How big of an impact does undergraduate school prestige impact grad school admission?

[warblersrule]

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@polarscribe

My dad has a BA in anthropology from Cal State-Northridge, nobody’s idea of a prestigious school. His Ph.D in paleontology is from UC Berkeley.

I’m always bemused by posters presenting as evidence people who acquired their PhDs 30 or 40 years ago – as if that has anything at all to do with the state of admissions today. There are many more applicants to graduate programs (both because of the increased number of college graduates and the unstable job market) and fewer spots available (thanks to funding shortages). One of the leading specialists in my field majored in an unrelated humanities field (German) and got into a top notch graduate program. If he applied today, his application would land in the auto reject pile thanks to his lack of appropriate language preparation. Times change.</p>

<p>In any case, it seems it is highly field specific. My impression is that certain fields are more egalitarian than others. My own field (in the humanities) is almost exclusively composed of graduates from top universities (Berkeley, Hopkins, Yale, Brown, etc.) because its selectivity creates high language and research pre-reqs; most universities simply don’t have those offerings. Successful applicants from other colleges have almost invariably spent time either at one of these universities as visiting students or in a master’s program that acts as a feeder to the more elite PhD programs. It should be emphasized, however, that even when programs consider an applicant’s college, it is the program strength that matters, not the school’s overall prestige. </p>

<p>On the other hand, other fields - like environmental policy at my alma mater - seem to be much more interested in work experience than the reputation of one’s undergraduate college. So, I think it very much depends on what you want to do. </p>

<p>One opinion on math:

@b_r_um

The bad news is that math seems to be rather prestige-oriented. For example, 18 of the 21 American admits to the pure and applied math PhD programs at MIT this year got their undergraduate degree from a top 10 math department. (Note that I am referring to graduate math rankings, not general undergraduate rankings.) The three outliers were from Duke, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a liberal arts college that shall remain unnamed.

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<p>A professor at UC Riverside on philosophy:

At U.C. Riverside (ranked 31 in the Philosophical Gourmet Report), we received about 200 applications last year, of which we admitted 24 (more than usual for us) for an entering class of 11. Note: This admit rate is very high because only half of the admits, at most, were offered funding due to UC budgets. ~warbler Students we admitted typically had GPAs of 3.8 or more, and most of them had virtually straight A’s (that is, almost no A-minuses) in their upper-division philosophy classes by senior year, if they were applying as undergraduates. Of our entering class of 11 students, four had perfect 4.0 GPAs in their last enrolled institution (whether undergrad or MA). </p>

<p>To get into the top-ranked philosophy departments is considerably more difficult than to get into UCR. To my knowledge no UCR undergraduate has ever been admitted to a top-15 philosophy Ph.D. program (certainly not in the 10 years I’ve been here), though we’ve had some students with straight A’s, very strong letters, and excellent writing samples. When I was a student at Berkeley, it seemed that almost all my classmates were from top universities (Harvard, Princeton) or renowned liberal arts colleges (Amherst, Swarthmore). The few who weren’t from such name-brand institutions seemed to have done time at such colleges (a classmate from Northeastern, for example, had spent a year at Oxford and had letters from professors there). I don’t want to suggest that it’s impossible for a student from a middle-tier school to get into a top Ph.D. program, but the odds appear to be long even if you’re valedictorian.

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