Those are all valid points, @Beaudreau. Just to clarify, though, I would certainly include Michigan, Berkeley, GT, and the usual top public universities among the nation’s elite or prestigious colleges and universities (that I reference above) - let’s say, give or take, the top 50 or even 100 national universities (public and private) and the top 50 or so liberal arts colleges. My point was just meant as a bit of a corrective to the idea that a quality undergraduate would realize no or very little advantage from attending Carleton College over, say, a directional university or one ranked outside the top 200. And we were really just talking about graduate (Ph.D., M.A.) rather than professional programs. But your point is a good one, especially with regard to law or medical school, though I would still insist (stubbornly) that where you attend undergraduate school matters quite a bit even in those cases.
I will share a funny story. Back when faculty still rode horses to their offices, a friend of mine at Michigan State applied to Harvard, Yale, and Nebraska (safety) law schools. He was ultimately admitted to all three schools. He was set on Harvard, but did want to at least interview with Yale. The interviewer asked my friend where else he applied and he answered. He then asked him what his number-one choice was; he answered “Harvard.” The next question was; “Do you like to work hard.” My friend figured, why not tell the truth and answered “no.” The interviewer then surprised him by saying “well you ought to come to Yale then”! After his formal admissions, my friend, who was already a life-master bridge player, thought about what he had learned in his interview and decided on Yale. He was there at about the same time as the Clintons and really did not work very hard. He played bridge almost every day.
I don’t know if this is true today, but back then virtually every school followed Harvard’s lead and used the Socratic method to teach law (see the Paper Chase movie or better yet TV series to watch Professor Kingsfield humiliate his first-year contract students). Yale of course would never follow Harvard’s lead, so they used a much more relaxed lecture/seminar approach. I believe that they did not even have class standings back then. Today they have only honors/pass/low pass/fail, with virtually no one in the last two categories.
I decided to test my own claim and went to the website for Knox College in Illinois, a small LAC that’s pretty well respected in its region. I looked at the faculty in two depts: Biochem and English. Here’s the list of undergrad institutions attended by the profs:
U of Wisconsin, River Falls
St. Louis U.
McDaniel C.
U of Minn, Morris
William & Mary
Knox
Princeton
U of Strathclyde, UK
UMass, Amherst
Bryn Mawr
Roanoke C.
Willamette U.
Smith C.
Monmouth C.
Kalamazoo C.
UIUC
A pretty broad range of schools. There are a couple of “prestige” institutions (Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Smith, W&M), but most of these profs had humbler academic beginnings. I didn’t jot down their PhD institutions, but I noted that they were generally NOT from the upper echelons of academia, either. And yet these folks all managed to get their PhDs and find jobs at an established college. Would any of these people have been hired by their counterpart depts at the Ivies? Almost certainly not, but they’re still among the lucky few who get to make careers in academia.
Here is what I have learned from several decades in education including grad degrees:
Undergrad school name means nothing for getting into any Humanities Ph.D. Program.
Ph.D. school name means everything in securing any Humanities tenure track professor gig.
Best wishes to you!
This is very fascinating and I think I’ll join. My field, composition and rhetoric, was born and bred at public universities in the Midwest. You will not find any composition and rhetoric PhDs at the ivy league schools (and if there are “concentrations” or such, they aren’t really considered prestigious). In fact, our field was spawned by the elitism of Harvard and its treatment of freshman composition. They never valued our work, so we created our own field to give it the attention it deserves.
All snark aside, I did some research on two programs that are highly regarded in the field: Syracuse and Michigan State. They both have their own PhD degrees in their own departments. A lot of schools have comp/rhet degrees in English departments, so for simplicity, I’m analyzing two programs that are completely on their own.
MSU has a lot of faculty and not all of them listed their education, but here are some of the results for bachelor’s and PhD (bachelor’s is first and PhD is second) :
Eastern Michigan / Michigan State
Texas A&M / Middle Tennessee State University
Purdue / Purdue
Xavier University of Louisiana / Ohio State
Bowling Green State University / Purdue
Ohio University / Purdue
Wheaton College / University of Wisconsin Madison
Indiana University at Kokomo / Miami University of Ohio
And now Syracuse (the first independent writing program to offer a PhD in comp/rhet) with PhDs only (they didn’t list undergrad education) :
Texas Christian University
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Texas at Arlington
Western Virginia University
University of Minnesota
University of Arizona
University of Louisville
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
We see here from this small sample that not one of these faculty studied at an ivy, either for undergrad and PhD or just PhD. I’m sure some have for their bachelor’s (one of my profs went to Yale, for example), but the emphasis here is really on the PhD program.
If you’re in my field, you’ll understand that a lot of the schools listed above for PhDs are excellent – Purdue (clearly since it’s listed the most), U Arizona, Miami, Texas Christian, and Urbana Champaign, to name a few. Someone else mentioned Arizona as not being able to produce PhDs who get jobs at Columbia, and that may be true in my field as well. However, Arizona has some of the best comp/rhet faculty, so you can be sure graduates will get jobs at probably solid state schools that have a lot of students and writing programs to work on. The ivies don’t have the same focus as my field does, so most of us will never work there simply because our work is well and alive at public schools and state schools.
So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that an ivy leave BA doesn’t automatically give you an edge for PhD admissions in composition and rhetoric (and maybe other fields, too). I studied at what’s probably a regional, directional university with an award-winning comp/rhet program and faculty who do great work. Studying under them helped give me practice and experience in my field, so I had a huge leg up on MA applications and I still carry what I’ve learned now as I advance to PhD applications.
Someone mentioned it’s really about the faculty you work with, and that’s right. You can have great faculty in your specific concentration at a regional school and do just fine.