I mentioned in an earlier post that there are about 70 BS/MD programs.  Since that time I have had numerous requests for the list of programs. So, I decided to provide the list to my faithful readers.

A brief note before the list.  This is a fluid list. Programs are created and programs end on a regular basis. To the best of my knowledge, this list is accurate as of the date of this post. If anyone is aware of another BS/MD program, please let me know and I will add it to the list.

These programs are the true BS/MD programs where you apply as a high school senior. These are not programs where you apply to medical school as a freshman or sophomore in college.

Some medical schools have BS/MD programs with different undergraduate colleges and the list indicates the undergraduate college and the medical school if they differ. If only one school is listed it is both the college and medical school.

Here is the list of 71:

University of Alabama

University of South Alabama

Caltech/University of California San Diego

University of California San Diego

University of Southern California

University of Colorado Denver

University of Connecticut at Storrs

University of Miami

Northwestern University

University of Illinois Chicago

Indiana State University

Grambling State University/Meharry Medical College

Boston University

Boston University/UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School

Michigan Tech University/Wayne State University

Northern Michigan University/Wayne State University

Wayne State University

St. Louis University

University of Missouri Kansas City

Washington University

University of Nevada

College of New Jersey/UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School

Drew University/UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School

Montclair State University/UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School

New Jersey Institute of Technology/UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School

Richard Stockton College/UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School

Rutgers University/UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School

Stevens Institute of Technology/UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School

University of New Mexico

Brooklyn College City University of New York/SUNY Downstate Medical

City College of New York Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education/various colleges

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/Albany Medical College

Siena College/Albany Medical College

St. Bonaventure University/George Washington University

Stony Brook University

Union College/Albany Medical College

University of Rochester

East Carolina University

Case Western Reserve University

Kent State University/ Northeast Ohio University College of Medicine

Ohio State University

University of Akron/ Northeast Ohio University College of Medicine

University of Cincinnati

University of Toledo

Youngstown State University/Northeast Ohio University College of Medicine

Drexel University

Duquesne University/Temple University

Lehigh University/Drexel University

Penn State University/Thomas Jefferson University

Rosemont College/Drexel University

University of Pittsburgh

Villanova University/Drexel University

Washington and Jefferson College/Temple University

Widener University/Temple University

Brown University

Baylor University

Prairie View A & M University/ University of Texas at Galveston

Rice University/Baylor University

Texas A & M Various colleges

Texas A & M International/University of Texas at Galveston

Texas Southern University/University of Texas at Galveston

University of Houston/Baylor University

University of Texas at Brownsville/University of Texas at Galveston

University of Texas at El Paso/University of Texas at Galveston

University of Texas Pan American/University of Texas at Galveston

University of Texas-Pan American/Baylor University

Virginia Commonwealth University

George Washington University

Howard University

Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico/Ponce School of Medicine

Interamerican University of PR/Ponce School of Medicine

Want more information about BS/MD programs? Check out the Guide to BS/MD Programs.

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When I work with BS/MD students, one of the first questions is often “How many BS/MD programs should I apply to?” While there is no one single answer, I generally tell students it depends on your focus.

If your primary focus is on getting into a BS/MD program then I would consider applying to 8 to 10 BS/MD programs and 5 regular college programs. Why this many? Because BS/MD programs are so competitive, you want to apply to a number of colleges where your credentials make you a strong candidate for the program. We may also discuss applying to those programs that have a greater number of positions available or those where the competition is less than it might be at some of the most popular programs. And, the regular colleges will often be more on the safe side since we don’t want to risk having no options in the spring.

If you are only interested in the most competitive BS/MD programs and, if not admitted to one of those, you wish to attend a college that has a strong placement into medical school, the number of applications will be different. For those students, I will typically recommend 3 or 4 BS/MD programs and 6 to 8 regular colleges. This allows the student to apply to the most competitive BS/MD programs and still have a reasonable number of regular colleges to consider reach, match and safety colleges.

