Do medical schools care where you get your undergraduate degree?

Question

As long as it's not a terrible school, does it matter? If you go to a school that is a satellite campus, will that look bad?

Answer 1

I would assume medical schools care where you get your undergraduate degree/ how well you got it. I wouldn't stress out about it if your school is ranked in at least the top 100 for nationals... or if the school your attending to get your undergraduate degree has a medical school and you plan on attending it... I wouldnt see why they wouldnt accept a decent amount of their own undergraduate students if they did well.  

Answer 2

The medical schools have processed thousands of students from every school, so they have a pretty good idea which undergraduate schools prepare kids properly and which do not. You can't always tell from the supposed % of acceptances that the school brags about. Sometimes the undergraduate schools are very selective so that every one of their students is a smart hardworking student. Those kids get tough courses and wind up with high scores on the MCAT. Almost all of them get in to med school. Other colleges allow in less selected kids, give them tough courses, but if they do not do well in their MCATs, then the college does not support them when they want to apply. If your undergraduate college won't support your application that is pretty much the kiss of death for your hopes of admission.  When the school calculates the % of its kids that get accepted, they just count the kids whom they preselected and supported, so they get a really high % of admissions. That part is sort of a public relations game.

But the end point is the same. The med schools know where you went and whether that is a good school. If you get out of MIT with a 3.9 then you are halfway into med school. If you are at Podunk State and you have great grades and a high MCAT score, and after you are the last man standing in their premed pool, if the faculty say you are the best thing since sliced bread, then you will get in somewhere.  

Answer 3

Yes medical schools do look at the quality of the school that you are coming from.  The better premed schools like College of the Holy Cross have a 90% acceptance rate into medical school because the medical schools know that only quality applicants come from Holy Cross via their rigorous premed program which screens out the weak.  This is true for most of the top liberal arts colleges.