, she had participated in a couple of clubs, but did not take on much research experience. She is not, at this point, a shoo-in for medical schools.
Scenario B: Shailaja notices that the public school that is offering her a full ride, has a prestigious hospital affiliated with it, and this, combined with her desire to not take on more student loan debt than she has to, informs her decision to go there. Even though this school has a reputation for partying over academics, Shailaja maintains a 4.0 throughout her senior year and ends up with a 3.82 cumulative GPA and 3.75 science GPA. However, she’s worried about whether her GPA will be seen as strong in the same way a 3.82 from a highly competitive private school would be. She takes on, in four years, two research internships and one clinical internship. She founds a club for service trips and maintains her passion for painting through taking studio art classes, finally exhibiting her work in the student gallery. Shailaja takes the MCAT over the summer of her senior year and gets a 518.
Her excellent MCAT score shows any admissions committee that she can compete on the same level as anyone from an Ivy League school. Between her GPA, MCAT, and extracurriculars, Shailaja is a stellar candidate for top medical schools.
Final thoughts
In closing, the question of how much your undergraduate institution matters can be answered with a single word: somewhat. It matters in terms of the resources it can offer premeds and the psychological advantage it may bestow, given the bias most people have in favor of strong brand names.
However, the onus is on each individual student to make the most of their time at their chosen undergraduate institution. No matter which school you attend, you will need to demonstrate that you are academically, socially, and intellectually prepared for medical school.
