Where do MIT grad students come from?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1

<p>I've heard both horror stories and uplifting accounts of the diversity of schools students accepted into MIT's graduate schools hailed from, so I was hoping to find out what the true state of the situation is. Does anyone have (or know where I can find) statistics or data on the schools the lead to MIT graduate students? If there is a significant variation among the departments (and I would guess there would be), I'm mostly interested in these stats for math students.</p>

<p>I've seen this [<a href="http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html"&gt;http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html&lt;/a&gt;] link floating around the internet when topics like this come up, but I don't think it tells as nice a story as it seems. For instance, there's no way of knowing which graduate schools students end up at; I would probably rate a school quite a bit higher if it sent 20 students to MIT than if it sent 21 to the University of Iowa.</p>

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<p>From MIT, mostly (though that’s more true in the engineering departments than elsewhere). </p>

<p>I don’t know that there’s a unified data source somewhere on the internet. Schools and departments keep track of the undergraduate origins and graduate destinations of their students, but these data are mostly not made public.</p>

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<p>Anyone that really wants to sink some time into this question can go to each department page and click on each faculty member’s group. Most faculty members have a webpage for their research group, and the undergrad institution is usually listed for each graduate student.</p>

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<p>“Where do MIT grad students come from?”</p>

<p>Ah, I remember when I first asked my parents. It was Disney movies that did it. In the first movie there’s a kiss at the end, and in the second movie there’s babies. I imagine it was pretty awkward for them. They got me a library book with pictures.</p>

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<p>I don’t think that there is a unified data source on this or that looking at MIT graduate students as a whole makes sense. Some programs like EECS M.Eng are by design all MIT undergrads. Some fields like math usually only take students from relatively elite universities while I would guess programs like Urban Planning, Architecture, and the Media Lab took students from a more diverse range of institutions. There are also many international students. Of possible interest is some data on where graduate students in Harvard physics and econ and MIT econ did their undergrad work although the sample sizes are not huge and these are only two fields. <a href=“MIT Economics Phd Requirements - #5 by UMTYMP_student - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - College Confidential Forums”>MIT Economics Phd Requirements - #5 by UMTYMP_student - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - College Confidential Forums;
<a href=“Undergraduate Origins of Harvard Physics PhDs - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>Undergraduate Origins of Harvard Physics PhDs - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums;