The prestige of your undergrad is NOT determinative for PhD programs

Graduate School
1

I’m currently a PhD candidate in English lit at a top-5 program in my field. I’ve been reading posts here that keep asking whether one college or another will provide easier entry to PhD programs in various fields and have been alternately amused and annoyed by the responses I’ve seen to these questions. I sit on the admissions commitee for my department (most PhD programs include a grad student or two in these deliberations) and have some advice to those planning to pursue PhDs.

First, not even a diploma from Harvard will guarantee you entry into any particular PhD program. Admission to doctoral study is VERY different from admission to college, law school, b-school, etc. For PhDs, assuming adequate academic credentials (more about this in a sec), it’s ALL about the fit between the applicant and the specific department. Your research interests have to line up with those of the faculty in the department you’re applying to. If there’s no one in that department interested in what you want to do, you will not get in, even if you’re an academic superstar. Someone with “lesser” credentials whose interests are more closely aligned will have a better shot. We see this over and over. People very often apply to our department because it’s “prestigious” but it’s clear they haven’t taken the time to investigate our specialities. You don’t get in just because you did well at a “good” college. You have to have a reason to apply to a specific department. If they can’t see the reason, you don’t get in. So if you’re interested in 19th-c. Irish lit, for example, you need to find a department where the profs are also interested in that. There has to be at least one prof in the department who will look at your stated research interests and say “I’d like to advise him/her.” If you don’t have a champion on the faculty, you don’t get in.

As for “adequate academic credentials”…this is kind of nebulous, but it does NOT mean that you necessarily had to go to a “prestige” college. It means that you have shown a seriousness of purpose wherever you may have gone to college: you got great grades in your field of study; you developed good relationships with professors in your field who recommend you enthusiastically; you have identified a research query that hasn’t already been done by a thousand other people; you write clearly and engagingly (hopefully wrote a thesis); you have shown interest in your field outside of your college (attended conferences, symposia, etc.). A graduate of HYPSM who does NOT have these credentials will not fare better than a graduate of a directional state U. who does. There are many reasons that a brilliant scholar may have gone to a “lesser” school.

That said, there are indeed certain “prestige” colleges that tend to attract budding scholars (as opposed to budding bankers, lawyers, & doctors) and so are disproportionately represented in top PhD programs (Oberlin, Reed, and Chicago come to mind) but chances are those students would’ve done just as well no matter where they went simply because that’s what they were passionate about. So a valedictorian who went to a “tier two” college bc they got mad merit money might well end up doing better in grad admissions than someone who barely eked out admission to someplace ranked higher. It wasn’t the school that turned them into a promising scholar; it was already in them. You’d probably be surprised by the broad range of colleges that “prestige” professors attended undergrad.

In the sciences, things are different because you need to have lab experience and wealthier schools will tend to have better resources and opportunities in this regard. But in the humanities and social sciences, it’s not as important to have gone someplace with a crazy endowment. Wherever you end up, buckle down, get good grades, engage your profs, and apply to the right PhD program for your specific interest.

2

Why would you be annoyed? What you said is pretty much what every regular around here says, too - it’s even in the FAQ.

It’s good advice!

3

@juillet I’m not a regular here and haven’t explored all corners of the site. I’m glad this issue gets addressed. I kept reading posts asking whether college x or uni Y would be better for an aspiring PhD in topic Z and kept seeing responses citing lists of which colleges have the highest rate of PhD production as if that were somehow relevant. All those lists tell you is which colleges attract aspiring PhDs and NOT which colleges provide any edge in grad admissions. Of course schools like Reed, Oberlin, Chicago, Swarthmore would appear on those lists – they attract kids who are already scholarly. No one goes to those schools for the slammin’ social scene. But even if you attended a “party” school, you could still do well in grad admissions if you demonstrated serious scholarly talent and interest. This past admissions cycle, my department fell over itself to nab an applicant from Arizona State, which is not known for its robust scholarly atmosphere. But this guy had really milked the school for every possible academic opportunity it offered and showed great passion for and creativity in his proposed research (which was a great match for our faculty). He was offered a full fellowship and the chair reached out personally to woo him. We lost him to a rival program that had offered him an even sweeter package. Meanwhile, we said flat-out no to applicants from Stanford, Duke, and Brown (among other highly regarded schools). The applicant from Stanford actually tried to contest our decision, a tactic that pretty much never works in the applicant’s favor. I didn’t even understand why she’d bother: for PhD programs, you’re MUCH better off going somewhere that’s excited to have you than to a “better” program that’s indifferent to you.

In any case, it seemed to me that there was some fogginess among high schoolers as to what PhD programs actually look for and I wanted to help clarify that undergrad “prestige” is almost never a factor.

4

There’s lots of good advice in here, but it’s probably major specific. There’s an econ prof on here, who’s taught at Ivies, and said undergrad prestige is one factor in admissions in their department.