Are these magic numbers? No, but they will hopefully give you a realistic idea of the number of colleges and BS/MD programs that may be appropriate for you to apply to.

Want more information about BS/MD programs? Check out the Guide to BS/MD Programs.

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When visiting a college campus everyone says you need to visit the college library. But why? You are a study in your room kind of person so who cares what the library is like.

While you might not be a person who wants to study in a library, the library is an important part of any college campus. You will need to use the library to research assignments given by your professors and many professors put required course material on reserve in the library. And when you have a big test the next day and your roommate decides to host “reggae night” for the floor, you might not think the library is such a bad place.

The library also can give you a window to the academic soul of a campus. No one in the library after 4:00 in the afternoon? This is not an academically focused college. What are the hours of the college. If the library closes at 10:00 at night this is also not a college where academics are paramount.

U.S. News recently wrote about the “4 Reasons Why the Library Should Affect Your College Choice.”  There are some good points made in the article and I would recommend that you read it before your next college visit.

The college library is one more thing for you to consider in the search for the right college for you.

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You have taken the SAT or ACT and scored very well.  Now come the viewbooks and letters from the colleges telling you about each college.  But, what really gets students excited is the letter from Harvard or Yale or some other very selective college urging you to apply because you are a great candidate for their college.

Wow, the college of my dreams wants me.  And everyone said getting into a highly selective college was tough.  Not for me!  I need to go online and buy that college shirt to let everyone at my school know how talented I am.

Stop. Take a deep breath.  While it is exciting to get such a letter from a selective college, you need to understand a few things. First, you are not the only student to get such a letter. Some colleges send out 10,000 or even 100,000 such letters to students around the country that scored at a certain level on a standardized test. And all of them say the same thing; we want you to apply to our college.

The second thing you need to understand is that getting a letter like this will provide you absolutely NO help in getting admitted to the college which sent the letter.  Colleges that send these letters do not give bonus points to the recipients if the student applies to that college.

So, why do colleges send such letters out? On a positive side, the colleges are trying to get the word out to students that have certain test scores that they might want to investigate this college.  Equally important from the colleges side is that the more students that apply to a college, the more students the college can reject. The more students they reject, the more selective the college. And in one of those odd twists, the more selective the college, the more students want to go there and the greater the perceived quality.

Bottom line is that receiving a letter from a selective college in no way provides you with any advantage in the college admissions process.  If it introduces you to a college you did not otherwise know about, great. Otherwise, file it along with the other college materials as you continue the search for the best college for your needs.

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Union College in Schenectady, New York was the third college I visited on my recent tour. Union is a small liberal arts college with 2,100 students from throughout the US although there is a heavy slant to the Northeast. This is important to note as those of you not from the Northeast may have a slight admission advantage.

We started the visit at Nott Memorial, a unique 16 sided building that is the center point of campus.  Union was the first planned college campus in the country and it feels very comfortable with large green spaces.  Despite miserable weather while we were there, the beauty of the campus is evident.  And the academic and residential buildings are all within easy walking distance so the weather was never a problem.

One of the most interesting aspects of social life at Union are the seven Minerva houses. Each freshman is randomly assigned to a Minerva house and there are about 300 students in each house.  Each house is funded by the college and the members of the house decide what they are going to use their money for.

Pizza parties, hosting a band, movie nights and sports tournaments are just a few of the activities hosted by a Minerva. This is a great way to create a smaller community of people on the campus to make it seem more like home.  A few students live in each house and the houses have community rooms and game rooms for those who are part of the house.  All events hosted by each house are open to all residents of the college.

Union also has a Greek system but events are open to all students so there is not the sense of exclusivity that can sometimes be a problem with Greek programs.

Union offers around 40 majors with approximately 50% of the students majoring in the Humanities and Social Sciences and 50% majoring in Science and Engineering. Yes, Union is one of the few liberal arts colleges that have an undergraduate engineering major. In fact, you can major in bioengineering, computer engineering, electrical engineering or mechanical engineering.

