<p>My anthropology professor for dual enrollment told me that schools like UMich and UChicago will not admit their own undergrads for their grad programs.....why is this? Becuase they don't want to be biased?</p>
<p>Some schools will not do this because they believe that it is better for undergrads to go elsewhere for their graduate education, as they can have more diverse experiences under their belts. UPenn is a prime example of this.</p>
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This might be true for some Penn departments but I doubt that it’s true for the university as a whole. I was an undergrad at Penn and I had a classmate who was encouraged by his professors to apply to the PhD program there. </p>
<p>Now I am a PhD student at Stanford and there are several students in my program who were Stanford undergrads as well.</p>
<p>Academic inbreeding is usually frowned upon in the humanities and social sciences. Each department and faculty has its own methodology and approach to a discipline, and a student trained in only one department has a limited outlook on his field. Additionally, networking is key in academia, and it is to your advantage to broaden rather than limit your network of scholars.</p>
<p>The degree to which inbreeding is frowned upon in the sciences varies. I can vouch only for ecology and marine science; generally students go elsewhere for their graduate degrees, but it is definitely not unheard of for students to stay for at least a MS. In other fields (e.g. math, per b@r!um’s post), inbreeding may be more common or even the norm.</p>
<p>“Academic inbreeding” is certainly not the norm and generally discouraged in math too, but it seems to happen a lot more in the tippy top departments than elsewhere. If the world experts happen to be in your own undergrad department, it doesn’t make much sense to go elsewhere. </p>
<p>There are plenty other ways to network in academia: go to workshops and conferences, talk to and keep in touch with seminar + colloquium speakers and visiting faculty at your own university, and maybe even spend a visiting semester elsewhere yourself too.</p>
<p>I’ve seen many academic inbreedings in my department, ucla engineering. the department even guarantees admissions into graduate schools to undergraduate students with high gpa(3.5+).</p>
<p>In my department, the reason is because the graduate student studied the exact same thing as the undergrad. They have a couple of more homeworks and their own project, but generally the coursework is very similar.</p>