5

Ok, I’ll play. (But I already know the answer, is that there is NOT a broad range at the top prestigious Unis, particularly as a % of total)

I randomly chose a Uni that had a reputation for top programs and English in particular. Columbia, for example. Tied for 3-6 in USNews, for what little that is worth. Then I randomly looked up the first dozen or so faculty on the English department’s website (alpha order).

And, I am not surprised, since there is nothing but the usual suspects of top colleges/unis in that (admittedly small) sample:

Berkeley
Oxford
Yale
Oberlin
Cornell
Williams
McGill
WashU
Wisconsin (egads, a real land grant Uni!)
one couldn’t find.

6

In my field, the university attended for the BS really has more of a (engineering) secondary effect on admissions to graduate programs. When I’m trying to make admissions decisions, if you are a good candidate, I don’t really care what undergraduate school you attended. If you are more of a borderline candidate, I’m more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if I’m familiar with and respect your undergraduate program.

7

“But I already know the answer, is that there is NOT a broad range at the top prestigious Unis, particularly as a % of total”

Because I was curious, a couple of years ago I did the same kind of search as bluebayou, but for the universities that are considered to have the strongest programs in engineering. I too found that the professors tended to have undergraduate and graduate degrees from a relatively small set of highly-regarded universities. In other words, prestigious universities tend to hire PhD grads from other prestigious universities. And those hired PhD grads generally also got their undergraduate degrees from other prestigious universities.

I have a PhD in engineering and worked for 27 years at a large R&D firm; the same trend was evident there for engineers and scientists.

“it’s ALL about the fit between the applicant and the specific department. Your research interests have to line up with those of the faculty in the department you’re applying to.”

In my experience, it’s not expected that engineering grad school applicants know specifically what research concentration they will pursue. That comes later, after you’ve taken classes, met professors that are taking on graduate students, and discuss the “fit” of potential research topics. At least, that’s the way it worked out for me and my colleagues.

So, sheepskin00, I don’t think that your experience in English is relevant for all disciplines.

8

The last couple posters hit on a separate, but related point. The pedigree of one’s undergrad may not affect PhD admission but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t help with professorships. I’ve done the same query of multiple schools and found the same results. I’ve also looked at State U’s and at least in that small sample, deans often have the top pedigree for undergrad and PhD.

9

The other issue is who knows who, very top unis have profs that know each other and they trust their recommendations.

10

I will preface this by saying I haven’t been in the ivory tower for very long, but based on what I’ve observed so far, I’d conjecture that in most case, the “top” pedigrees of many/most faculty nationwide might be a result of correlation rather than causation. At least in my field, faculty are much more impressed with what you’ve done than where you went to school (though you can’t completely avoid the latter, we are all human after all).

With that in mind, I would suggest that the more important factor is that the prestigious schools tend to accumulate prestigious faculty at higher rates than other schools, and there is therefore more opportunity (per capita) for students to have been involved in some truly impressive work while there. This is at least what seems like the more important factor in my field, but I am sure this varies by field.

11

There are two different issues being discussed here. The first one is admission to graduate school. From everything I’ve read here and elsewhere, @boneh3ad is correct, at least for technical degrees: the prestige of one’s undergraduate college is a minor factor for admissions.

@bluebayou and @whatisyourquest discuss a different issue, whether there is a correlation between degrees from top graduate schools and professorships at those same schools. It does not surprise me that the top-ten graduate programs in a particular field will often hire from these same schools. It would be surprising if this were not true. However, the OP raised the issue of whether the prestige of one’s undergraduate college was a major factor in graduate admissions. It seems to me that a correlation between top graduate schools and their PhD hiring is not relevant to the OP’s question.

12

^ I guess the next logical question should be: what can one do with a PhD in English? If not a professorship, then what? You get admitted to a PhD program, as an undergraduate from a less than prestigious university, you get the PhD in English, and then? The odds are stacked against you for a professorship, apparently.

13

@whatisyourquest - I think that you are drawing the wrong conclusion. The prestige of your undergraduate university should not be a major factor for graduate admission. Then, if you are admitted into a top-ranked PhD program, then you will be well placed for a professorship at a top university.

14

^ As I understand it, bluebayou’s research for the Columbia English Department (see #4) pertained to undergraduate degrees that the professors there hold. And the searches that I did for engineering profs at prestigious universities showed the same trend: very few profs at top universities were undergraduates at “directional state U” (sheepskin00’s words). I’m sure that it can happen, but it’s not common at all.

It’s easy for anyone to try out this exercise. Simply pick a university that is esteemed in a given discipline, google the department website, and then jot down the undergraduate and graduate degrees of the profs, as stated in their bios. What does it show?