Union uses a trimester system for its academic year which means that students typically take 3 classes a term and have 3 terms.  Each term only lasts 10 weeks so the information is compressed from the typical 15 week term.  There are advantages and disadvantages to such a system and I will be writing about those in the next few weeks. There are a few other colleges that use this type of system such as Carleton and Dartmouth.

Union has a BS/MD program with Albany Medical College.  This program is called the Leadership in Medicine Program and is an eight year program that includes not only a BS and MD degree but also an MS or MBA degree. If you like the business side of medicine this is a great program.

The college has 25 varsity teams that play Division III sports although men’s and women’s ice hockey is Division I.

Union is highly selective with the average SAT score of 1,920.  40% of the class is admitted through Early Decision and the overall acceptance rate is around 40%.  The college has substantial financial aid available for students and meet the full financial need of 99% of students.

Union is a beautiful campus with great academics and a real sense of community. If you are interested in a liberal arts college, Union should be on your radar.

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I mentioned in my last post that I am still talking with parents and students who have yet to begin the search for a college to attend this fall. If you are one of the students who are late to the game, let’s look at your options.

Basically, you have three options on how to proceed. If you are intent on attending a four year college this fall, there are colleges that still have openings. This option does allow you to attend a four year college but the number of colleges still accepting applications is limited. Moreover, many of these colleges are not very selective so the student body may not be as competitive as you might like. Some of these colleges may be a great fit for you but since there are less options, your chances of finding that right college are less than they would have been had you applied earlier.

If you are not able to find the right fit for you with a four year college, you may also consider a two year community college.  Many students intentionally go this route with the intent on transferring to a four year college because the first two years at the community college are usually one of the most reasonable options in higher ed.  But as I have discussed here before, community colleges are not always the best choice.

Your third option is to take a gap year.  There are many options on what to do for a gap year, but this additional time allows students the opportunity to research colleges to find the best fit for their needs. While you may be discouraged by the thought that you are not starting college with all of your classmates, this is often the best option for students who have not spent the time to find the best fit college.  A gap year may also make you a more interesting candidate for admissions next year which means you might have a better chance of admission once you find the right college.

What you do NOT want to do is to just pick the first college you can find that has an opening for the fall.  Chances are this college will not be an appropriate fit for you and you will not only end up transferring, you may be miserable in the meantime.  Spend some time and find the right college to begin with.  That way you can avoid all of the problems associated with transferring colleges.

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It is getting late in the admission season for current high school seniors and I am still getting calls from students who haven’t applied to any colleges. While there are some colleges still accepting applications, for many of these students, community colleges might be the best option. But, before choosing a community college, students need to understand articulation agreements.

An articulation agreement is an agreement between a 2 year college and a 4 year college that explains what credits will be accepted at the 4 year college.  Obviously, if you are starting at a 2 year college you want to have all of your credits transfer to a 4 year college. Historically, however, credits have not always transferred so these agreements came into play.

Students need to ask the 2 year college they have an interest in what 4 year colleges they have an articulation agreement with.  Then you need to check with the 4 year college and confirm the agreement. You need to ask exactly what credits will transfer. Will it be all credits or only certain credits? If only certain credits transfer, how do you determine whether the credits from a class you might take will transfer?

Articulation agreements are not necessary to transfer credits from a 2 year college to a 4 year college, but there is more certainty about what credits will transfer if an articulation agreement is in place.

I have written before about some of the problems that can occur when transferring from a 2 year college to a 4 year college. Articulation agreements can help address some of those problems.  The biggest thing you have to understand if you plan is to transfer from a 2 year college to a 4 year college is that you must ask lots of question, particularly from the 4 year college that you might wish to transfer to.

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I started out to write a posting about how class sizes as published by colleges can be misleading. But, I came across a posting from several years ago by a fellow college admissions consultant, Mark Montgomery, that addressed the issue so well I thought I would just let you read Mark’s article on class size and student faculty ratios.

