Medical Schools With the Most Applicants

Post By

Ryan Brownlee

– Founder of AspiringMD

Medical schools with the most applicants ranked using 2025–2026 AAMC data. See the top 25, why they get so many applications, and whether you should apply.

If you are looking for the medical schools with the most applicants, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences currently leads U.S. MD medical schools with 17,194 applications in the 2025–2026 AAMC data. Drexel follows with 16,547 applications, Tufts with 15,455, Georgetown with 14,542, and the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University with 14,278. Those are enormous applicant pools, especially when you remember that an incoming medical school class usually contains only a few hundred students.

I would not look at those numbers and immediately cross all five schools off your list, though. Application volume tells you something important about competition, but it does not tell you whether your application fits the school, how many applicants were genuinely aligned with the program, how many people received interviews, or how many offers of admission the school ultimately made. A school receiving 15,000 applications can still be worth applying to when your academics, experiences, residency, and interests line up particularly well with what that school is looking for.

That is the part I want to focus on in this guide. I went through the current AAMC institutional applicant data, compared the schools receiving the largest pools, reviewed what applicants are saying on Reddit/r/premed and Student Doctor Network, and looked at guidance from medical school admissions officers about how schools actually evaluate applicants. The goal is not merely to give you another table of application counts that you could find elsewhere. I want you to understand why these schools receive so many applications and how much weight I would personally give that information while building a medical school list.

If you are working on your entire list right now, I would keep my broader Medical School Guide for Premeds and All About Medical Schools hub open alongside this article. Application volume is useful, but it works much better when you consider it together with GPA, MCAT, residency, mission, cost, and whether you would actually want to attend the school.

Which Medical Schools Get the Most Applicants?

According to the latest available 2025–2026 institutional applicant data, the five U.S. MD medical schools receiving the most applications are George Washington with 17,194, Drexel with 16,547, Tufts with 15,455, Georgetown with 14,542, and Temple with 14,278. Albany Medical College and Albert Einstein are not far behind, both receiving more than 14,000 applications during the same period.

The scale becomes easier to appreciate when you compare those individual school totals with the national applicant pool. The AAMC reported that 54,699 people applied to U.S. MD medical schools in 2025, an increase of 5.3% from the previous year. Those 54,699 applicants generated many more school-level applications because nearly everyone applies to multiple programs, so the 17,194 applications received by George Washington do not represent 17,194 people who applied nowhere else.

That difference between people and applications is extremely important. You are competing against a large applicant pool at these schools, but you should not add the application totals across schools and interpret that number as hundreds of thousands of unique premeds competing against you.

Medical Schools With the Most Applicants: 2025–2026 Data

I built the table below from the current 2025–2026 institutional application data reported through the AAMC FACTS system, with the residency breakdown included because it helps explain why many of these schools attract such enormous national applicant pools. The AAMC’s current institutional dataset is available through its 2025 FACTS applicant and matriculant tables.

There is a pattern in the final column that I think is more useful than simply memorizing the ranking. Twenty-one of these 25 schools receive approximately 84% or more of their applications from nonresidents. Many are private schools with little or no meaningful home-state advantage for applicants, while others are public schools that attract unusually broad national interest.

This helps explain why the highest-volume list looks very different from a list of medical schools with the highest median MCAT scores. A school does not need to be viewed as one of the handful of most academically selective programs in the country to receive 12,000 or 15,000 applications. It needs to appeal to a very large number of applicants who believe there is at least a plausible reason to apply.

How I Calculated This List

I am using school-level applications, not unique national applicants, and I am focusing on U.S. MD programs because the AAMC publishes a standardized institution-by-institution table for the 2025–2026 academic year. The AAMC identifies its Table A-1 specifically as “U.S. Medical School Applications and Matriculants by School, State of Legal Residence, and Gender, 2025–2026.”

I also deliberately did not label matriculants divided by applicants as a medical school’s acceptance rate. You will see that calculation on some ranking websites, but an entering class of 150 students does not mean the school offered admission to only 150 people. Some admitted students choose another medical school, which means a school normally must extend more offers than the number of people who ultimately matriculate.

I dealt with the same denominator problem when researching my Medical Schools With the Highest Post-Interview Acceptance Rates guide. If a school interviews 600 people, admits 350, and enrolls 180, dividing 180 by 600 gives you the percentage of interviewees who eventually matriculated, not the percentage who were accepted.

