<p>PS - I mean this for law and med school admission, where GPA matters a LOT. For MBA and doctoral admissions, Chicago does extremely well, because GPA does not matter as much. If your son is considering business school, there isn’t much need to worry - Chicago students really seem to excel on this front.</p>
<p>One other point - here is a thread discussing colleges represented at Harvard Law in 2005-06:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/law-school/656128-schools-harvard-law.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/law-school/656128-schools-harvard-law.html</a></p>
<p>If you scroll down a bit, you’ll see that in terms of raw numbers, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the rest of the ivies do extremely well. Chicago isn’t listed, but, again, in terms of raw numbers, I’m assuming the U of C is NOWHERE CLOSE to schools such as Brown and Penn. </p>
<p>This is very unfortunate. For a school as good as Chicago, students should find success (whether defined materially or tangibly or not) in every endeavor they decide to pursue.</p>
<p>Unfortunately Cue7, my son has an eye on law school :)</p>
<p>What I find fascinating is that he has met fantastic professors who have become wonderful mentors and friends, I seriously couldn’t be more thrilled with his education. I was shocked with the grade he got in that one class because it was the first time he hadn’t recieved any feedback at all…in fact he had to struggle to have a meeting with the TA who was quite put out. I also thought the TA’s words about a Chicago undergraduate student should be happy with a C- to be rather alarming. I can’t imagine telling a student at any of Chicago’s peer schools that a C- was an acceptable goal. It seems to go hand in hand with the old canard that Chicago students are weaker.</p>
<p>But just a thought on the Harvard numbers, could it be that most Chicago students interested in law seek out law schools that are more theory/intellectual/less BigLaw? How do Chicago kids do at Yale and Chicago?</p>
<p>I can tell you that my second year has never met with anyone having to do with prelaw, his advisor tells him there’s plenty of time for that. She seems to want him to focus less on any preprofessional things and rather concentrate on getting grants to study and internships in various programs. I actually get the feeling that he’s being prepped for academia:)</p>
<p>At UChicago Law, U of C undergrads are the biggest group - about 35 kids out of a class of about 190.</p>
<p>At Yale, I think the class is dominated by Yale (87) and Harvard (66) - this is for all 3 years. So about 22/year for Harvard and 29/year from Yale. U of C has 8 students at Yale law, Darthmouth has 15, Duke has 11. Columbia has 30, or 10/year. Stanford has 33, 11/year. MIT has 5 total.
[Law</a> School Students](<a href=“http://www.yale.edu/bulletin/html/law/students.html]Law”>http://www.yale.edu/bulletin/html/law/students.html)</p>
<p>Hekau - I think akx06’s numbers verify what I was talking about in my post. Outside of Chicago Law, I don’t think Chicago places nearly as well as its peers. A look at the Yale Law stats verifies this. In comparing Chicago (roughly 1200 students per class) to its peer schools of roughly the same size (or where Chicago is bigger), here’s how the breakdown works out:</p>
<p>Columbia (roughly 1k students per class): 30
Dartmouth (around 1k per class): 15
Brown (around 1400 per class): 17
Princeton (roughly 1200 per class): 24
Williams (roughly 1/3 the size of Chicago): 7
Amherst (roughly 1/3 the size of Chicago): 9
Chicago: 8</p>
<p>Chicago is readily outpaced by all of its immediate peers. </p>
<p>In terms of Chicago students “seeking” schools that are “more theoretical” than Harvard, perhaps this may be true, but law school is law school - outside of Yale, law schools generally have the same feel, the same approach to academic subjects, and prestige of the school matters the MOST. If more Chicago students could gain admission to Harvard, they would go their in droves. The problem is, just not many Chicago students are getting into Harvard. </p>
<p>I was serious for a while about law school while I attended Chicago, and my pre-law advisor gave me the same advice (do internships, study abroad, broaden your skills, blah blah), and that advice is garbage. It’s frankly quite disappointing that the current administration at Chicago is still feeding its undergrads this ridiculous information. Now more than ever, the reputation of the law school matters the most, and law schools care primarily about GPA and LSAT. That’s it. Maybe a great internship will serve as a tiebreaker at some schools, but GPA and LSAT MUST be high. Kids at other schools know this, at Chicago for some reason, the administration continues to pull wool over the undergrads’ eyes. </p>
<p>Again, the academic environment at Chicago is second to none. I enjoyed my time at Chicago, but it’s crazy that the administration has not at least caught on to advising students appropriately. While this may sound uncouth, when I was doing grad work at Penn, the undergrads had a lot more savvy about the entire pre-law process. They picked classes they enjoyed but also always had an eye to maximizing their GPA, and they took the LSAT very, very seriously. At chicago, my peers would be fine getting Bs in classes, and they usually wound up taking the LSAT without as much preparation. </p>