Thanks Mark for the thoughtful article on college class size.

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Now is the time that juniors should start the process of finding which colleges they will apply to. But with over 3,000 colleges in the country, where do you get started?

Here are my 3 favorite college search sites. Each of these website has its advantages so checking more than one is a good idea.

1. College Navigator- I recommend that students start at this site more than any other. This is the official college search site of the US Department of Education. You can search for colleges by a number of different criteria but I particularly like the ability to look at the retention and graduation rates of different colleges.

2. College Board College Search – This site  allows students to search for even more criteria than the previous site. The other thing I really like about the the College Board web site is the financial information provided for each college that is identified.  This is one of the few sites that tells a student the average amount of need met by each college’s financial aid department.

3. Princeton Review- Princeton Review’s Counselor-O-Matic asks questions in a fun way to make the process of finding the right college more interesting. Unfortunately, in the past, the colleges that were identified were often not appropriate. Think a guy having an all woman’s college as one of their options.  They are working to improve the search engine. The nice thing about the Princeton Review site is that once it identifies a possible college you can also find similar colleges.

Using these three sites together can help a student put together a preliminary list of colleges. But do not rely on such a list alone. You need to research each of the identified colleges in more detail starting with the websites of each college.  And as I have discussed here before, I always recommend visiting a college before making the final decision of where to apply.

Of course, if you really want to find the best colleges for your needs, you should consider hiring a professional college admission consultant.

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Now is the time that many high school juniors start to get serious about the college admissions process. To find the right college, a student needs to realistically evaluate the grades they have received to see which colleges might be academically appropriate.  And then the problems begin.

What problems? The problem of evaluating your grades and the GPA you think you have.  You would think that evaluating your GPA would be simple.  But how high schools calculate grades differs dramatically from one school to another.

This difference in how many points a student receives is called grade weighting. Many high schools weight grades as an incentive to have the top students take difficult classes rather than sluff off and take the easy “A” classes.  But high schools weight grades differently depending on the particular school.

Let’s say your high school gives a 1 point grade increase for honors courses and a 2 point increase for AP classes.  If you are a strong student, and takes lots of honors and AP courses, it is very easy to end up with a GPA greater than 4.0.  Some schools give 3 or 4 additional grade points, or even more, for an AP grade.   At your high school a 4.3 GPA might be the highest in the class while at another school that calculates points differently, you would need a 5.7  GPA to be at the top of your class.  Is the student with the 5.7 GPA smarter than the student with the 4.3. No, of course not.  But you start to see the problem.

And if your high school doesn’t weight grades at all you might have a 3.9 and be at the top of your class.

To deal with these inequities, many colleges use unweighted grades rather than weighted grades in admissions so that they can compare the GPA of students from diffeerent high schools.  Unweighted grades are the traditional grading of 4.0 for an “A”, 3.0 for a “B”,  on so on. Using unweighted grades, a student can not have greater than  4.0.

As a student, you need to know if the college your are interested in reports average GPA’s of admitted students, are they referring to weighted or unweighted grades. Some colleges like to report weighted grade averages of admitted freshman to make themselves look more competitive than they really are.

The average GPA of admitted freshman at the University of California Berkeley is often reported as a 4.34. If your high school does not weight grades you might think Berkeley is impossible for you to get admitted to with your mere 4.0.  On the other hand, if you have a 5.7 GPA you might think Berkeley is a safety if the average student only has a GPA of 4.34.  Both of these imaginary students would be mistaken if they didn’t understand weighted grades.  (For those of you who are interested in Berkeley, their unweighted average is 3.91.)

Even those colleges that use weighted grades in admissions will understand if your high school does not weight grades as heavily as other schools or if your school does not weight grades at all.  You will not be at a disadvantage in those circumstances.

Finding the right college requires a student to understand all of the many factors that go into the college admissions process. Now you know how to figure your “real” or unweighted GPA.

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