That distinction becomes particularly important in an article like this because application counts are so large. Dividing a class of 130 by 17,194 applications produces a frighteningly small number, but that is not automatically the school’s true offer-of-admission rate. I would rather show you exactly what the available data measure than turn a convenient calculation into an admissions statistic it does not actually represent.

Why Do Some Medical Schools Get So Many Applications?

One of the strongest patterns is geographic accessibility. Many of the medical schools on this list accept applications nationally without the kind of overwhelming resident preference that can make certain state medical schools unattractive to applicants living elsewhere.

Look again at George Washington, Georgetown, Tulane, Vermont, Dartmouth, Drexel, Tufts, and several others in the table. More than 90% of the applicant pool at each comes from outside the school’s state or district. An applicant in California, Florida, Ohio, New York, or nearly anywhere else can look at one of these programs and reasonably decide that geography alone does not disqualify the application.

Location probably contributes as well. Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Diego, San Francisco, and other major metropolitan areas represented here offer large healthcare systems, research environments, diverse patient populations, and places where many students can imagine spending four years.

Academic accessibility can also increase volume, although I would be careful with what that means. Some high-volume medical schools have GPA and MCAT distributions that place them within consideration for a wider range of applicants than schools whose median MCAT scores sit around the very top of the scale. That does not make the high-volume school easy to enter. It means more people may decide their academic profile is plausible enough to justify applying.

Reputation also operates differently from raw ranking prestige. Schools such as Drexel, Temple, Tufts, Georgetown, Tulane, Loyola, Rush, Jefferson, and Albany are familiar names to applicants researching broadly, and many are repeatedly recommended on school lists. Once a school becomes a commonly discussed national option for applicants across many states, its application volume can perpetuate itself.

Why Does George Washington Get So Many Medical School Applications?

George Washington currently sits at the top of the MD list with 17,194 applications. Of those applicants, 17,108 were classified as nonresidents in the underlying residency data, meaning the pool is extraordinarily national rather than being driven primarily by applicants from one local jurisdiction.

That broad reach makes sense for a private medical school in Washington, D.C. Applicants from essentially every part of the country can consider it without first asking whether they are competing against a huge protected in-state pool. The location also creates natural appeal for students interested in health policy, public health, advocacy, research, urban medicine, and clinical training in a major metropolitan healthcare environment.

What I would not do is apply simply because George Washington frequently appears on national school-list recommendations. When almost 17,200 applications are entering the same system, a generic application has very little helping it stand out. I would want a specific academic, experiential, geographic, clinical, service, or professional reason that made GW more than another private MD program I added because I was anxious about having enough schools.

Why Does Drexel Get So Many Medical School Applications?

Drexel received 16,547 applications in the 2025–2026 data, the second-highest total among U.S. MD schools. About 93% of those applications came from outside Pennsylvania, reinforcing the idea that Drexel functions as a genuinely national destination rather than a predominantly state-based opportunity.

Drexel also enrolls a comparatively large medical school class, which is worth remembering before looking at the application total in isolation. A school receiving 16,500 applications for a class of roughly 300 is in a different situation from a school receiving a similar number while enrolling 100 students, although neither comparison gives you a true acceptance rate unless you also know total offers.

I would still classify Drexel as a high-volume application where fit needs to be intentional. If it belongs on your list because you genuinely like the program, your academics are appropriate, and you can explain why its training environment fits you, the number of applications alone would not scare me away. If you have twenty-eight schools already and Drexel is number twenty-nine because you saw the name on somebody else’s Reddit list, that is a weaker reason to spend the additional primary fee, secondary fee, and writing time.

Why Do Tufts and Georgetown Receive So Many Applications?

Tufts received 15,455 applications, while Georgetown received 14,542 in the current AAMC-aligned data. More than 92% of the Tufts applicant pool and more than 99% of Georgetown’s came from outside the school’s home state or district.

Both schools occupy a space that naturally produces a lot of applications. They are recognizable private medical schools in desirable metropolitan areas, they recruit nationally, and applicants with many different backgrounds can at least imagine a plausible pathway to applying.

Georgetown is also a good example of why you should check the year attached to every admissions statistic you see online. Its current public-facing school information may display numbers from a different class or reporting snapshot than the AAMC 2025–2026 institutional table. I would rather tell you which dataset I am ranking than silently combine numbers from different entering classes.

Why Are Temple, Albany, Einstein, Tulane, Loyola, and Rush So Popular?

