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outwest
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 05:12 am |
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Along with the usual suspects, I thought there were some interesting schools on this list. I question the necessity of going to a big name grad school and I think the comments are lame, but it is still interesting:
http://www.collegejournal.com/special/top50feeder.pdf
Hmm. Maybe this wasn't the best thread to put this in. If someone thinks it would be better under grad school or somewhere else, feel free to move it.
Last edited on Sun Apr 6th, 2008 05:21 am by outwest
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DesperateDad
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 05:20 am |
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The statistical problem with this "article" is geographical and economic bias, IMO. For example, the authors exclude the two top professional schools on the west coast: Stanford Business School, and UCSF Med School. And, since the focus is on top professional schools, which are also private, there is a built-in bias towards that can afford such shools -- which just so happen to be (primarily) kids who attend private east coast schools.
Edited to add the obvious: At least half of Harvard's students were high school valedictorians; 25% have perfect or near-perfect SAT scores. Take any of those high gpa-high test score kids and put them in a top 50 LAC or any of Loren Pope's colleges, and they would still end up in the same professional school. At the LAC, they would have a huge leg up for merit money, high gpa, participation in research, great recs, etc.
Last edited on Sun Apr 6th, 2008 03:30 pm by DesperateDad
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outwest
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 05:24 am |
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Yah, I thnk the list is tilted, too. I just ran across it and wanted to throw it out there. The schools differ from this list published by Reed College, for example, which rather then top business, law and medical schools is overall PhD rate:
http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html
I don't think any of it matters that much and maybe I am putting stuff out here that perpetuates the stereotypes rather then breaks them. But, don't you find some of the schools on the lists surprising? I do.
Last edited on Sun Apr 6th, 2008 05:27 am by outwest
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DesperateDad
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 06:29 am |
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Ok I'll bite: what do you find surprising?
Last edited on Sun Apr 6th, 2008 06:31 am by DesperateDad
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mackinaw
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 08:35 am |
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I don't find the data surprising, but then again I've seen it before. I do find it enlightening.
However, for a more thorough summary of undergrad origins of doctorate earners that covers more than just the top 10 schools in each discipline, and that gives actual percentages, this list published on the Swarthmore website is useful. Alert: PDF file.
 http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/baccorsum1995-2004.pdf
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patsmom
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 12:07 pm |
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The College Journal article's list is pretty outdated, too. They mention Malcolm Gillis as Rice's president. His tenure was from 1993-2004. Not sure what year the article was published but it could be anywhere from 4-15 years old.
I don't know how much the list would have changed over time, but it's something to consider.
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outwest
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 03:39 pm |
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Your list is more meaningful, Mackinaw. I had no idea that one of my Ds schools was so high on these lists. That's what I was surprised about. I mean, Bryn Mawr college? It is above all the other womens colleges (including Wellesley) and even above Yale and University of Chicago! How can that be?! No one can even pronounce the schools name, let alone have they heard of it. That was what I found so surprising.
Maybe she will like that school when we visit next week. 
Wouldn't it be nice if there was some sort of list that had 'hppiness in life' listed by undergraduate institution. That would be a useful list.
Last edited on Sun Apr 6th, 2008 03:41 pm by outwest
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DesperateDad
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 04:00 pm |
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| Outwst, I think the main difference is that some undergrad colleges have a pre-professional (med, biz, law, dent, vet, nursing) bent, and attract that type of student (think of premeds attracted to Johns Hopkins). Thus, those students may go to grad school, but not a PhD program.
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WestrnMom
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 04:34 pm |
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None of the UCs are on there, meaning to me as DesperateDad said that those who go to med school or law school aren't included in the data. It also depends on the majors and how well prepared grads are from a school to go out into the work force. I don't see going directly to grad school as necessarily a good thing or what most people do coming out of college. How far out did they follow their undergrads? Are these students who went directly to grad school after graduation?
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warblers
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 04:57 pm |
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One thing to keep in mind about the baccalaureate origins surveys is that quality of the PhD is not taken into account. X may send 10 oceanography majors to PhD programs at UAF or LSU, but that doesn't impress me as much as Y sending a few to Scripps or WHOI. The WSJ survey, despite the flaws mentioned by DesperateDad, makes an effort to combine quantity and quality.
I mean, Bryn Mawr college?...No one can even pronounce the schools name I saw much worse in Wales. 
Last edited on Sun Apr 6th, 2008 05:02 pm by warblers
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Descartes
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 09:28 pm |
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I have to disagree, Warblers. I find the "feeder school" study nearly valueless because its scope is so small. Some reasons for this have already been cited above. Let me add some more:
-- It is highly likely that lots of such grads in all programs means lots of grads in top programs. If many of a program's grads are being admitted to grad schools across the nation and awarded degrees therein, this shows real success by and general respect for a program because of the number of schools surveyed. Regional preference, institutional prejudices, and statistical noise are much less likely to influence such an analysis.
