<p>and this is the case despite the fact that by any measure Cornell has the best Engineering school in the Ivies..... (?)</p>
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<p>Thus, the best Stanford undergrads, who would be top candidates at Harvard, are more likely to go to Stanford for medicine, law or business. </p>
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<p>Yes, and that matters as to the placement of that ONE UNDERGRAD on the list -- and given that Stanford is still one of the top feeders to all of the grad schools that did make the list, we're talking about a difference of a couple ranks at most. It doesn't render the entire list useless.</p>
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<p>Harvard does not get kids into top professional schools. Kids who are headed for top professional schools are just fairly likely to go to Harvard, and the others on the list, for undergrad.</p>
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<p>This is way too sweeping. Yes, HYPetc. do a great job of picking kids in the first place, so it's no surprise that those kids continue to do well. But it's not an either/or question; there are a lot of factors at work. HYPetc. ALSO add value to those students; that is, professional schools cut them slack because they're HYP grads. One data set that demonstrates this is the law grid for Harvard College, which show the LSAT, GPA, race, major, etc. for all the HC seniors and alumni who applied to law school in the last year. The mean LSAT for Harvard grads admitted to YLS, SLS, etc. is close to the overall admit LSAT median for each school, but the mean GPA is substantially lower...like .2 lower. In other words, law schools treat Harvard grads with a 3.7/172 the way they treat median college grads with a 3.9/172.</p>
<p>Finally, this is impossible to quantify, but in my experience there's an effect from the well-oiled feeder machinery at the top feeder schools. At Harvard, every upperclassman has current HLS, HMS, and HBS students (among others) living in their dorm whose entire job is to encourage the kids to apply to grad school and show them how to do it well. Once a student decides to apply, an additional HLS, HMS, or HBS student is assigned to them individually to be a one-on-one advisor and walk them through the entire process (personal statements, interviews, etc.). Students are pushed to think big both by their advisors and by the general culture among their peers. Comparing this to what was available at the college I transferred from (Bryn Mawr)...it's like another universe, and I think that it is an additional reason why Bryn Mawr sent exactly one alumnus to HLS in my three years there.</p>
<p>Not ONE UNDERGRAD, but the collection of the best Stanford students, who will be overrepresented at Stanford, and under represented at Harvard. So, by excluding Stanford from the destination list, it has a lower feeder score. Look, I am not claiming that Stanford should be ranked I higher, I don't care, I am pointing out a weakness in the study design.</p>
<p>The difference in GPA from Harvard vs the median college might indicate some pro Harvard bias, or that Harvard students, being stronger students, took more challenging course work, and the admissions committees were responding to that, rather than the name of the college. Impossible to know without more information.</p>
<p>On overall career success, not grad school acceptance, there is excellent data that people who are admitted to HYP, etc, but attend less prestigious colleges are just as sucessful as those who go to the top places. If there were some added value of attending the top colleges, then being accepted, and attending, should produce more career success than being accepted, but going to a lower ranked school instead. It doesn't.</p>
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<p>Not ONE UNDERGRAD, but the collection of the best Stanford students</p>
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<p>I'm confused. Do the career choices of Stanford undergrads determine the ranking of more than one undergrad school? Your criticism of the study relates to the relative ranking of one school out of what was it, fifty? It's not a global flaw.</p>
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<p>The difference in GPA from Harvard vs the median college might indicate some pro Harvard bias, or that Harvard students, being stronger students, took more challenging course work, and the admissions committees were responding to that, rather than the name of the college. Impossible to know without more information.</p>
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<p>Well, earlier you made the sweeping statement that the entire difference was due to the quality of applicants coming in. I take it now you're agreeing with me that there are other factors that may be playing a role in addition. But as to your suggestion that law adcoms are responding to the more challenging courses taken by the Harvard students, that theory is not borne out by the data. If law adcoms cared about the difficulty of a student's college classes, then Harvard students in tough majors like biochemistry and social studies should be getting into law school with lower GPAs than those in easy majors like psychology, but that isn't the case. Likewise, you'd expect to see some difference between students with the same GPA who did and did not write theses, but there is none.</p>
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<p>there is excellent data that people who are admitted to HYP, etc, but attend less prestigious colleges are just as sucessful as those who go to the top places. </p>
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<p>Yes, and those data measure success financially, not by the quality of grad schools attended. At this level, whether you attend a grad school ranked #3 vs. #14 has more to do with the freedom to pursue a wider range of hypercompetitive subfields, like ophthalmology for top med grads, federal clerkships for top law grads, etc., and very little to do with starting salaries, which are tightly clustered across the top tier of professional schools.</p>
<p>I'm NOT saying that attending one of the top feeder schools is somehow determinative of a student's future -- simply that there is some meaningful information to be gleaned from that list.</p>
<p>I took ONE UNDERGRAD to refer to a person, not a school. So the applicatoins and enrollment of, for example, dozens of Stanford students affect the rankings, not just one person. </p>
<p>However, as noted with the handful of other examples I cited, yes this is an overall flaw of the study. Some universities had their professional schools included on the list, so students of those universities who went to the same professional school boosted that university's ranking. Students of universities with equally outstanding professional schools who went to their local school, but it was excluded from the list, lowered their schools ranking. This only affects those universities that have top professional schools, so it does not confound the rankings of the liberal arts colleges. It also has less effect on places like Caltech and MIT that have none, or only one, of the sort of professional school included in the study.</p>
<p>Again, I am not shilling for a particular school. I don't care. In fact, my beloved alma mater did quite well. I just think the study itself is so badly done as to be worthless. This is only one reason why. Lots of people have pointed out other problems.</p>
<p>I was saying that the differences between schools was determined by the differences in the students who are enrolled, not by some magic the schools work while they are there. I was saying that differences in mean GPA among accepted students might reflect a bias in favor of a particular school, or characteristics of the students at the school- I think the latter is more likely. Without knowing the mix of student talents (not created by Harvard, but brought to Cambridge with them), course selection, major, relative ranking in their major, and interaction with LSAT scores, I do not think one can interepret the GPA difference alone.</p>
<p>As I said, the data was for income. But it was not limited to starting salary. They followed these people for quite some time</p>
<p>Once again, afan, we draw swords. Looks like your general thesis on this thread is that there is no such thing as a 'feeder' school - but rather that places like HYPS just happen to select highly capable students in the first place. </p>
<p>We have debated this issue before, and yet again, I would invoke the example of MIT. I think you would agree that MIT students are entirely comparable to that at HYPS. Yet why is it that MIT premeds get into med-school at a conspicuously lower rate than HYPS premeds do, if the notion of a feeder school does not exist? Note - I'm not talking about the entire MIT student population, for it is obviously true that many of them don't want to be doctors anyway. I'm talking about those MIT students who actually go through the whole process of applying to med-school (take MCAT, submit stuff to AMCAS, pay fees to apply to med-school, fill out applications, etc. etc.) . That process is not exactly trivial, so anybody who undergoes it is probably pretty serious about getting into med-school. Yet the fact remains that MIT premeds have for a very long time had a startling lower success rate at getting into med-school than have HYPS. Why is that, if there is no such thing as a feeder school? Are MIT premeds stupid?</p>