15

Your conclusion was that “In other words, prestigious universities tend to hire PhD grads from other prestigious universities.” In fairness, you did discuss undergraduate degrees. Bluebayou’s research was not clear, so I went on the Columbia website for the Department of English and Comparative Literature. For the first dozen listed, three did not disclose UG colleges. The other nine UGs were Oxford, Cal Berkeley, Oberlin, Cornell, Washington U (St. Louis), Williams, McGill, and Sara Lawarence. For graduate schools, again three did not disclose any PhDs. The remaining nine were Cornell (twice),Cal Berkeley (twice) UCSB, Yale, Texas, Penn, and UC Irvine. So good PhD programs, but five state universities.

I then looked at the first dozen PhD’s in the Georgia Tech Mechanical Engineering Dept. Georgia Tech is ranked second by US News among graduate schools in mechanical engineering, and awards the most ME bachelor’s degrees and the most engineering PhDs overall each year. Looking at UG degrees, five earned their bachelor’s overseas, and there was one each from RPI, MIT, Wisconsin, Iowa State, Georgia Tech, Maryland, and Illinois. Two earned PhDs overseas, with the others from Wisconsin, Clarkson, Cal Berkeley (2), Iowa State, Georgia Tech, Penn State, Texas, Illinois, and Purdue.

So, based on this very limited data set, one could conclude for English, that most went to very good UGs and for PhDs, they went to an equal mix of top State schools and private schools.

For Engineering, the first observation (no surprise to you I’m sure) is that outside of MIT and Stanford, the top engineering schools are state universities. The Georgia Tech PhDs largely went to top-20 engineering universities both UG and graduate.

Of course, for this to be meaningful, you really need to drill down to the particular specialty of interest. My son will be applying this fall to graduate programs in Aerospace Engineering, specializing in plasma rocket propulsion. The largest and best-known program in the world is offered by Michigan’s Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory. According to their website, they currently have 11 postdocs/PhD candidates/pre-candidates (not yet passed qualifying exams). About 1/2 are aerospace engineering majors and about 1/2 applied physics majors. The undergraduate colleges are Arizona State, Yale, Michigan State, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Georgia Tech (2), Southern Cal, McGill, Maryland, Michigan, and Columbia. That’s a pretty diverse mixture of universities.

Another interesting fact emerges when looking at where the Michigan PEPL PhDs are placed. Most end up in private or governmental research labs, not at universities. (Although Mitchell Walker who runs Georgia Tech’s High-Power Electric Propulsion Laboratory came from Michigan’s PEPL, as did Kentaro Hara (Michigan PhD 2105), my son’s plasma-propulsion professor at Texas A&M. So this is another area for an aspiring PhD to explore. They should consider whether they want to ultimately work at a university or for industry/government/private research labs. Then they need to look at the recent placement statistics for PhDs. (I don’t know much about English PhDs, but I’m guessing that most end up teaching.)

16

Oh yes, in the College Search & Selection and College Admissions forum! Yes, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Those posts set my teeth on edge. You’re absolutely right.

Sure there are.

As the OP already stated, it’s not really suprising to find a concentration of people who did undergrad at elite universities. Number one, those are the students who are already pretty “scholarly” and intellectual and attracted to research careers. Number two, they are far more likely to be acquainted with the idea of getting a PhD, since they’re more likely to be wealthy (or at least upper-middle-class) and have family members or other adults in their social circle with PhDs. They’re also less likely to have financial concerns that prevent them from going to get a PhD.

But concentration is not the same thing as range - and the OP is absolutely correct in that there is a wide range of places where top scholars across fields get their undergrad degrees. For example, for the professors my my top 20 psychology department, in addition to the “usual suspects” we also had representation from the University of Toronto, Penn State, UIUC, Barnard, and Rutgers. When I was a graduate student there, we had doctoral students who had all kinds of backgrounds, from elite Ivies to Cal States and other publics.

Even if you go back and look at the English department - I also see BAs from places like Wisconsin, Sarah Lawrence, UC-Davis, University of New Mexico, and University of Virginia - and that was after checking only about 15-20 people (I got tired after that).

And these are also at the elite departments - the ones that are nigh impossible to get hired at, and also tend to have professors from wealthier backgrounds (just a correlation). If you look at professors from other universities - I checked other well-respected public flagships like Wisconsin and Georgia, as well as some other private schools like Boston University - I also see plenty of other BAs represented, like Western Kentucky University, Wright State University, and the University of Southern Mississippi (again, stopped checking quickly…professors have really terrible websites.)

But that wasn’t the original question at hand. It wasn’t about obtaining a professor position at an elite university - the original question was about whether or not where you went to undergrad matters for getting into PhD programs. And generally speaking it doesn’t - not in a direct way, anyway. The professors at any elite university - even if you bundled ALL of the elite universities (and I include the prestigious public land grants - only represent a very, very small slice of PhD recipients in general.

