<ol>
<li><p>Will being admitted to Harvard College make it A LOT easier to be admitted to a Harvard Graduate School (med. school)? Does your answer apply to most top-notch schools?</p></li>
<li><p>Will being a graduate from Harvard College make me a more attractive candidate to other Ivy Graduate Schools?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I really do not believe you will have much of an advantage from what I have personally read. Although many Harvard undergraduates are accepted into the graduate and professional schools, Harvard attempts to represent as many undergraduate institutions as possible. But perhaps if you have contributed to the university or brought some degree of positive recognition to yourself (which subsequently heightens the reputation of the university), you may have added an incentive to your application.</p>
<p>Graduating from Harvard College alone will not help into admission for the graduate schools. If anything, there would be a ton of students from Harvard that would apply to the same Harvard graduate school and it would be very competitive since they want generally want kids from all over the world. However, there is also the possibility of slight help if you personally have done something important in Harvard or have been recommended by a noteworthy professor.</p>
<p>^Exactly. -</p>
<p>It would especially help, I would imagine, if you did any work with one of the professors on the admissions board for that particular graduate school and that professor found you rather impressive.</p>
<p>Success is not guaranteed. Harvard pre-meds were pretty bummed in '08 when Harvard Medical School accepted a grand total of 6 of them. Most of them did get into medical school somewhere though.</p>
<p>I would doubt it is much of an advantage to go to Harvard in order to get into HMS or HLS. But if you’ve been doing research with a professor who values your work and you want to continue in this field, I would imagine its a great advantage from the standpoint of a Ph.D…</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses!
What’s the advantage then of going to an Ivy for your undergraduate then?</p>
<p>^Well, there are many more things to be gained from your undergraduate education than just admission to grad school.</p>
<p>WSJ did a ranking a while back of the top “feeder” schools into top grad programs - Harvard ended up on top: <a href=“http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf[/url]”>http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf</a></p>
<p>Make of this what you will, it’s old and doesn’t effectively show causality…</p>
<p>As odd as it seems, there are people who do not immediately go to graduate school. Some never go to graduate school. Most of my daughter’s friends are going to work directly after graduating from Harvard. Many have wall street jobs already lined up.</p>
<p>^Same with my daughter. She took her degree and got an impressive internship that led to a good job. She’s working and supporting herself (not Wall Street or other finance type jobs).</p>
<p>The article from wsj is quite interesting. Would it mean that the vast majority of college graduates (80% for harvard&y</p>
<p>sorry i don’t know what happened with the post :
The article from wsj is quite interesting. Would it mean that the vast majority of college graduates (80% for harvard&yale, 85% princeton, 90% stanford etc) never go to grad school ? I thought that the majority of ivy league and top universities graduates attended grad school within 5 years of their college graduation ?</p>
<p>^I think the ranking are just reporting that percent of Harvard undergrads that went to a specific (select) 15 grad schools (the “elite” ones). So 358 out of 1666 Harvard undergrads went into elite grad schools.</p>
<p>“Behind the ratings”</p>
<p>Traditionally, college rankings have focused on test scores and grade averages of kids coming in the door. But we wanted to find out what happens after they leave – and try to get into prestigious grad schools.</p>
<p>We focused on 15 elite schools, five each from medicine, law and business, to serve as our benchmark for profiling where the students came from. Opinions vary, of course, but our list reflects a consensus of grad-school deans we interviewed, top recruiters and published grad-school rankings (including the Journal’s own MBA rankings). So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth’s Tuck School; Harvard; MIT’s Sloan School; and Penn’s Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.</p>
<p>Our team of reporters fanned out to these schools to find the alma maters for every student starting this fall, more than 5,100 in all. Nine of the schools gave us their own lists, but for the rest we relied mainly on “face book” directories schools give incoming students. Of course, when it comes to “feeding” grad schools, a college’s rate is more important than the raw numbers. (Michigan, for example, sent about twice the number as Georgetown, but it’s also more than three times the size.) So our feeder score factors in class size.</p>
<p>How did colleges react to our list? Some were quick to point out that it was only one year of data, and many said they didn’t track their feeder rates closely. “I have no way of verifying this,” a spokesman for Cornell said. Others said they didn’t think this was an important way to judge schools because so many factors play into grad schools’ decisions. Still, the colleges in our list did not dispute our findings and neither did the grad schools.</p>
<p>Not that they necessarily want it out there. “We keep a lid on this data,” says Mohan Boodram, director of admissions and financial aid at Harvard Medical School. Otherwise, “high-school students will think they have to go to certain schools.”</p>
<p>^yes I saw that. But still, if only 20% of harvard graduates (as low as 6 or 7% for other ivies) attend one of these elite grad school, I assume that the overall graduates attending grad school is a low percentage of the total population. What surprises me is that I was convinced that most top college graduates attended grad school within a few years. This article tends to show the opposite.</p>