<p>For your son, I would tell him that, if he really, REALLY wants law school, be sharp during shopping week every quarter - take the classes that are interesting but are also with the profs who are more lenient in their grading. Study HARD for the LSAT. Take a prep course, get individual tutoring, whatever, to do well on it. There is NO boost given to Chicago applicants in competition with Chicago’s direct peers (Duke, Columbia, etc.). A 3.7 from Columbia beats a 3.5 from Chicago EVERY TIME. </p>
<p>Does Brown really have DOUBLE the number of qualified, capable candidates as Chicago? Does Columbia really have TRIPLE the number of capable candidates at Chicago? My answer would be a resounding NO, but the structure and feel of Chicago works against applicants looking to go to law school. It’s unfortunate, and I was sorely hoping this had changed after I left the U of C. From the numbers I can see, however, it still looks like Chicago’s numbers are, sadly, pretty pathetic. </p>
<p>(Now, most people who attend law school - even the best ones - end up hating the law and their profession. This is why I wound up not going, but this is a conversation to have with your son perhaps at another time ;-)</p>
<p>I agree with Cue7 here. From day one if you understand the LSAT / GPA strategy, the game totally changes (even if you are already at UChicago). Some majors are just terribly ill suited to the pre-law setup. As far as econ goes, a 3.5+ from the college with the right mix of math puts you solidly in competition for a top 5 PhD programs (see the admissions tables that are out there online). Meanwhile, it would not be enough to get you into Harvard, Yale, or Stanford Law, and would make you by no means a shoe in at Columbia, Chicago, or NYU (even if coupled to a 170 or so). </p>
<p>If you can grasp this concept before you matriculate, you are even better off, because the disparities in placement between similar ranked schools colleges are ridiculous. There is no shame in recognizing that Browns curricular setup can be gamed (while still getting a fine education), and then making the most of it.</p>
<p>uchicagoalum - exactly. The problem is, too many Chicago students do NOT know this until too late, and a big reason for it is because the advisers throw out a lot of propaganda about how law schools “love Chicago students,” and how Chicago students should just concentrate on “doing what they love” and “expanding their minds.”</p>
<p>The very first pre-law meeting I attended, the adviser told all of us to relax, and to rest assured - law schools knew about the rigor of a Chicago curriculum. This may be true when an admissions committee compares a Chicago application to some applicant from Ohio State, but overall, this argument was complete garbage. Chicago is no more respected than Columbia, Duke, Dartmouth, etc. in the law school admissions world. </p>
<p>The other big problem at Chicago is since placement wasnt great when I was there, there were few future Harvard Law upperclassmen I could talk to for info on law school admissions. I couldn’t get “real deal” info from the guy who took the LSAT without much prep and was heading to Univ of Iowa. A culture of success in placement breeds even more success, and Chicago needs to get on board with this.</p>
<p>S1 found that the preprofessional students at Harvard were incredibly focused on their careers after college. From day one, the main concern was how what they were doing would help them land that acceptance at a top professional school. Much the same pattern that got them into Harvard to begin with. Chicago students (as represented by friends in the premed groups) in contrast, were not so obsessed. The culture in the schools is just different. Many more of the very best and brightest at peer schools are focused on the professions. Many of the best and brightest at Chicago are not, if they were I’m sure the LSAT scores etc. would likely be higher. This may not represent the school at all, but simply the focus of each school’s student population. S1, who finished almost all the premed requirements and who was on track to met the requirements described here has decided he now disdains the “practical” as he calls it, and is interested in theory and will be headed to grad school instead. The culture grabbed him and changed him, I’m sure he is not an isolated case. Part of his decision was based on his time at Harvard talking with the premeds there. Rightly or wrongly, he did not see them as interested in topics not directly related to their professional goals as he was. He said he just didn’t find the lifestyle attractive. (The other part was shadowing a top surgeon and an internist for a month, and finding it was not as interesting to him as he thought it would be.) From an article in the Harvard Crimson (2008):
I would wager this is quite different than Chicago’s demographic.</p>
<p>Idad, Chicago’s demographic may not be terribly different from Harvard’s student body. Please look here:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/baccorsum1995-2004.pdf[/url]”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/baccorsum1995-2004.pdf</a></p>
<p>Approximately 15% of Chicago’s graduates go on to graduate school, and about 13% of Harvard’s graduates go on to graduate school. This doesn’t seem to be that significant a difference.</p>
