Best Placement HERE to Top MBA/MD/JD Programs

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Some may remember the Wall Street Journal study which revealed the colleges sending the greatest percentage of their class to top business, law, and medical schools. The study was imperfect. For medical school it included Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCSF, and Yale; for law school it included U Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, U Michigan, and Yale; for business it included Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, U Pennsylvania (Wharton), and U Chicago.</p>

<p>The Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition</p>

<p>One of the biggest problems with the study was the regional bias (it included no schools from the South and only one from the West) and the exclusion of some notable programs like say Stanford’s professional schools and perhaps the overrepresented University of Chicago (it’s business and law school were both used while that wasn’t the case for U Pennsylvania, Duke, or UVA). Harvard was used for all three categories, which could have inflated Harvard’s numbers as well.</p>

<p>Over time I worked on a study (nerdy I know) that was more broad and all-encompassing that looked at the undergraduate institutions attended by one current class at the top 15 law, business, and medical schools according to U.S. News and World Report. The data was taken from Facebook groups like “SLS 2010” (for Stanford Law, for example). Every school had a Facebook group that represented at least one class year of students, and most profiles listed the undergraduate institution attended by the student*.</p>

<p>I think the use of percentages as opposed to total number was not a great idea for WSJ because it doesn’t make sense to count say NYU’s Tisch school in the numbers (how many of them are really pre-law, pre-med, or pre-MBA?), but they did.</p>

<p>My Data was as follows (by number):</p>

<p>(1) 234 - Harvard
(2) 177 - Stanford
(3) 177 - U Pennsylvania
(4) 154 - Yale
(5) 150 - UC Berkeley
(6) 143 - Duke
(7) 134 - Cornell
(8) 123 - Princeton
(9) 121 - Columbia (includes Barnard College/CGS)
(10) 111 - U Michigan
(11) 111 - Georgetown
(12) 102 - UCLA
(13) 94 - U Virginia
(14) 89 - Dartmouth
(15) 87 - Brown
(16) 87 - Northwestern
(17) 75 - MIT
74 - U Texas - Austin
59 - Johns Hopkins
56 - NYU
53 - Rice U
51 - Washington U in St. Louis
50 - UCSD
48 - USC
47 - U Notre Dame
46 - U Chicago
42 - Emory, U North Carolina - Chapel Hill
41 - Amherst, Tufts
38 - U Florida
37 - Vanderbilt, Williams
36 - The Claremont Colleges
33 - U Washington
32 - U Wisconsin - Madison
30 - George Washington U
28 - Boston College
27 - Wellesley
26 - Swarthmore, U Maryland</p>

<p>By number (as opposed to percentage), the WSJ data looked like this:</p>

<li>Harvard (358)</li>
<li>Yale (231)</li>
<li>Stanford (181)</li>
<li>Princeton (174)</li>
<li>U Michigan (156)</li>
<li>U Pennsylvania (153)</li>
<li>Duke (139)</li>
<li>Columbia (118)</li>
<li>UC Berkeley (118)</li>
<li>Cornell (115)</li>
<li>Brown (98)</li>
<li>Dartmouth (93)</li>
<li>MIT (92)</li>
<li>UCLA (92)</li>
<li>Georgetown (85)</li>
<li>U Virginia (82)</li>
<li>Northwestern (73)</li>
<li>U Chicago (59)</li>
<li>U Texas – Austin (49)</li>
<li>Williams (47)</li>
</ol>

<p>*Note: Northwestern’s Kellogg school did not have a Facebook group for a current class so I used an old class. As a result, I had to count some profiles that just listed “Northwestern Alumni” as undergrad alumni, which gave Northwestern better results than it would have gotten ordinarily.</p>

<p>**While the order is different, the top 17 schools are the same (which I found interesting). If you are curious about how an individual school did that is not listed here I will provide it (if I have time)…</p>

<p>The institutions included the following (directly from U.S. News Top 15):</p>

<p>MBA: Harvard, Stanford, U Pennsylvania (Wharton), MIT, Northwestern (Kellogg)*, U Chicago, Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Columbia, NYU (Stern), UCLA, U Michigan, Yale, U Virginia, Duke, and Cornell</p>