17

I appreciate Sheepskin00 and the point she is making, but I think she and others significantly overplay their hands when they suggest that prestige (of undergraduate college) “doesn’t matter” or “should not be a major factor” on admission to a top Ph.D. program. If my 30+ years of experience in academia taught me anything, it’s that there is no field of specialization on earth where it matters MORE where you went to school than academia. Now, I’m also thinking primarily about where you do your Ph.D. (as juillet clarifies above), but I don’t want to leave the impression unchallenged that it doesn’t matter where you went to college. I guarantee you that it does. Can a slightly above average school like ASU send students to graduate school at Columbia or Harvard? Of course, but it’s not the norm, and that student probably has to be better than their fellow applicants from Swarthmore, Williams, or Stanford. And it’s certainly true that a Ph.D. from Arizona State is unlikely to ever secure a tenured position teaching at Columbia. Where you go as an undergraduate matters a great deal when it comes to graduate school admissions and where you later find work. It’s not the only determinative, but it matters. A lot.

18

@SwimDad99 In the world at large, prestige matters greatly. If someone wanted to go into investment banking and said they were deciding between a full ride at U of Nebraska and full pay at an Ivy, I’d smack them for even considering Nebraska, given the rigid biases of i-banking. Really, no amount of scholarly achievement at Nebraska would compensate for the prestige differential in that field.

However, in academia it’s a significantly different story. Absolutely, where you get your PhD matters enormously. There are so few tenure-track slots open at any given time at top schools that PhDs from lesser-ranked programs would have an exceedingly hard time even getting interviewed. A PhD from Harvard who did undergrad at Nebraska would have an easier time than a PhD from Nebraska who did undergrad at Harvard. For sure. But an undergrad from Nebraska who has the grades, the GRE score, the recs, the thesis, and the important research query would not fare less well in PhD admissions than someone with the same record from an Ivy. Not in my experience. The reason you see so many prestige BAs in prestige PhD progs is simply that they were generally driven from an early age to achieve academically. Budding scholars tend to self-select for certain institutions. Now, that said, I would readily admit that there’s a baseline prestige that’s necessary for admissions committees to take your undergrad record seriously. A 4.0 from a school that’s completely unknown or generally held in low regard wouldn’t carry much weight. But most of the people asking about PhD programs here end up asking whether it’d be better to go to one respected college vs another respected college if the goal is a PhD in a particular subject. At that point the only response is “It doesn’t matter.” Go where you think you’ll enjoy your experience and do your best.

19

Thanks, sheepskin00. I would agree with all of that. Well said.

20

@swimDad99 - I think your observation is fair, but I suggest that this is much less of a factor for admissions for technical and professional programs like law, medicine, and business.

As has been discussed, the top engineering schools, both UG and graduate degrees are largely public universities. Further, because of accreditation requirements, most engineering students study and are expected to master the same subjects. So, Ivy “snobbery” is not really a factor.

Top medical schools require specific UG courses with high grades, high MCAT scores, strong letters of recommendation, etc. Anecdotally, my ENT doctor graduated from the University of Arizona and was admitted to the Yale School of Medicine. His classmates were from all over the world. He was twice elected class president and graduated first in his class.

Top business schools require a few prerequisites and good UG grades, but rely much more on strong work experience/recommendations and high GMAT scores.

Top law schools have similar metrics.

Further, as others have pointed out, we can’t confuse correlation with causation. The Ivies and other similar colleges (Stanford, Chicago, MIT, etc.) attract the top students in the world, so it should be no surprise that they make up a large percentage of graduate students in the top graduate programs. But there are still far more students with top grades and test scores at the large public universities. The top 25% of students at Michigan or Cal, to name two outstanding public universities, are certainly Ivy quality. At Michigan, US News reports that the top quartile had a HS GPA >3.9 and an SAT > 1500. With about 27,000 UG students, that means that Michigan alone has almost as many Ivy-quality students as the three largest Ivies (Cornell, Penn, and Harvard) combined. The math for Berkeley yields similar results. Overall, if we add in the top 25% of students at the top ten public universities with the top 10% of the next 30 public universities, there are a huge number of potential extremely well qualified graduate school applicants.

Finally, it’s important to realize that the vast majority of graduate degrees awarded are in just five fields. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 2014-15, there were 758,700 masters degrees awarded. 69.4% of these were in Business, Education, Health Professions, Engineering, and Public Administration. There were 178,500 doctoral degrees awarded, with 79.2% awarded in Health (MDs etc.), Law, Education, Engineering, and Biological Sciences. It would be a fair point that we don’t have similar data for the top 10-20 universities in each of these specialties, where we would expect graduates from the Ivies, other top private schools, and top universities to be most represented. But it also seems to me that Ivy-bias would be most concentrated in the humanities and social sciences, which would represent a relatively small percentage of graduate school applications.