Wharton's BS/MBA Program

<p>What do people know about it?
How hard to get in?</p>

<p>You apply end of soph year I believe. It's quite difficult to get into.</p>

<p>I heard from a current student during a tour that the admissions rate was about 50% (this would be 2 years ago), while everyone who applied to the BS/JD program was accepted.</p>

<p>are there any ba/mba or ba/jd programs?</p>

<p>it's not a program. it's a sub matriculation into the MBA from the Wharton BS. approximately 2 people apply on average per year, with the process beginning in your junior year fall. they usually take 1-2 people. you need to have the equivalent work experience (2-5 years) that MBA applicants have, and you need to have worked your Wharton schedule out so that you're at a very exact point (there are info sessions for frosh and sophomores to teach you about this). </p>

<p>the same is essentially true for the BS/JD sub matriculation. (Except, I believe, any penn student can go for law submat)</p>

<p>Is there a submatriculation method for pre-meds? Getting into Penn med school guaranteed would be awesome</p>

<p>no - and you do know they say it's harder to get into penn's professional schools coming out of penn undergrad, right? :-)</p>

<p>that weird since penn would be taking from their own....hmmmm....interesting.....</p>

<p>whoa.. it's harder to get into a penn grad school coming out of penn??? jeez. does that apply to all grad schools? i looked at the BA/JD site and it said that 33% are coming directly from the undergrad/college.. (a few posts above, the poster mentioned he/she thought that everyone submatriculating into the JD program was accepted.. anyone know about this?)</p>

<p>specifically, i'm wondering how hard would the SAS master's / CAS submatriculation and the grad school of education be?</p>

<p>Yes - most grad schools discourage their undergrads from applying.</p>

<p>I'm a senior in Classics here at Penn and when discussing grad school with our advisor I was explicitly told not to bother applying in Classics or any of the related fields (Ancient History, Archaeology, Art History). Other universities, however, actually encourage it. Ohio State for example accepts a significant numnber of their Classics undergrads into their graduate program.</p>

<p>Also - its important to distinguish graduate school from vocational degrees like the MBA, JD and MSEd. Note that all the submatriculation programs are for vocational degrees, not "graduate school" in the sense of the normal Masters to PhD progression.</p>

<p>MBA, JD, MSEd, and MD programs are usually referred to as "Professional" degrees, not "vocational". In America, "vocational" programs are usually community college/2-year/associates degrees.</p>

<p>On the whole, Penn's "professional" schools certainly do not offer any advantage to applicants coming out of Penn's undergrad. You hear about 100% acceptance rates for submatriculation - that's because only 2-3 people actually apply each year. They try to weed out the applicants who shouldn't be there to avoid wasting peoples' time.</p>

<p>"Graduate" school, on the other hand, is largely program-specific. Penn may or may not accept its undergrads at the same rate. Conventional wisdom, however, suggests that one go somewhere else when looking for a PhD, in order to expand the network of contacts and experiences. MS/MA programs generally suggest similar behavior, but you do see people submatriculating/directly applying to their undergrad University in order to save time or money.</p>

<p>"they usually take 1-2 people. you need to have the equivalent work experience (2-5 years) that MBA applicants have, and you need to have worked your Wharton schedule out so that you're at a very exact point"</p>

<p>What does this exactly mean? When would u get this work experience if you are an undergrad?</p>

<p>i believe during the summer but i don't think they are looking for kids who are working for investment banks or anything. maybe as interns...</p>

<p>But why would the professional schools discourage Penn's own undergrads from applying?</p>

<p>I was under the impression that Penn med school would actually favor their own undergrads. I know that at Harvard, the medical school takes the most incoming med students from its own undergraduate school</p>

<p>for law school, 82 students (33% of 249 enrolled) "enrolled directly from the college" (<a href="http://www.law.upenn.edu/prospective/jd/classstatistics.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.law.upenn.edu/prospective/jd/classstatistics.html&lt;/a&gt;)
am i missing something here? a previous poster said only 2-3 people bother applying to the BA/JD, but this stat says 82 students did, right?</p>

<p>preMEDguy312 - just the opposite - the "professional" programs don't care - they are offering a non-research, terminal degree. </p>

<p>You must distinguish between the submatriculation programs the OP mentioned (which are extremely selective), real graduate school (PhD, research based) and "professional" programs that are credentials for a particular class of jobs.</p>