-- The Ivy law schools, in particular, are demonstrably fond of Ivy graduates. You can find data on entering classes and their baccalaureate institutions on the Web -- Harvard admits Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy graduates at a rate very disproportionate to their number of graduates. (I suspect this is also true of Ivy medical and business schools, but I have not seen statistics. I cannot say what the situation is for non-Ivy programs). While we cannot know all the reasons for this, the trend is so lopsided that I submit this is one of great unchallenged "perks" still remaining to Ivy grads: that prestigious Ivy professional degrees are much more easily available to Ivy grads and in excess of merit to be gleaned from test scores and other measures of performance. This bias makes me doubt the validity of a study in which such biased admissions play a large role.
-- In fact, I was startled to find just how much Harvard Law School preferred Harvard Colleges graduates. In the academic world, I had always understood that continuing a graduate education at the same institution from where one's undergraduate degree originates was considered vaguely incestuous (as is also the practice of a department hiring its own grad students to faculty positions). For example, I believe Harvard's philosophy majors are encouraged to move to other institutions to seek their doctorates. Apparently this is not the case for Harvard law school students. Thus, I think that doctorate program admissions are more likely to be unbiased and, therefore, trustworthy.
You would think wider-scale feeder data could be found. You can obtain it (or at least calculate it) easily enough for academic doctorates--but try to find equivalent data for law, med, business and other professional degress. It isn't to be had (I have tried many searches) publicly, although I know it is collected and distributed privately.
Why this is I can only speculate. Perhaps the biases I suspect above would be exposed. Or perhaps if such data were publicly available it could be combined with the academic doctorate data to get a much more objective measure of college "prestige" and performance than the opinion surveys used by USN&WR and other ranking schemes.
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NCEph
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Posted: Sun Apr 6th, 2008 11:57 pm |
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Descartes - You raise some interesting points, and I agree that there are some significant flaws in the ranking.
With regard to the Ivy bias among the Ivy professional schools, how do you interpret the higher ranking non-Ivy schools? I'm particularly interested in part because my son is now choosing between Williams and Duke, which did well and are, of course, non-Ivy.
Also, I think one distinction needs to be made between the undergraduates going to graduate school in the field they studied as undergraduates (you mentioned philosophy concentrators at Harvard ) and those undergraduates going to professional school. With the former, it makes a lot of sense to me that those undergraduates would benefit from graduate study in a department at another university, so that they can benefit from a whole new faculty and possibly different departmental approach to their discipline. With regard to the students heading to professional school, I don't see similar benefit to the student in going to a diffferent university. I'm not trying to address whether the bias among the Ivy professional schools may be warranted, but just pointing out that I don't see an academic negative to the student who goes to Harvard for undergraduate and law school in that arrangement.
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Descartes
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Posted: Mon Apr 7th, 2008 01:22 am |
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I don't know the situation at the Non-Ivy schools, so I left them out. I have only ever seen feeder data on incoming Law School classes at Harvard and Yale because those schools publish that data on their Web sites. And in those data I only noticed what I considered to be favoritism towards Harvard and Yale graduates and other Ivies to a lesser extent. I don't recall the numbers, but it was scores of Harvard/Yale grads vs. single digit totals for most other schools. For these two law schools, even the grads of other prestigious schools, both LAC and research, did not fair as well (yes, this includes allowance for differences in class sizes).
You are right, I think: there is less of a reason for Law Students (who really are learning a common body of knowledge and method of practice) to go to a different school than for academic trainees (who will be conducting research guided, ultimately, by their own point of view) to go elsewhere. So perhaps I should not have been so startled. But, still, I found the favoritism surprising, and a good reason not to prefer the professional "feeder school" survey over the doctoral/baccalaureate data.
Now it could be that there really are statistical performance differences between applicants which account for this, but how different are the average LSAT scores from, for example, Williams and Duke applicants compared to HY applicants likely to be? And it could be that what is going on here is that the LS admission people are only human and prefer recommendations coming from their colleagues in the departments in the next building over those in another state and find it easier to evaluate students from programs they know intimately against those from programs they know less well. In the latter case what is going on here is a kind of "old boy" network (which includes HY women applicants, too) where advantage is gained from acquaintance or near-acquantiance. Nonetheless the net effect is to preserve the desirability of HY undergraduate education by the ties to their law schools (and, I assume, medical and management schools, too.)
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outwest
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Posted: Wed Apr 16th, 2008 09:26 pm |
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So, why does it matter much if you go to an Ivy league law school or, say, Hastings?
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