These six schools all received more than 13,000 applications in the latest table. They are also names that appear again and again when applicants discuss broadly accessible private or relatively nationally visible MD options.

Tulane is especially striking because only about 3% of its applicant pool in this dataset came from Louisiana. Its official class information has likewise reported 13,814 applicants for a class of 190, matching the current application total used here.

Loyola and Rush add another variable: institutional mission. A school can have a GPA and MCAT range that makes an applicant feel academically plausible while still being a poor actual fit if that person’s experiences do not align with what the program prioritizes. This is why I would pair applicant-volume research with my guide on how to find and fit a medical school’s mission instead of treating every school with attainable-looking statistics as interchangeable.

Temple and Albany illustrate another reason high application volume can be deceptive. Tens of thousands of people may see enough statistical or geographic compatibility to submit, but admissions committees still have to decide which applications make sense for their particular class. The denominator is enormous, yet not every applicant in that denominator looks equally appropriate for the program.

Are the Medical Schools With the Most Applicants the Hardest to Get Into?

Not necessarily. Most applications and most selective admissions profile are related concepts, but they are not synonyms.

Some of the most academically selective medical schools in the United States are not in the top five for raw application volume. Conversely, some schools receiving 13,000 to 17,000 applications have academic ranges that make them appear realistic to a comparatively broad group of applicants, which is part of the reason so many people submit applications in the first place.

The University of California schools make the point nicely. UCLA appears in the top 25 with 12,474 applications, UC San Diego with 10,400, and UCSF with 10,372. Their applicant pools are enormous, but evaluating how difficult they are to enter also requires considering academic profiles, interview selection, state and regional considerations, mission, and class size. I go into those differences much more deeply in my UC medical school admissions comparison.

I would therefore avoid using this ranking as a second version of an acceptance-rate ranking. It answers a narrower and useful question: Where are the largest applicant pools? You still need other information to understand what those pools mean for you.

Does More Medical School Applicants Mean a Lower Acceptance Rate?

Usually, a huge applicant pool creates substantial competition for a limited number of seats, but you cannot calculate the true acceptance rate from applicant count and class size alone. Medical schools commonly make more offers than they have seats because not every accepted student matriculates.

Imagine a school receives 15,000 applications, offers admission to 400 applicants, and ultimately enrolls 200. Its true offer-of-admission rate would be about 2.7%, while matriculants divided by applications would be about 1.3%. Calling the second number the acceptance rate would make the school appear roughly twice as selective as it actually was in terms of receiving an offer.

This is why I am particularly cautious with websites displaying very precise “acceptance rates” that appear to equal enrolled students divided by applicants. Before using one of those numbers to decide whether a school is realistic, find out whether the numerator represents offers of admission or matriculants.

What Is a “Low-Yield” Medical School?

“Low yield” is an informal applicant-community term rather than an official AAMC classification. Premeds generally use it to describe schools that receive a very large number of applications relative to the number of available seats, particularly nationally accessible schools where applicants may have difficulty distinguishing themselves within a huge pool.

The phrase can become misleading when it is interpreted as “do not apply here.” A school receiving 14,000 applications can be low yield for the average person dropping it casually onto a thirty-school list while still being a sensible application for somebody whose academic profile and experiences line up exceptionally well with that program.

I think of applicant volume as a school-list risk factor, not a rejection prediction. If your list contains three high-volume programs that fit you extremely well, I would not automatically remove them. If fifteen of your twenty-five MD schools come from this table and several were included only because they are commonly described as OOS friendly, I would take a much closer look at whether the list is balanced.

Should You Avoid Medical Schools With More Than 10,000 Applicants?

I would not use 10,000 applications as a hard cutoff. You would eliminate many excellent and potentially appropriate programs without considering whether you actually fit them.

Instead, ask why each school is receiving an application from you. If you can explain why the academics are realistic, why the mission connects with something you have genuinely done, why the residency situation makes sense, and why you would be happy to attend, then high application volume becomes one piece of context rather than a reason to panic.

If the explanation is basically “it accepts out-of-state applicants and my MCAT is around the median,” I would be more cautious. Thousands of other applicants may have reached exactly the same conclusion.

This is especially useful if you are applying with a score where list construction requires some extra care. My guide to medical schools for a 505 MCAT explains why I would rather build around actual fit and current school statistics than copy a collection of schools simply because their MCAT averages look relatively approachable.

How Many High-Applicant Medical Schools Should Be on Your List?