<p>All the Ivy Law/Medical/Business schools are well known for "eating their own dog food" so to speak. As gopumas07 mentions, Penn Law sucks up quite a few of Penn's undergrads and you can find similar stats for Harvard, Yale, etc.</p>

<p>gopumas07 - that's people who applied as seniors, graduated, and THEN started Law school (without first entering the "real world").</p>

<p>mattwonder - I know that those are usually called "professional" degrees. However, when a degree has been degraded to the point that it is simply a job credential, involves no research, no publications - then it is, IMHO, a "vocational" degree and the term "professional" has just become a class marker that is effectively meaningless. </p>

<p>After all, what is the difference of between, say, a cosmetic surgeon and a skilled stone mason? Both spend comparable time learning their craft, both presumably create beautiful results. The mason's work will last longer of course and they hardly ever kill their clients...</p>

<p>No no no no no no! Gopumas07, it appears you've confused several statistics. First, the page you quote says from "college", not "the college". This means that roughly 1/3 of the students entered law school right after graduating from undergrad, and that's from all colleges, not Penn. That's ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from the BA/JD or BS/JD program, where you go directly from your junior year of undergrad into a JD program. That's an incredibly self-selective program, and only a handful (<10) complete the application process, leading to 1-2 enrolling. Of course, only a Penn student could submatriculate :-). Please understand that this statistic means that 2/3 of law students had some after-college experience - either graduate programs or work.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/mba/admissions/faqs/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/mba/admissions/faqs/&lt;/a>
MBA programs favor work even more. Almost all enrolling in Wharton MBA have real (after college) work experience, and those who have little experience have had very quantitative backgrounds. This is largely why the submatriculation applicant pool is so small - very few people have internships that provide the meaningful experience that an MBA draws upon. Addiitionally, they've got to be good quantitative students. (The few that I know who submatted were M&T's).</p>

<p>Penn Med has a reputation for being selective against penn undergrads. Some believe it's because so many penn undergrads apply, and all have stellar applications, so it becomes even more competitive, because they obviously can't have a class full of Penn undergrads. There is no submatriculation to the Med school. Further, Harvard's website says that no school provides an admissions advantage(ie, you don't have to go to harvard to go to harvard med school). Additionally, the site says that the stats published there are the only ones published, so I really doubt your claim. <a href="http://hms.harvard.edu/admissions/default.asp?page=statistics%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://hms.harvard.edu/admissions/default.asp?page=statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>ILOVEWHARTON,
the point is that you can't get that kind of experience until you graduate. That's why so few MBA's come directly from undergrad, and even fewer submat. (Additionally, the wharton mba is basically the same classes as wharton undergrad, so it's of questionable value to go)</p>

<p>@williamC: you beat me to it. crappy internet here.</p>

<p>and calling it "vocational" school is simply wrong. you may be a classics snob (and I'd love to throw some derogatory words your way about the waste of your education :-)) but the truth is that we have a language for a reason. Vocational schools in the US lead to largely blue-collar jobs; Professional schools are the MBA, JD, and MD arena. Although you may bemoan the transition of professional schools into simple training, the term remains</p>

<p>
[quote]
"All the Ivy Law/Medical/Business schools are well known for "eating their own dog food" so to speak. As gopumas07 mentions, Penn Law sucks up quite a few of Penn's undergrads and you can find similar stats for Harvard, Yale, etc."

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Wait, so WilliamC are you saying that professional schools in general don't favor their own undergrads, but this isn't the case for Ivy League schools?</p>

<p>So are you saying that Ivy League Med/Law/Business schools do favor their own undergraduate students?</p>

<br>


<br>

<p>Yes - but it is an Ivy-Wide phenomenon - not just, e.g., Penn -> Penn Law, but Ivies -> Ivy Law, etc.</p>

<p>B-School is a bit different because most applicants are coming in with several (sometimes many) years of real world experience AND an excellent undergrad record AND high test scores AND they tend not to have majored in "business" as undergrads. Wharton's MBA program for example is about 2/3's engineering/liberal arts people who are adding a particular skill set to their resume that most B-School undergrads will already have to at least some degree.</p>

<p>There are threads about this in the corresponding Professional school fora on CC but it might take a little work to dig them out.</p>