What Graduate Schools Think About Your College

Graduate School
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@EyeVeee It is also a possibility that an equal number or fewer number even apply to grad school from large publics. All of my kids have attended publics and the number of grads from individual depts is typically quite low. (Like 10 from the chemE dept or 20 (or less) from the physics dept.) This roster shows the number of grads from physics depts across the country: https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/rosters/physrost17.1.pdf

Ds graduated from Bama in 2018. I didn’t see the roster for 2018 but 2017’s says 20. I know of 3 specifically who applied to grad school. One is at Harvard in their MD-PhD program, ds is at a top 5 program in physics, and one wasn’t accepted anywhere (he ignored the advice of not graduating early with his incoming credits from high school.) I know that ds said only a handful applied to grad school, definitely not all of them. Quite a few were double majors and physics was not their primary focus.

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@Mom2aphysicsgeek , I am sure this varies by department, but the stipends + fellowship + travel allowances offered by Berkeley, Wisconsin, UCLA and Michigan were substantially less than the total package offered by the top private Us. Her postdoc and professor friends who had been at a number of schools would talk about this as well, e.g., that Ivy A (or B or C) has money stuffed in the air vents. That was not the basis for her decision, and it does not at all mean that the Big State Us’ offers were not fair, but there was a definite difference.

@ucbalumnus , I am not sure why you’re so intent on disproving an observation I’ve passed along from someone who is inside one of these programs and the experience of someone else who is involved in admissions at another one, but I will throw out one more data point: at the accepted students’ visit at one of the tippy-top schools, one of the professors asked my daughter, sneeringly, why she attended Big State U. “You must have lived really close to it, because it’s not the kind of school anyone would travel to attend.” This is a school with 25th/75th percentile ACT scores of 31-34 and, in fact, many students do travel from very far to attend. It’s probably good for her that this prof wasn’t involved in reviewing her application. Regardless, it is no secret among the students that there is a preference for HYPSC (and whatever initial I’ve left off) undergrads.

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It really depends on the fields. In humanities, the Ivies are self-obsessed and insular. They recruit grad students and hire faculty almost exclusively from other Ivies. In STEM it’s generally different (though, as pointed out, Math often behaves like humanities). In STEM, graduate programs look at the reputation of a program within the field. I am in ecology, and back when I was a grad student, UC Davis had a lot more cachet in the field than UCLA. A CS undergraduate from Notre Dame would be considered far less desirable than a CS undergrad from U Washington.

Basically, admissions committees in STEM trust some programs to prepare students more than others, but that is based on the reputation of the program, not the reputation of the university as a whole.

As @bluebayou pointed out, letter of recommendation are really important, and the bigger the name, the better the letter. However, it is extremely difficult to get famous people at prestigious universities to write a personal LoR for a lowly undergraduate. Moreover, in STEM, there are often Big Names in smaller schools, because of geography or climate.

There are plenty of public universities which are high on the lists of STEM PhD programs. For engineering, UIUC, UMich, Berkeley, and GTech are just a few universities whose graduates would be welcomed into any engineering graduate school in the country.

However, admissions are Holistic, and accomplishments can compensate for undergraduate institute. So a graduate of a relatively low ranked program who has published a peer-reviewed article as an undergraduate will get attention, as will a student who worked with a big name in the field, who wrote a glowing LoR.

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Oh, dear! Another college counseling pro labelled an expert.

Her bio says a decade “as an undergraduate admissions officer and independent school college counselor,” but her linkedin refers to teaching after college and 8 years as a school counselor.

No more self designated experts, please. And where does it say she works with grad school hoperuls? Methinks some spin.

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Here’s my experience for Chemistry PhD programs.

For top-5ish programs (Caltech, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, can also include places like Scripps and now Northwestern), they have their pick of the most qualified candidates from around the world. They pick their PhD students accordingly, which means they want to see strong evidence of preparation to perform novel research. That means a strong academic foundation (necessary to develop valid hypotheses and correctly interpret data), and research experience (lab skills, ability to learn on the job, to deal wth adversity/failure, and to synthesize new knowledge and ideas).

The top-5 programs tend to have students from top schools, and some are particularly overrepresented. But that also depends on the size of the undergraduate chemistry program at the school (ie. Stanford has only ~20 chem undergrads per year, not that many apply to PhD programs). More commonly, the students who are accepted have some sort of research ties with professors who are well-known in their field. This is correlated with top universities, but does not necessarily mean top universities. Students from lower-ranked or small non-research universities may do REUs with very reputable labs; there are also very reputable professors at lower-ranked universities.

So how to get into a top-5 program? Solid grades + solid research experience. Research experience is reflected in publications and letters from professors/PIs that say the student was a good researcher. Same goes for getting research fellowships to pay for grad school. Some fellowships are targeted towards underrepresented groups (women, some visible minorities). The top-5 programs do not really have ‘diversity’ considerations for admission. If you don’t have a letter from a well-known researcher, you’ll want a publication in a reputable journal to demonstrate research ability.

Another thing to note is that a ‘well-known professor’ does not always mean one with lots of prizes or a giant research group. Some professors are well-known because they do their bit in the academic community - they serve on journal boards, host conferences, review grant proposals, etc. The academic community is very small and incestuous. You can see a name and think ‘oh I know his/her PhD advisor, that advisor did excellent work and therefore this person must also be a solid scientist.’ Or ‘I’ve seen this person’s papers or heard him talk at X conference. He/she seems like a careful scientist and therefore I trust his/her judgement.’ On the flip side, there are also infamous professors (who also tend to be at top schools)… people tainted with scandals/rumors/bad science - they will also damage the credibility of associated scientists like former students, collaborators, etc. Usually this doesn’t carry down to the undergraduate students since they understand that undergrad students don’t really have the nuanced understanding of academia to know any better.

Outside of top-5 programs (but even within the top 20), admissions become much looser. They’re still looking for ability to do good research, but the quality of applicants (especially from Western countries) is lower, so a very strong GPA with limited research experience may be enough to be admitted.

As for stipends, just a single example - Stanford’s is >$40K; Berkeley is ~$35K. For post-docs, Stanford mandates salaries to exceed NIH minimum; Berkeley follows federal salaried employee minimum wage.

A final note: as much as it’s true that good grad programs will accept top students from lesser-known schools, it’s also important to know that poorly prepared students will not survive a rigorous PhD program. I once mentored a PhD student who had a top GPA, 2 REUs and a research fellowship who was from a very very small LAC with weak STEM programs. Despite being excellent on-paper, the student just did not have the solid fundamental chemistry knowledge and lab preparation to do research. The student had the passion and commitment, but did not have the tools. And it was truly heartbreaking to see because the truth was s/he should have done a lot of undergraduate courses over again, but it was just too late to be able to do anything about it. This student left the PhD program well before candidacy.

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@planit With our ds, financially his offers were pretty similar. Where he saw the biggest difference was in terms of being offered fellowships or lesser responsibilities. (Those incentives for him all came from publics.)

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@geraniol Sounds similar to what I know from biology and most other STEM. As I wrote, though, ecology can be different because you can get really good people and programs in fairly low-ranked universities, because of geography/biogeography (top ecologists often choose places like New Mexico or Arizona to work, because of the proximity to interesting ecosystems, so UNM and U of Arizona have had their share of world-renown ecologists, and, consequently, top-notch programs).