How a 98% BS/MD Acceptance Rate Is Manufactured

If you are a parent or a student weighing a BS/MD admissions company, you have seen the numbers. Ninety percent. Ninety-five percent. Ninety-eight percent. They sit at the top of the page, next to the price, and they do exactly what they are designed to do. They make a near-impossible process feel close to guaranteed if you simply pay.

I want to show you how those figures are built, not to attack anyone, but so you can read them the way a physician reads a drug trial. A doctor does not ask whether a result sounds impressive. A doctor asks who was studied, what was counted, and what happened to the people who were left out. Once you ask those questions, a 98 percent rate stops being a promise and becomes what it actually is: a sentence with most of the facts removed.

I can explain this because I have done the opposite kind of work. In a 2021 Academic Medicine paper, my co-authors and I analyzed AAMC data on the outcomes of combined baccalaureate-MD graduates. Real outcomes research has rules. You define your population before you count. You report who you could not account for. You compare against a group that did not get the intervention. None of those rules apply to a number a company prints about itself, and that difference is the whole story.

Every percentage is a fraction. A success rate is the number of students who got in, divided by the number of students counted. The headline only shows you the top of that fraction. The bottom is where the figure is made.

Ask a simple question: counted out of whom? A company can count every family who paid. It can count only the families who finished the full program. It can count only the students it labels "qualified." It can quietly drop the students who withdrew, who switched to a traditional pre-med path, or who never made it to an interview. Each of those choices produces a different number from the exact same set of students, and a company is free to pick the one that reads best.

A rate with an undisclosed denominator is not a result. It is a decision about what to leave out.

The second lever is the definition of success itself. To a family, success has a clear meaning. It is an acceptance to a program the student actually wants to attend.

A success rate does not have to use that definition. Admission to any direct-medical program can count as a win, including the least selective option on a long list, and including programs that guarantee an interview rather than a seat. A student who is admitted to a safety program and rejected everywhere they hoped to go is, on the scoreboard, a success. The number goes up. The family's real goal may have been missed entirely.

This is why the headline rate and a family's lived experience can both be accurate and feel like they describe different worlds.

This is the most important one, and the hardest to see from the outside.

Many admissions companies screen who they take on. They can decline applicants who look like long shots and accept the ones who already have the profile that wins. When a company works mostly with students who would have had strong odds on their own, a high acceptance rate is close to guaranteed before anyone does a single hour of advising.

A rate built on a pre-selected pool measures the students, not the service. It is the equivalent of a tutoring company that only enrolls students already earning top marks, then advertises that its students earn top marks. The claim is true. The causation is missing.

For a family, this is the trap that matters most, because the families who most need help, the ones with a real but uncertain case, are sometimes the ones a rate-protecting company is least motivated to take.

Even if a company counted every student honestly and defined success as the family would, one piece would still be missing. A rate on its own cannot show that the service caused the outcome.

To know whether advising made the difference, you would need to compare against similar students who did not use it. That is what a control group is for, and it is why a credible medical study has one. No admissions company runs that comparison, because it cannot, and because the result might be uncomfortable. A strong student admitted to a strong program proves that strong students get admitted. It does not prove what the service added.

This is not a reason to refuse all help. Good guidance is real and it matters. It is a reason to stop treating a percentage as evidence of anything, and to judge a service by what it actually does for you.

You do not have to be a statistician to test a claim. You have to ask the questions the headline is built to skip. Bring these to any company that advertises a rate, and notice whether the answers are specific or whether they dissolve into "we don't disclose that."

1. Who is in the denominator? Does the rate include every student who paid, including those who withdrew or never reached an interview? Or only a chosen subset?
2. What counts as a success? Does admission to the least selective program count the same as the student's first choice? Are guaranteed-interview outcomes counted as wins?
3. Do you screen students before accepting them? If the company only takes strong applicants, the rate describes the students it selected, not the help it provided.
4. Compared to what? What do similar students achieve without your service? If there is no comparison, the rate cannot show cause.
5. Who verified the number? Has any outside party audited it, or is the company the only source for a figure about itself?

A company that does honest work will not be offended by these questions. It will have answers. A company selling a number will change the subject.

It would be easy for me to print a high percentage. I worked inside a combined program as an assistant dean, I came up through one as a student, and I have published the research on how these graduates turn out. I could assemble a number that looks excellent and defend every digit.

I will not, for two reasons. First, an honest rate would require the verified denominator and the comparison group that no admissions company actually has, so any number I published would carry the same hidden choices I just described. Second, and more simply, no one can control an admissions committee's decision, and a figure that implies otherwise is a promise no physician should make to a family.

What I can promise is the honest version of the assessment. Here is the case the student's application currently makes. Here is where it is strong. Here is where it is vulnerable. Here is what to change, and here is when a BS/MD path is the wrong fit and a traditional route serves the student better. That is a thing I can stand behind, because it is true regardless of the outcome.