There is no number that works for everyone because your state residency, GPA, MCAT, activities, mission fit, finances, and overall application strategy change the answer. A person with several strong in-state options can afford to build a different national list from someone living in a state with very few realistic resident-favored programs.

When I applied to medical school in 2023, I submitted applications to 25 programs. What I learned from that experience is that every additional school brings more than another line on AMCAS: it can mean another secondary, another fee, additional school research, more deadlines, and another opportunity to submit a rushed essay if you stretched your list farther than your available time.

I would therefore evaluate your high-volume schools together rather than individually. One may make perfect sense. A second may also fit extremely well. By the time you are looking at your eighth or tenth school receiving 12,000 or more applications, I would want to know whether you intentionally selected those programs or whether your list gradually became concentrated in the same nationally popular category.

My full How to Build a Medical School List guide goes through the other pieces I would balance alongside application volume, including academic fit, state residency, mission, prerequisites, MD versus DO considerations, and cost.

Out-of-State Friendliness Helps Explain This List

One of the strongest findings from the current data is how nationally distributed these applicant pools are. George Washington, Georgetown, Tulane, Vermont, and Dartmouth each received approximately 97% to 99% of their applications from outside their home state or district. Drexel, Tufts, Temple, Wake Forest, Emory, Pittsburgh, Boston University, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Colorado also received more than 90% from nonresidents.

That does not automatically tell you the proportion of matriculants who are nonresidents, and it certainly does not prove that an out-of-state applicant has the same odds as a resident at every public program. It tells you that applicants across the country perceive these schools as accessible enough to consider.

For public schools specifically, I would go one step further and investigate how the applicant pool translates into interviews and enrollment. My Most Out-of-State-Friendly Public Medical Schools guide is designed for exactly that question, because a large nonresident applicant pool does not by itself prove a public school is equally friendly to nonresident applicants.

How Should You Use Applicant Volume When Building Your Medical School List?

I would first build the academically and geographically plausible portion of the list before worrying about raw application volume. Compare your GPA and MCAT with current school distributions, investigate residency restrictions, verify prerequisites, and remove programs where you would not realistically attend if accepted.

Then I would evaluate mission. A school receiving 14,000 applications has plenty of academically qualified applicants available, so being able to show a coherent relationship between what you have done and what that institution values becomes particularly important. The AAMC itself advises applicants to consider mission alignment, state residency, educational style, location, and whether they would genuinely attend a school rather than simply maximizing the number of applications submitted.

The AAMC notes that applicants currently apply to an average of about 16 medical schools, but the right number is individual. Its broader recommendation is much more useful than chasing a universal total: apply broadly enough to create opportunity, but focus on medical schools you would actually attend. Read the AAMC’s school-list guidance

Once I had a tentative list, I would mark the high-volume schools. If a very large portion of the list came from this article, I would ask whether I had accidentally built a collection of nationally popular schools instead of a balanced list that reflects my own strongest opportunities.

What Reddit and r/premed Say About the Most-Applied-To Medical Schools

For this article, I searched Reddit and r/premed discussions about high-volume and “low-yield” medical schools and summarized the recurring themes rather than using individual comments as admissions facts. That separation is important because Reddit can be excellent for understanding what applicants are worried about, but a highly upvoted comment does not replace AAMC data or a medical school’s admissions office.

The school names discussed by applicants overlap remarkably well with the current data. Reddit threads repeatedly identify George Washington, Georgetown, Drexel, Tulane, Tufts, Temple, Loyola, Rush, Rosalind Franklin, Albany, Einstein, and Jefferson as schools with unusually large pools. In one r/premed discussion, applicants specifically connected the phenomenon with out-of-state accessibility, major-city locations, recognizable programs, and academic ranges that encourage a broad group of students to apply.

A second theme was more useful than the school names themselves. Applicants frequently warned each other against filling an entire school list with high-volume programs. In school-list discussions, the recommendation was usually not “never apply to GW, Tulane, Drexel, or Georgetown.” It was to balance those applications with schools where residency, geography, academics, or mission gave the applicant a more individualized reason to be competitive.

I also found an important correction within the Reddit discussions themselves. Some commenters initially divided class size by applications and interpreted the result as an acceptance rate, while others pointed out that schools admit more people than ultimately matriculate. That is exactly why I have avoided presenting the matriculant-to-applicant percentages in this guide as official acceptance rates.

