I see so many parents and kids here asking whether to attend College X vs College Y if the ultimate goal is to get into a good grad program. As a parent who went through grad (PhD) admissions myself, I thought I’d share the insights I gave my own child as he started applying to schools.
First, to be clear, I’m just talking about academic grad schools (MA & PhD programs in fields like English Lit, History, Econ, Bio, etc.). For these programs, where you went to school is not going to be as important as what you did while you were there. No one gets into a top program simply because she went to Harvard and no one is rejected simply because he went to a less-prestigious school. But let’s say we have two applicants to the graduate physics dept. at MIT, one from Harvard and one from Northwestern. Now, Northwestern is an excellent, prestigious school…but it’s not Harvard (or Yale or Princeton or Stanford).
The first thing to understand is that PhD admissions are not done by professional admissions staff (unlike admissions to college and law school). The process is overseen by the professors in the department, and their pressing concern is going to be “Is this applicant likely to contribute to the field?” They’re not going to care about whether you sang a cappella or played lacrosse or did charity work. It’s pretty much going to be about academic accomplishment. So let’s say both applicants majored in physics and graduated summa with 3.8 GPA, Phi Beta Kappa, and departmental honors. Still, neither one has an edge yet. So then the question is “Have they done research and, if so, with whom?” So let’s say both have had significant lab experience with noted physicists who were known to the dept. at MIT and who wrote glowing recs. Ok, still neither has an edge.
So then it comes down to “What does the applicant want to study?” This is ultimately the $1,000,000 question. It doesn’t matter how good your school or stellar your grades if you propose to study something the professors in the department are not eager to help you with. If the student from NW happens to want to study the exact topic that a faculty member is working on and the student from Harvard wants to study something no one’s doing in that dept, chances are the student from NW will be accepted and the student from Harvard rejected. The rejection of the student from Harvard is not in any way a repudiation of that student or his/her record but rather a recognition that the dept at MIT had nothing to offer him/her in terms of his/her stated research interests. So the point of all that is to recognize that grad school admissions isn’t about going to a particular school but rather about showing academic achievement AND shared research goals.
Upshot: if you don’t go to HYPS you can still get into any top PhD program if you present a solid application to a department whose interests match yours. So all the parents here who are agonizing because their kid didn’t get into HYPS and they don’t know whether it’s better to go to Chicago or Dartmouth or Brandeis or WUSTL or Wesleyan should just relax and know that once you’re at a certain level, any PhD program will assume you had access to adequate preparation and will just look at your record to see what you did with those opportunities. If your goal is academia, apply to schools where there’s serious research activity in your desired field if you want to go into the hard sciences or where there’s a chance to write an honors/senior thesis if you want humanities or social sciences. Develop relationships with your professors (or TAs if you’re at a big school like Berkeley). But it will not make ANY difference to PhD programs whether you went to Middlebury vs Bowdoin or Pomona vs Oberlin or Duke vs UMich. Granted, if you went to the night program at the University of Southeastern Nebraska, you might have to really work to make your case to MIT, but it still wouldn’t be impossible.