<p>My biggest frustration for Chicago is that for finance, for rhodes scholarships, and for PhD programs, Chicago basically does JUST as well as ANY of its peer schools. What I want to change, however, is the fact that Chicago trails its peers significantly for law school and (I’m assuming) for medical school as well. </p>
<p>To be blunt, I want the options for Chicago graduates to mirror the options available to Harvard, Stanford etc. grads across ALL fields - including law and medicine. I think Chicago grads probably end up applying to law and med schools in roughly similar rates to grads from Harvard and Stanford. No reason for the Chicago grads to trail their peers in this area, if Chicago can do just as well for PhD programs and awards.</p>
<p>Those are Doctoral rates, not how many go on to Grad School. One must also subtract the Engineering numbers from the all disciplines category. From the U of C website:
</p>
<p>Cue7: Is UChicago’s business school placement good? I’ve heard a lot of wonderful things about doing economics at UChicago.</p>
<p>I’m really into the social sciences, so I think non-profit and community service will appeal to me.</p>
<p>idad - very true, these are doctoral rates, but at Chicago, at least when I was an undergrad, there was always a strong appreciation for PhD programs, and interest in getting the doctoral degree. You must admit, it’s surprising that the difference between Harvard and Chicago on this front is so negligible, no?</p>
<p>I’m not sure it is that close. I have seen other charts where there is more separation, and where Chicago’s numbers were closer to 20%, and Harvard’s lower. I saw a recent quote somewhere, I think on the U of C site, that claims Chicago is #1 in percentage of students getting Ph.D.'s.</p>
<p>This has already been posted about a bajillion times, but I always find it interesting. </p>
<p>[REED</a> COLLEGE PHD PRODUCTIVITY](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html]REED”>Doctoral Degree Productivity - Institutional Research - Reed College)</p>
<p>It depends on how one calculates these things over what time period, but the point is Chicago does well, but of more interest to this thread is the Medical Sciences group. Reed ranks quite high in this category as well. (However, these particular numbers are quite old.) This is interesting since the average GPA of Reed graduates is about 2.8.</p>
<p>Minor correction: <a href=“http://www.reed.edu/registrar/forms/grades.pdf[/url]”>http://www.reed.edu/registrar/forms/grades.pdf</a> says:
</p>
<p>Interesting. Still low, but higher than when S1 was accepted there a few years ago. Then he was told the average was 2.8.</p>
<p>Those “Medical Sciences” numbers are for PhD programs, not MDs. And you can tell that there’s something hinky about them because of the particular list of most-productive undergraduate institutions: </p>
<p>Univ. of Sciences in Philadelphia
Albany College of Pharmacy
Hampshire
U.C., San Francisco
Ohio Northern
Stanford
Univ. of Texas Hlth Sci Center
Reed
Mount Holyoke<br>
Wellesley </p>
<p>Ummm, give me a break! University of the Sciences in Philadelphia is the rebranded Philadelphia College of Pharmaceutical Science. I didn’t even know that UCSF had undergraduates. Any race in which they, and Hampshire, and Albany College of Pharmacy, etc., are beating Stanford (not to mention the rest of the college glitterati) may not be a race I care all that much about.</p>
<p>EDIT: OK, a little research solved the UCSF puzzle, and gives a little more indication of why the Medical Science numbers aren’t what I would focus on. UCSF doesn’t generally award baccalauriat degrees, except that in nursing and pharmacy it will take students with associate degrees and eventually give them a BA as part of the qualifications for the masters degree programs in which they are enrolled. It’s a very small population relative to the university as a whole, and obviously there’s a significant opportunity for generating PhD degrees in those fields because they don’t award BAs to anyone who isn’t already enrolled in an MS program, and of course its MS programs are cheek-by-jowl with some of the biggest PhD programs in those particular fields. Now I want to know how USP, ACP, and Hampshire (!) could possibly produce bigger numbers.</p>
<p>^ “not to mention the rest of the college glitterati”</p>
<p>I think “university glitterati” would be more accurate. </p>
<p>We’re talking about a narrow subset of undergrads, those who go into academia and/or research. Stanford, e.g., is two-thirds grad school, the main source of its world-class glitter, and is where many of those PhDs are earned. It’s just a statistic: Only a few top universities have top-ten future PhD stats as well (averaged over all disciplines): CalTech, MIT, UChicago, Yale. Stanford, OTOH, more than any other school, is likely responsible for U.S. dominance in technology; it doesn’t have to be the best at everything.</p>
<p>How the smaller schools do it is well known: Self-selecting students (especially USP and ACP?), small classes, individual mentoring, undergrad research.</p>
<p>So for undergraduate, does this mean it’s better to go to a decent state school and look badass, or is it better to go to a top school for undergraduate and get around the same grades that everyone else has? In other words, is a 3.7 to 3.9 gpa from University of Iowa better than a 3.3 to 3.5 gpa from University of Chicago or an ivy?</p>