There is another pattern I would be careful with: applicants often try to estimate how many of the 15,000 applications are “actually competitive.” You cannot reliably remove thousands of people from the denominator just because you assume their MCAT is too low, their essays are weak, or they applied without serious interest. Every admissions committee has its own review process, and anonymous applicants on Reddit do not have access to the entire pool.

My takeaway from r/premed is therefore fairly measured. High-volume schools deserve extra attention when you are evaluating the balance of your list, but Reddit does not provide evidence that a particular applicant should automatically avoid them.

What Student Doctor Network Says About High-Volume and Low-Yield Medical Schools

For this article, I also searched Student Doctor Network discussions and summarized the recurring advice I found there. SDN has been discussing “low-yield” schools for many years, which is helpful because it shows that this is not merely a phrase invented during the current cycle.

The familiar list appears there too. A long-running SDN school-list framework places programs such as Jefferson, Tulane, Tufts, Georgetown, Loyola, Rosalind Franklin, Drexel, Temple, George Washington, Albany, and Rush into a “low-yield” category, while individual school-list discussions frequently flag the same group.

What I found more useful was that experienced SDN contributors do not always recommend removing those schools. In one school-list discussion, a verified physician specifically told an applicant that including the low-yield schools on an otherwise reasonable list could still produce interviews. Another discussion pushed the applicant back toward a more important question: what is your purpose as a future physician, and how does that align with the missions of the schools you selected?

A January 2026 SDN discussion also made the same denominator point I emphasized above: applicants should not simply compare applications with class size because successful applicants can receive multiple acceptances and schools generally make more offers than the number of seats ultimately filled.

I think that is the most useful way to interpret the SDN discussions. The community label can alert you to schools receiving unusually large numbers of applications, but it cannot tell you whether your specific application is a good fit. Use the label to investigate more deeply, not to substitute for the investigation.

What Medical School Admissions Officers Say About Standing Out in a Huge Applicant Pool

I also looked specifically for guidance from medical school admissions officers rather than relying only on applicant forums. The overlap between what admissions professionals emphasize and what I recommend for these high-volume schools is fairly consistent: schools are not simply sorting fifteen thousand applications from highest MCAT to lowest MCAT.

In the AAMC’s explanation of how medical schools review applications, Irene Tise from Wake Forest discusses evidence of academic readiness, while Lori Nicolaysen, a former assistant dean of admissions, emphasizes demonstrated personal initiative. The broader AAMC guidance explains that schools differ in mission, policies, and requirements and look at both the ability to handle the academic demands of medical school and the attributes applicants would bring to medicine.

Another AAMC article asked admissions officers what they wished applicants understood before applying. Their advice included being able to tell your story, obtaining meaningful clinical experience, and making sure your goals align with the medical school’s mission.

You can read the AAMC’s broader explanation of how medical schools review applications, but I think the implication for this article is particularly useful. If 14,000 people apply to a school, you cannot control the denominator. You can control whether your application gives the admissions committee a compelling reason to move you out of that denominator and into the much smaller group it wants to know more about.

This is also why I would resist the temptation to make your secondary increasingly generic when you apply to more schools. A paragraph about “excellent research, a diverse patient population, and a collaborative curriculum” could describe dozens of programs. A paragraph connecting a particular part of your history with a specific priority of that institution gives the reader information that belongs to your application.

Does a Huge Applicant Pool Mean the Admissions Committee Will Not Read My Application?

A large pool does not mean your application is literally thrown into a lottery. Medical schools have review systems designed to move thousands of applications through eligibility checks, academic review, holistic evaluation, and interview selection, although the exact workflow differs by institution.

Schools may use academic screens, prerequisite requirements, residency eligibility, mission considerations, application completeness, experiences, essays, letters, and other criteria at different stages. The AAMC describes medical school admissions as a process in which institutional expectations and missions vary, while admissions teams evaluate both preparation for the curriculum and broader applicant attributes.

The practical lesson is that the number 17,194 should not make you think your application has a 1-in-17,194 random chance. It should remind you that the committee has many alternatives, which makes it particularly important that your application be academically credible, complete, thoughtful, and genuinely aligned with the program.

Is Applying Early More Important at Schools With Lots of Applicants?

Application timing can matter at schools using rolling admissions, but I would not turn applicant volume into a claim that every high-volume medical school operates identically. You should verify the admissions timeline and review process for each program rather than assuming that a school receiving 15,000 applications must evaluate applications in strict chronological order.