<p>JD: Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, NYU, UC Berkeley, U Chicago, U Pennsylvania, Northwestern, U Michigan, U Virginia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, and Vanderbilt</p>

<p>MD: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, WUSTL, U Pennsylvania, UCSF, Duke, U Washington, Stanford, UCLA, Yale, Columbia, U Michigan, Baylor College of Medicine, UCSD, and U Pittsburgh</p>

<p>***The problems with the study are obvious: a significant percentage of professional school students do not have Facebook accounts or their undergraduate institution is not listed (but this should not favor one school over another), Facebook is more popular at some schools than others (legitimate concern), the sample size compared to the total number of students that should be in one class is relatively small, the Claremont Colleges can not be viewed separately, the issues with Columbia, some Facebook groups are much larger than others which means some MD/JD/MBA programs are disproportionately represented, etc., etc.</p>

<p>****Besides Penn (maybe Facebook is more popular?!) doing particularly well and Princeton not doing as expected, my study seemed to jive with the WSJ numbers for the most part. As expected, the pro-U Chicago bias was removed which made it drop several spots.</p>

<p>P.S. If you want to find out the per capita data go ahead. It seems less significant to me for a number of reasons (but it is impossible to know how well Pomona or Claremont McKenna did or what percentage of the Columbia alumni went to Barnard or the small portion that went to the CGS for that matter).</p>

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<p>Bump
Bump
Bump</p>

3

<p>David, I advise you to spend time analyzing something that is relevant.</p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/492417-acceptance-rate-into-dream-med-law-bus-school-irrelevance.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/492417-acceptance-rate-into-dream-med-law-bus-school-irrelevance.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Per capita some of the numbers get really interesting</p>

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<p>I did it when I was bored/procrastinating and I (strangely) actually like this stuff.</p>

6

<p>
[quote]
Per capita some of the numbers get really interesting

[/quote]

Remove regional employment biases.
Remove non-targeted majors (like education).</p>

<p>Then maybe it will get even more interesting.</p>

7

<p>
[quote]
**While the order is different, the top 17 schools are the same (which I found interesting). If you are curious about how an individual school did that is not listed here I will provide it (if I have time)...

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I thought this was interesting too.</p>

<p>
[quote]
****Besides Penn (maybe Facebook is more popular?!) doing particularly well and Princeton not doing as expected, my study seemed to jive with the WSJ numbers for the most part. As expected, the pro-U Chicago bias was removed which made it drop several spots.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>This was by far the school that had the biggest change between methodologies. Funny the WSJ instituted such a bias...</p>

8

<p>Top based on facebook on percentage. Looks alot like WSJ.</p>

<p>(1) Harvard 234/1666 = .140
(2) Yale 154/1286 = .1197
(3) Princeton 123/1103 = .112
(4) Stanford 177/1692 = .105
(5) Amherst 41/431 = .095
(6) Duke 143/1615 = .887
(7) Dartmouth 89/1101 = .081
(8) Swarthmore 26/336 = .077
(9) Columbia (includes Barnard College/CGS) 121/1652 = .073
(10) Williams 37/519 = .071
(11) Georgetown 1666 = 111/1666 = .0667
(12) U Pennsylvania 177/2785 = .064
(13) MIT 75/1187 = .0631
(14) Brown 87/1506 = .058</p>

9

<p>^ slipper, Penn's graduating class isn't 2785--it's more like 2400 (it may have just seemed like more when you were an MBA student there :) ). Of course, even that includes Wharton, Engineering, and Nursing (which--especially Wharton and Nursing--have fewer grads applying to graduate professional schools than most liberal arts programs). Not that there's any way to separate that kind of stuff out with this data.</p>

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<p>I got all this from WSJ classroom edition rankings numbers. Actually there seem to be more graduates per year at all the schools. Not sure why.</p>

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<p>Actually, taking the number of undergrads listed on collegeboard.com, and dividing by 4, some of the others seem about right (e.g., Harvard, Yale). But that Penn number is definitely too high.</p>

