<p>I would disagree with the perception that Davidson is far better than Brandeis. Davidson's tradition gives it a slight edge in prestige, though Brandeis seems to have a better upside.
Either one will give you an excellent education and both are great for premed. Ultimately, I would pick Brandeis because of Boston.</p>
<p>The Wall Street Journal only looked at five med schools, five biz schools, and five law schools, 11 of which are in the northeast:</p>
<p>medicine (Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, Yale), </p>
<p>law (Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan and Yale )</p>
<p>business (Chicago, Dartmouth's Tuck School, Harvard, MIT's Sloan School and Penn's Wharton School )</p>
<p>The sample is heavily weighted to favor certain feeer schools. For example, there is not a single southern professional school on the list. Only one California school.</p>
<p>Once you get even part way down the list of undergrad schools, the differences are insignficant. I mean, is there really any difference between 1.65% and 1.64% of the graduating class going to one of these 15 professional schools? It's meaningless. </p>
<p>It doesn't tell you much about the real world of med school admissions. You know, the real world where you actually have to pay for med school and your state school looks pretty darn attractive. Do you really think Davidson students are crying when they go to Emory Med School? Or UVa Law School?</p>
<p>redcrimblue, I don't think Yeshiva is comparable to Brandeis... </p>
<p>"Brandeis is lost in the Boston backwaters."
I am a pretty picky person, and I chose to apply to Brandeis instead of Lehigh, NYU, and Tufts... (there was the name factor as well...Tufts sounded really awkward..) I don't think Brandeis falls behind in any of the categories.</p>
<p>interesteddad - Emory Med/Law/Business, Vanderbilt Law (and pretty weak business), UVa Law/Med/Business.</p>
<p>Any others? Nothing prominent. The northeast dominates education - and that's a fact. WSJ looked at the best professional schools and researched which schools were most represented...sound ineffective to you? If a school on the list has its top students at those schools, clearly its second tier students would stand a good chance at getting into slightly lower tier professional schools.</p>
<p>Moreover, you didn't rebutt my argument in the least - the fact of the matter is that the WSJ Feeder List does display a geographic diversity of colleges, and Davidson is not in the top 50. Hell, Reed College "just missed the cut".</p>
<p>ID is correct about the misleading WSJ article about feeder schools. Many Davidson students are from Texas(as an example); if you are applying to medical school, as I was, Texas has 8 medical schools, two of which(Baylor and UT-Southwestern) are ranked in the top ten in the country. The tuition for Texas residents at Texas medical schools is $6550/year. There is a huge admission advantage to these schools for Texas residents. Do you think Texas students at Davidson apply to Harvard or Yale etc.. at tuitions of $40,000 a year? I don't think so. same thing applies in many other states, stay close to home. No debt-a beautiful thing.</p>
<p>Fair enough.</p>
<p>hubbell:</p>
<p>In effect, the WSJ feeder school "ranking" is essentially a self-selected measure of where wealthy northeasterners go to professional school and which undergrad colleges are most pre-professional oriented. Well, we already know which undergrad colleges are the most pre-professional oriented and have the highest percentages of wealthy northeasterners! The logic of the WSJ "study" is circular.</p>
<p>If you really want to look at these issues, you need to look at:</p>
<p>a) a much broader selection of graduate schools. The simple fact of the matter is that admissions to Harvard Medical School is irrelevant to the average student at ANY undergrad college and particularly irrelevant to any student who doesn't have an extra $200,000 lying around to spend on med school.</p>
<p>b) Look at a much longer period of time. Particularly at smaller schools, the percentages are so low that we are only talking about 10 students per year. By studying only a single year, there is so much annual variation as to make precise rankings meaningless.</p>