I would still prefer to submit a strong application early in the cycle rather than wait unnecessarily. What I would not do is sacrifice the quality of your primary or send a rushed secondary simply because the school appears on a high-volume list. A thoughtful application submitted on a reasonable timeline is more useful than an early application that does a poor job showing who you are.

Do the Most-Applied-To Medical Schools Screen Before Sending Secondaries?

Policies vary by school, and application volume alone does not tell you whether a program performs a meaningful pre-secondary screen. Some schools send secondary applications broadly, while others assess primary applications against specific eligibility or screening criteria first.

This becomes financially relevant with the schools on this list because receiving a secondary is not necessarily evidence that you have already survived a highly selective admissions cut. Before paying another fee, I would still ask whether the program remains a sensible fit for your application and whether you can write a convincing school-specific response.

What About DO Medical Schools With Lots of Applicants?

I kept the primary ranking MD-specific because the AAMC’s current Table A-1 gives us one standardized institution-by-institution dataset for U.S. MD schools. Osteopathic medical schools use AACOMAS, and AACOM publishes its own application reports, so combining the two systems into one table without carefully matching reporting definitions and years can create misleading comparisons.

AACOM reported 23,114 osteopathic medical school applicants in 2025–2026, and its institution-level report for the 2025 entering year showed individual colleges ranging from 1,183 to 8,697 applicants, with an average of 4,340. AACOM subsequently reported that the 2026 application cycle produced 26,506 applicants and 242,076 individual college designations, showing that osteopathic application volume is also substantial and growing.

Because those datasets are organized separately, I would rather give DO applicant volume its own analysis than force it into an MD table and imply that every number was collected in exactly the same way.

How Many Medical School Applications Is Considered a Lot?

At the individual school level, I would view 10,000 or more applications as a genuinely large pool, particularly because only 25 MD programs in the current data exceed roughly 10,300. Once a school is receiving 12,000, 14,000, or 17,000 applications, you are dealing with one of the largest pools in the country.

I would not create an artificial line where 9,900 applications are fine and 10,001 suddenly makes a school dangerous. Applicant volume is a continuum, and its significance depends on class size, residency distribution, mission, interview practices, academic profile, and your own relationship with the program.

For your personal list, the more useful question is how many high-volume schools you are stacking together. Having five schools with 11,000 applicants may be perfectly reasonable when each has a strong rationale. Having twenty such schools because they all looked nationally accessible deserves another review.

Which Medical Schools Get the Fewest Applicants?

The other side of this analysis can be just as helpful because schools with relatively small applicant pools often have a reason for receiving fewer applications. Some have strong residency requirements, regional missions, smaller geographic recruiting areas, or other characteristics that naturally narrow who should apply.

I put that side of the data into my companion guide to Medical Schools With the Fewest Applicants. I would read the two articles together rather than assuming high volume is automatically bad and low volume is automatically good.

A school receiving far fewer applications may be an excellent opportunity for someone who matches its mission and residency preferences, while being effectively unrealistic for somebody who does not. Applicant count only becomes useful after you understand why the count is high or low.

Should You Apply to the Medical Schools With the Most Applicants?

Yes, some of them may absolutely belong on your list. I would just want every application to have a reason beyond the fact that the school appears frequently in premed discussions.

When I was building my own medical school list, I found it much more useful to think about how the pieces of my application fit together than to treat every statistical category separately. GPA and MCAT matter, but so do research, clinical exposure, service, residency, mission, secondary essays, and whether you would actually be excited to train there.

If George Washington is one of your favorite programs and your experiences connect naturally with what it offers, 17,194 applications would not convince me to abandon it. If you added GW, Georgetown, Drexel, Tufts, Tulane, Temple, Loyola, Rush, Albany, Jefferson, Rosalind Franklin, and several other high-volume schools simply because they appeared on somebody else’s generic “mid-tier MD” list, I would revisit the overall construction.

You can also browse my full list of accredited U.S. MD medical schools before assuming the same handful of nationally discussed programs are your only options. There are many medical schools outside the top 25 by applicant volume, and some may fit your background considerably better.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Medical Schools With the Most Applicants

What medical school gets the most applications?

George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences received the most applications among U.S. MD medical schools in the current 2025–2026 institutional data, with 17,194 applications. Drexel was second with 16,547, followed by Tufts with 15,455.

The ranking can change from cycle to cycle, so I would always attach a year to this statistic rather than repeating an older list. Several articles still ranking in search use application data that are many years old.

