<p>Snooker, </p>
<p>Appreciate your well thought out reply, though I don’t agree 100%. I’m not sure that playing up Wh. is the same as undermining the other programs. Regarding the stats, once you back out Wharton, everyone else has 18% admit rate - double that of Wh., which I would say is a very significant difference. 9% is in league with HYP, 18% is more in line with say Dartmouth/Brown/Cornell. If Wh. were to disappear tomorrow, that’s where Penn would be now - among the “lesser Ivies” instead of scraping up against the Big 3. Not that that’s a bad place to be - it’s still very good to be a top 15 school, but I feel Penn’s #4 rank is due in no small measure to Wharton.</p>
<p>But that 18% is not broken down between the “hard” majors (the sciences, mostly) and the “soft” majors (English, most of the social sciences, the “studies” depts., etc.) I think that you’d find even more of a spread if you did.</p>
<p>As I said before, undergrad b-schools were not thought of until recently as enhancing prestige (and for the most part, except for Wharton and a few others, are STILL not thought of as especially presitigious). Also interesting that at one time the social sciences were housed at Wharton because THEY were not thought of as “respectable” enough for the College either - I didn’t know that piece of history.</p>
<p>It’s useless to speculate on counterfactual history such as whether Wh. would be #1 if HYPS had undergrad B-schools. HYP and S were too snooty to start undergrad B-schools and that tells you something in itself. The fact that Penn has had one for well over a century is part of its DNA and why it is such a great place in a way that pure stats don’t show. H and Y started as divinity schools and have always had their head in the clouds to some extent. Penn in many ways reflects Franklin’s values. He loved things that had practical value here on this earth - things that would get him ahead personally and would improve the well being of the entire society - libraries, insurance co’s, postal service, etc. If you look at Penn’s greatest strengths, you’ll see they are still mostly areas that have real world application. Some of them, such as the computer, have revolutionized the world.</p>
<p>While it’s true that you don’t have to study entrepreneurship in order to practice it in the same sense as medicine, you do need a formal education in order to be an accountant or to do advanced corporate finance. it was recognized a long time ago (when Wharton was founded as the first B-school) that business, like any other field, would benefit from having people who were systematically educated in that area instead of just picking it up on the street.</p>
<p>I-banks are in need of warm bodies, especially warm bodies who are bright, intelligent presentable young people so it’s no surprise that they recruit from other majors and other top schools - 600 Wh. undergrads/ year are not enough to supply all of Wall St. and the rest of the world. People who are highly intelligent (as most Ivy grads are) can be trained to do almost anything but it’s certainly an advantage to come in knowing something in advance so that the employer doesn’t have to train you from zero.</p>
<p>Of course anyone can get an MBA later , but that in effect means that you have spent $200k on a degree that is worthless without spending another 2 years and another $100k. How happy would you be with a car that cost $200k if you had to spend another $100k before you could drive it?</p>
<p>I was not judging the value of the English degree in the business field or vice versa - I was comparing the starting salaries (and potential earning power - some areas such as engineering have high starting salaries but a flat growth curve) of Wh. grads (in ANY job available to them) vs. English majors (in ANY job available to them). I think you would find that Wh. grads do substantially better. Journalism (and BTW, being an English major doesn’t qualify you to be a journalist - there are J-schools for that) pays substantially less than business. As someone pointed out, English majors are not motivated by $ to begin with - that’s not what they are looking for (and they sure don’t find it).</p>