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<p>While the top law and business programs may be relatively stable, there are some significant problems in picking "top" medical schools.</p>

<p>As far as the USNWR rankings themselves - "top" research institutions (which appears to be what you used) are ranked largely on NIH funding. That dollar amount makes up something like 35-40% of the ranking. It's far from an adequate metric and doesn't really tell you all that much about the education you'll receive. Likewise for the primary care rankings, USNWR uses % of students entering a primary care residency (Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Family Medicine, OB/GYN). This is a misleading as well - it's fairly variable from year to year what becomes popular in a medical school class (the class ahead of mine had 13 match into Anesthesia after only 4 the previous year; there are at least 11 people in my medical school class looking towards doing a combined Medicine/Pediatrics residency after only 3 in the class above mine), and further, even if you want to be a specialist, many specialties (cardiology, critical care, GI, oncology, and rheumatology among others) require an internal medicine or pediatrics residency...yet those students count for the % going into primary care numbers.</p>

<p>Secondly, medical school admissions are heavily affected by state residency status - in most states it's 2-4x easier to get in as an instate student as it is at a private institution. Given the wide discrepancy in costs of a private school education and an in-state public, many students are reluctant to attend a private school if they got into their home-state public school. This might affect the data in some ways.</p>

<p>Thirdly, there exist in law and business an upper echelon of schools which, through obtaining a degree there, one is granted a significant reward when it comes to finding employment (ie, you attend a T14 Law school and you have national recognition and improved employment prospects), the same is not true in medicine. There's not a lot of value derived from going to a "top" medical school except in very specific circumstances. So there's not necessarily a lot of incentive to push towards a "top" school. Most students are much more concerned about just becoming a doctor, rather than a "________ Medical School Graduate"...</p>

<p>Just some things to think about.</p>

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<p>Actually, you are wrong about medical school admissions. The top schools draw students NATIONALLY for a reason (they have higher stats and the accepted students are stronger in terms of ec's, accomplishments, GPA, prestige of undergraduate college, MCAT scores, etc). The top medical schools have stronger match lists in residency programs, provide better research opportunities (which are important for getting some top residency spots), and graduate students with higher board scores (which is also important in residency placement). When it comes to competitive fields like dermatology graduates of Harvard have an easier time than graduates of U Connecticut. It's just reality. Sure everyone that graduates from medical school and passes their boards become doctors, but they may not get the residency they want in the location they want...</p>

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<p>Penn should be more like where Pomona is for the WSJ study. I will post the top 20 by percentage soon...</p>

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<p>Um...those numbers are way off. Harvard WSJ has 358 but in yours has 254, whereas Yale WSJ has 231 and in yours has 154. In other words, despite the fact that you've included the same schools that WSJ has included plus a significant number more, the total number of students attending has <i>decreased </i> according to your study. This wouldn't be a huge problem except that we have no idea if the "facebook effect" (presumably causing this decrease) is at all regular between colleges. </p>

<p>The only way to make the above ranking at all meaningful would be to use your facebook ranking for the exact subset of schools that WSJ uses, calculate the % increase or decrease from the WSJ findings for each individual school (ie: the facebook factor) and apply that increase or decrease to your complete ranking, to achieve a ranking (at least somewhat) adjusted for the facebook factor. </p>

<p>Now on the subject of absolute numbers vs per-capita numbers, I don't understand why you're not interested in the per-capita ranking. Leaving out the LACs, even the difference between Yale and UPenn should be huge, given that UPenn has over two times the number of students graduating each year. For an entering student the important information shouldn't be how many students get into the top schools, but what percentage of a given class gets into the top schools; it's pretty much equally as hard to be in the top 1/3 of Amherst as the top 1/3 of Penn, despite the fact that the top 1/3 of Amherst includes ~150 students while the top 1/3 of Penn includes ~900 students. </p>

<p>If 300 students from Penn and 150 students from Amherst are getting into top schools, it might look like Penn is doing better than Amherst but instead, because the relative size of the school matters so much, it actually demonstrates that Amherst students appear far more likely (30% vs ~7%) to be accepted to the top grad schools than Penn students.</p>

