Well said. Good perspective. What are thoughts then for opportunities for grad school - will it be soley a high GPA over the prestige or will the prestige give more opportunity?
My S has been admitted to Honors and will be going down later this month to see it. He is in an engineering major.
Okay, @cleoforshort, that was simply awesome!
@ajwomic I loved it! Iâm starting to see that the opportunities available to me balance USCâs ranking. I also talked to an International Business professor who convinced me to do that program, so it would be the #1 IB program at the #1 Honors College, on top of all the monetary and advising benefits of Top Scholars.
@cleoforshort Agreed. Just be glad your kid didnât get into Wharton; that would have caused a big headache. Because I went to an Ivy, I am also not that impressed by an Ivy name. I only went there because it was almost free for me â I took the money. Frankly, I didnât even know the school was an Ivy at the time because I was a dummy also. lol
I am so glad I had lousy grades at school because if I had good grades I might have ended doing something I did not like, i.e., working at large law firms and doing forced billings of writing down 15 minutes when the actual time i spent on working is 5 minutes. I learned long time ago to go at my own pace, for my own goals, to my own drum beat. Might have been one of very few students who did not interview for jobs in college.
@Biscuitâsmom
It somewhat depends on the type of grad school. For some (philosophy, for example) itâs not overall prestige but specific colleges that are seen as having strong phil majors. However, for most it either doesnât matter, or doesnât matter much. For medicine & law the main cuts are based on GPA + MCAT/LSAT. STEM varies a little across discipline but typically research experience then subject specific GRE, major GPA & overall GPA. Sometimes a state university can even be a better grad school prep than a prestigious college, b/c of the resources (equipment, graduate level courses).
@biscuitâsmom Ivyâs accept more undergrads from Ivyâs than non for some grad school degrees. Measuring the role that prestige plays in that process is very difficult. While entering class data may show a student admitted from a lesser known school, there are likely many more overall from Ivy ârankedâ schools. That may be just a function of the level of students attracted to the Ivies in general. And, Ivy undergrad doesnât guarantee admittance into grad school. Neither does a good GPA at a state university. As collegemom3717 mentioned test scores play a large role, so you need a curriculum that prepares you well.
Grad grad school application reviews are not âblindâ in terms of where you went to undergrad. So, given an equal MCAT or LSAT score and other factors, a 4.0 at a non-top state uni is not going to trump a 3.8 at Harvard. That doesnât mean that the applicant wonât get into grad school. Just that it is not a straight trade off on GPA. Remember that many grad schools recalculate GPA in core classes as well, so getting an A in all of your religious study minor classes isnât going to help your admittance to med school if your STEM classes are Bs. Also, grad school may require recommendations which can carry more weight from more well regarded professors/departments.
My son has some friends at USCarolina who are pre-med, and who have opted out of HC because they donât want to do the extra work for the HC diploma. And some donât want to pay the fees. I have no idea if it will hurt them, or conversely if it will help someone else to have that designation. But they arenât concerned about getting into Ivy Med schools as they already have family practices to join in SC.
There are a multitude of posts on CC with really good studies about the path to grad school from top schools.