Wall Street Journal Feeder Ranking

<p>Anyone have a link to Wall Street Journal's ranking of best feeder schools to top grad programs?</p>

<p><a href="http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Here you go</p>

<p>Top 10:</p>

<ol>
<li>Harvard University</li>
<li>Yale University</li>
<li>Princeton University</li>
<li>Stanford University</li>
<li>Williams College</li>
<li>Duke University</li>
<li>Dartmouth College</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Amherst College
10.Swarthmore College</li>
</ol>

<p>The .pdf gives the top 50</p>

<p>thanks alot.</p>

<p>The Wall Street Journal methods were terribly flawed. There are other threads on CC that discuss this. Biased, limited sample. Only surveyed about a dozen different schools as I recall.</p>

<p>If you rank schools by average family income of the students, you'll get pretty close to the same result.</p>

<p>It only uses the top 5 professional schools, which hurts schools who have lots of students that go to their own professional schools but helps schools that have top 5 schools which they go to</p>

<p>It also proves how good LAC's are since they have no professional schools of there own, let alone ones used in the survey</p>

<p>That being said, this ranking probably isn't different from a survey that uses a much larger sample of top professional programs</p>

<p>Ditto Collegehelp -- unreliable with faulty criteria for judgment. Also, it's a bit dated.</p>

<p>are there any unflawed rankings of feeder schools ?</p>

<p>Unfortunately, this is probably the best you'll find.</p>

<p>In my personal experience I have found the list to be incredibly accurate.</p>

<p>The WSJ feeder list along with the Revealed Preferences study confirm what everyone already knows (at least in the back of their minds if they don't state it out loud):</p>

<p>1) HYPS is justified.
2) The Ivies matter. Period.</p>

<p>btw, Slipper, I normally don't hold grudges but when one makes a clear mistake (and add to that an unjustified accusation and insult) one should own up to it. "To Err is Human" and all.</p>

<p>It's not the ivy distinction that matters. Cornell is way below Harvard. This survey, as I see it, is dependent on two variables:
1. Outstanding students
2. Students of a given school aspire to be professionals (medicine, law, and business)
The schools top on the list fulfill both those criteria. Others, less so, resulting in a lower ranking, as is the case with MIT and Caltech, whose students lack the professional aspirations of HYPS students.
I find it initially funny, and then sad, that Morehouse, a predominantly black (95%) school with I assume a 1060 SAT average (based on 25-75 percentiles) does better than Michigan, UVA, and Cal. A cookie for the first person who guesses why!</p>

<p>Biggest variable is money. See WHO is being fed into these schools, rather than focusing on where they got their degrees. Stratify undergrad schools by income class, then correlate with feeder status.</p>

<p>Look at percentage of students at MIT and Caltech receiving needbased aid, and compare with similar stats at HYP and you'll have most of your explanation for the differences.</p>

<p>What are you referring to Ivy Grad? I have seen the lists at Wharton, Columbia Business School, Stanford Business School, Cornell Med School...none of which are on the WSJ list and they are pretty much exactly in line with WSJ.</p>

<p>Ashrnm, good observations, this is totally true. As for Morehouse, they have done an amazing job of connecting with top grad schools as feeders as have Spelman, Howard, etc.</p>

<p>Also, I think the reason places like Michigan do badly on a list like this is due to sheer size and the fact that big schools tend to be less pre-professional.</p>

<p>Whether you like the results of the Wall Street Journal "study" or not, the methods undermine its credibility. The Wall Street Journal should have known better than to publish information obtained this way. Most of the 12 "graduate" schools were northeast. I think the 12 "graduate programs" were not really graduate programs but professional schools of Law, Business, Medicine. The denominator for their fractions was often not appropriate; very few undergrads in schools of Engineering, Communications, Agriculture (and so on) are candidates for law, medicine, business yet they are in the denominator. I think the "Baccalaureate Origins of Doctoral Recipients" study was much better but not perfect, although it did not focus on professional schools. I also like the Revealed Preferences study. I dislike incompetent research and irresponsible journalism whether I agree with the results or not.</p>

<p>slipper, i'm referring to the comments you made on the "U.S. News 2006 Ranking Prediction" thread. </p>

<p>Basically, you made references to a "grade" ranking list (in fact you posted your own revised list) that you erroneously thought which I originally posted. Fact is a "grade" ranking list was posted straight after I posted my comments about "Tiering" and you assumed that I was the one who made that grade rank list. Further, you made an accusation about me being a UVA grad in disguise based upon your wrong assumption.</p>

<p>Not only that, other posters had begun assuming as much after your comments (about me putting up that grade rank list). If you look back, you'll clearly see that the person who posted that list was a poster named "collegeparent":</p>

<p>
[quote]
In deference to IvyGrad, I'll post again a bell curve of colleges and universities based on a grading system. Of course the various factors to determine the grade remains comparable; the best in everything gets the A+, etc. Here goes (in alphabetical order):</p>

<p>A+
Harvard
MIT
Princeton
Stanford
Yale
...

[/quote]
</p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=83339%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=83339&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Slipper, I was referring to AA. No cookie for you!
mini:
Caltech & MIT students simply do not usually aspire to go to professional school. They prefer, due to their interest in science & engineering, industry and graduate school. MIT is a bit more oriented towards business, and so produces some MBAs.</p>

<p>"Biggest variable is money. See WHO is being fed into these schools, rather than focusing on where they got their degrees. Stratify undergrad schools by income class, then correlate with feeder status."</p>

<p>This is my rationalization of this phenomenon:</p>

<p>The rich insure that their offspring recieve the best education possible. Also, the rich are generally smarter than poorer classes, for after all, that is partially or wholly why they are now rich (There are few truly old rich families). This intelligence is quite heritable, and thus also passed down to the children. If intelligence was perfectly heritable and nonrandom, the rich would probably be even more represented and social mobility would be even less. Agreed, some rich get in through devious measures like legacies or VIP or donating huge amounts of money, but those cases are quite the minority.
Intelligence almost always correlates with Income.</p>

<p>collegehelp, the sample is quite biased, and possibly arbitary, for what is the cutoff between elite and non elite? Why not include graduate school like Phds? Engineers do get a fair share of MBAs though, explaining MIT's high rank.</p>

<p>Well, all the WSJ does is show the proportions of students going to top schools. It does not claim that it shows proportions of students going to top schools adjusted for the number of pre-professionals. And even though they are in the Northeast, we see Stanford, Duke, Pomona, Chicago, and Rice all doing fairly well on the list (better than some Ivy Leagues, which would be suprising if you assumed that being in the Northeast gave you an immediate advantage in getting into top professional schools).</p>

<p>Of course, my biggest problem is that the sample size of schools is really too small...it should use top 10-15 law schools, med schools, and business schools; after all, the top two schools in the feeder chart might be challenged more if they considered more schools in the survey.</p>

<p>note: I think asher was slightly disgruntled about affirmative action, not connections with top schools by all-black colleges</p>

<p>Ashern, </p>

<p>AA is more complex than simply letting in minorities. At the corporate/ grad school level they use feeder schools like Morehouse as AA. Its much easier than finding people individually. So no cookie for you either!</p>

<p>IvyGrad, you were cited as the source of that list and UVA was ranked almost laughably high so I assumed you wrote the list.</p>

<p>thethoughprocess, such actions as selecting a school sample, determining the top 10-15 law schools or which schools may be considered elite all amalgamate to malign the study with a degree of arbitrariness.</p>