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<p>^ These are valid points, but there is also the issue--as I pointed out above--that we're comparing student bodies with different types of academic components. E.g., using your example, the Amherst student body is most analogous to Penn's College of Arts and Sciences in terms of professional school aspirations, whereas on a per capita basis, fewer--although admittedly some--Wharton, SEAS, and Nursing students will seek entrance into graduate professional schools. The only truly accurate measure would be expressed as a percentage of the students in each school who seek admission to the relevant type of professional school, and not just a percentage of the entire class.</p>

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<p>This ranking might be used as a (circumspect and inaccurate) ranking of student quality/motivation, but it says nothing about any advantage attending a school will provide. </p>

<p>And for all the people crying about how much better top schools are, they probably are for many things (consulting, Ibanking, Ph.D programs to some extent, networking/peer quality), just not for professional school admissions (or at least this data doesn't show that they are).</p>

18

<p>What would be a measure of the advantage of attending a top school would be comparing the relative selectivity ranking (input) with the WSJ study or a similar study (output). It'd be difficult to figure out how to compare Harvard (1-selectivity 1-WSJ) with Harvard (is there an added value? How could we tell?) but we could compare schools that have improve their output over input or vice-versa. Given that, among the top schools, we would most likely see the LACs as the biggest winners--they are relatively much higher in their output (Williams #5, for example), than their input (generally they're #10-25 in selectivity). </p>

<p>However, to even approach an accurate capture of quality such as this, given the small sample sizes at even the bigger schools, we'd have to collect data from 3+ years. Additionally, we'd have to do our best to capture all of the measures of post-graduate success, and not just the top pre-professional schools. If we added in Teach For America (a very selective and popular post-graduate option for many students), a representative selection of the top ibanks from around the country, and several of the most popular grad schools (Oxbridge attendance for one)...we would approach a more accurate measure.</p>

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<p>^ Berkeley does a good job too, given its statistically "weaker" students compared to the Ivies and top privates.</p>

20

<p>To abl, there are benefits though associated with going to a school that sends a great number of students to top professional schools not just percentage. When you get there it provides a great networking tool not only for jobs but building relationships at the institution as well. Also, usually schools that are extremely large are thus because they have large non-CAS school programs (like say Penn has Nursing, Wharton, and Engineering and U Texas - Austin has Communication, Education, Fine Arts, Geosciences, Pharmacy, Social Work, Architecture, etc.). Most matriculates to these top professional schools (with the exception of MBA programs which take lots of Engineering and Undergraduate Business graduates) come from CAS programs. Cornell and Penn are about the same size as the other Ivies if you just look at the CAS population. Now, when it comes to lac's, that's a little bit of a different story. But, having a smaller alumni network is not a plus. </p>

<p>Raw number seems to be as unfair a statistic as percentage is. I think you should consider both not one exclusively.</p>

<p>But, the facebook effect definitely makes the study imperfect (as does WSJ's selection of graduate programs) but that does not render it meaningless. Evidence of the fact that it is not meaningless is that the rankings end up very similiar to the WSJ ones (most notably the top 17 by number are the same).</p>

<p>Regardless, here is the list by percentage (only surprises really are Rice and Grinnell); class size numbers from collegeboard.com:</p>

<p>The Top 20 by Percentage for My Study</p>

<ol>
<li> Harvard 14.1%</li>
<li> Yale 11.6%</li>
<li> Stanford 10.8%</li>
<li> Princeton 10.0%</li>
<li> Amherst College 9.7%</li>
<li> Duke 9.9%</li>
<li> Dartmouth 8.6%</li>
<li> Williams 7.4%</li>
<li> U Pennsylvania 7.3%</li>
<li>MIT 7.2%</li>
<li>Rice U 7.2%</li>
<li>Swarthmore 7.0%</li>
<li>Georgetown 6.3%</li>
<li>Brown 5.8%</li>
<li>Columbia 5.3%</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins 4.8%</li>
<li>Wellesley 4.5%</li>
<li>Northwestern 4.2%</li>
<li>Cornell 4.0%</li>
<li>Grinnell College 3.9%</li>
</ol>