What are the top five most-applied-to medical schools?

For 2025–2026, the top five U.S. MD programs by applications are George Washington, Drexel, Tufts, Georgetown, and the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. Each received more than 14,000 applications.

They also share another important characteristic: the overwhelming majority of their applicant pools come from outside their home state or district. That broad national accessibility is likely one reason these programs attract so much attention.

Why does George Washington Medical School get so many applications?

George Washington is a private medical school in Washington, D.C. with an overwhelmingly national applicant pool. Approximately 99.5% of its 17,194 applications in the current residency data were from applicants classified outside the district.

Its location and nationally accessible admissions profile give students throughout the country a plausible reason to consider it. That broad appeal also means I would want a meaningful school-specific reason before adding it to an already long list.

Is Drexel a low-yield medical school?

Applicants commonly describe Drexel as low yield because it receives an exceptionally large number of applications relative to its entering class. The current data support the high-volume portion of that description: Drexel received 16,547 applications in 2025–2026.

I would still treat “low yield” as informal applicant shorthand rather than an official admissions category. If Drexel fits your academic profile, experiences, interests, and preferences well, the application can still be completely reasonable.

Is Georgetown a low-yield medical school?

Georgetown is frequently described that way in r/premed and SDN discussions, and the current application volume helps explain why. The AAMC-aligned data show 14,542 applications for 2025–2026, with nearly the entire applicant pool coming from outside Washington, D.C.

That does not tell you whether your Georgetown application is low yield. Mission alignment, academics, experiences, writing, and the overall strength of your candidacy remain much more individualized.

Does applying to a medical school with 15,000 applicants waste money?

Not automatically. If you are a genuinely strong fit for that particular program, I would rather submit the application than reject yourself solely because a large number of other people are applying.

The calculation changes when you are adding the school without a compelling reason or when your list already contains many similar high-volume applications. Application fees and secondary-writing time are real costs, so I would rather concentrate them where you can explain why the school makes sense.

Is class size divided by applications the medical school acceptance rate?

No. That calculation tells you the percentage of applicants who ultimately matriculated, not necessarily the percentage who were offered admission.

Medical schools generally need to make more offers than they have seats because some accepted applicants choose other programs. Whenever you see an unusually tiny acceptance percentage online, check which numerator the website used before relying on it.

Are the most-applied-to medical schools also the most competitive?

Some are extremely competitive, but application volume alone cannot rank admissions difficulty. Academic profiles, interview rates, class sizes, mission, residency preferences, applicant quality, and total admission offers all contribute to selectivity.

A school can receive fewer applications but have an exceptionally strong applicant pool, while another can receive a much larger pool because its location and academic range encourage many more people to apply. I would therefore use this ranking as one part of school-list research rather than as a substitute for acceptance and admissions data.

Should I remove low-yield medical schools from my list?

I would remove a high-volume school when I cannot identify a convincing reason it belongs on my list, not simply because somebody on Reddit called it low yield. If the school fits extremely well, I would keep it and make sure the application communicates that fit.

What I would avoid is building the majority of my list from schools that all receive enormous national applicant pools. A balanced medical school list should give you several different ways for your application to make sense rather than repeatedly placing you in essentially the same admissions situation.

Final Thoughts on the Medical Schools With the Most Applicants

Seeing 17,194 applications next to one medical school can make the admissions process feel even more intimidating than it already does. I understand why applicants look at numbers like these and wonder how anyone gets noticed in a pool that large.

I would use the data differently. Applicant volume can tell you where competition is especially crowded, help you recognize when your list contains too many of the same nationally popular programs, and encourage you to be more intentional about where you spend your application money and writing time. It cannot tell you whether an admissions committee will find your particular combination of academics, clinical experience, service, research, leadership, life experiences, and goals compelling.

The current top of the list is dominated by programs that recruit nationally, many in major metropolitan areas, and the residency data make that pattern unusually clear. That is valuable information because it explains why these schools receive so much traffic without requiring us to pretend that all 15,000 applicants are interchangeable.

I would therefore keep high-volume schools that genuinely make sense for you, remove the ones that are there only because they appear on generic school lists, and make sure the rest of your applications give you meaningful breadth. The strongest list is not the one with the fewest competitive schools or the greatest number of applications. It is the one where you can look at every program and explain, with real evidence from your own background, why applying there was worth one of your limited spots.