Top Feeders to Medical School

Updated December 2022

Earning an excellent GPA in a rigorous, usually science-based major and scoring well on the MCATs are prerequisites to earning a spot in any American medical school. Those seeking a spot in the nation’s most selective medical programs need to meet that criteria AND bring other compelling factors to the table. One such factor can be the prestige of your undergraduate college. While attending an elite undergraduate school is not a prerequisite for gaining acceptance into an elite medical school, it certainly can help, as our analysis demonstrates. This leads us to the Top Feeders to Medical School.

The two lists that follow showcase the top 30 “feeder” schools into the most highly-ranked MD programs. On the first list, for each school, we look at the raw number of students who go on to attend elite MD programs, as well as the two MD programs enrolling the most graduates from that undergraduate school. The second list looks at the top 30 producers when adjusted for a school’s undergraduate enrollment, which allows us to highlight schools that may be smaller in size, but that still send a consistent flow of graduates to the world’s premier medical schools.

In order to identify "top feeder” colleges, we relied on publicly available data from LinkedIn, a professional networking site featuring profiles of approximately 170 million workers across the United States. Specifically, we identified and analyzed the undergraduate backgrounds of more than 27,300 individuals who enrolled at twenty five of America’s most reputable MD programs, including those at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Pennsylvania (Perelman), New York University (Grossman), Stanford University, Columbia University, Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, UCLA (Geffen), University of California-San Francisco, Washington University, Cornell University (Weill), Duke University, University of Washington, University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, Yale University, University of Chicago (Pritzker), Northwestern University (Feinberg), Vanderbilt University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, University of California at San Diego, Baylor College of Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Case Western Reserve University, and Emory University.

Top Feeder Rankings (by total graduates enrolled)

Top Feeder Rankings (adjusted for undergraduate enrollment)

Does institutional selectivity matter?

 When applying to medical school, yes, it appears that institutional selectivity does in fact play a role. In our sample, of the students who went on to enroll at America’s best MD programs, approximately 63% graduated from colleges categorized as “Most Selective” or “Extremely Selective.” Only 17% of elite medical school students in our sample graduated from schools indicated as minimally selective or non-selective. Click here to see how we group colleges by selectivity.