<p>muerte-- if I recall, hawkette’s list is entirely her own design based on her own perceptions (and she’s a current student as well, not an HR person anywhere, again, if I recall). So essentially, her list is basically based on her beliefs solely, without any methodology at all. Notice how it conforms almost identically to groups that can be made following the USNews overall results with the exception of maybe 4-5 schools out of 50.</p>
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FWIW, her profile indicates that she’s 53.</p>
<p>Thanks for the headsup, Modest.</p>
<p>Hawkette - your ranking is recycled drivel.</p>
<p>muerte,
The EA scores above are a just a presentation of my opinion on how employers rate the strength of the students coming out of the USNWR Top 50 colleges. I used that format in another thread because I was trying to draw comparisons with USNWR’s PA scores. Both are subjective and I would expect some readers to have different perceptions, but I also suspect that these “EA rankings” better reflect the thinking in the real world than do USNWR’s PA scores. </p>
<p>My key point is/was that employers look at colleges for the quality of their students/graduates and that the differences at most top schools are not great. That what’s my “EA ranking” meant to convey and that is certainly the case with the three schools in the title of this thread-U Penn, Dartmouth, and Brown.</p>
<p>hawkette’s ranking is basically WSJ + PA Score + some hawkette magic.</p>
<p>More Duke hate; Duke places extremely well, certainly higher than Brown, Penn, Chicago on average [note the word average, average, average, average, average, Law, Med, Business, etc. For those who can’t read, it means on average, not necessarily better in every field]. This can be observed from the WSJ study (heavily flawed according to some; no one seems to have problem with HYPSM/D in the list, only Duke) also from various IB/Consulting list posted on CC and various other websites.</p>
<p>The real difference is not perception of grads, it’s long established recruitment practices. So while many bankers will tell you that Dartmouth and Brown students are on par, they have been recruiting many more from Dartmouth for decades and thus strong networks have formed that pull more Dartmouth students in than Brown students.</p>
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<p>Yes. Wellesley is the premiere women’s college. It benefits from its size as well.</p>
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<p>Dartmouth did very well, as did Columbia.</p>
<p>From [Wharton</a> Top 10](<a href=“http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/UnderGrad/Experience/Wharton-Top-10.htm]Wharton”>http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/UnderGrad/Experience/Wharton-Top-10.htm) :
Anyone else catch this embarrassing grammatical error? Haha sorry, it’s irrelevant to this thread but it’s kinda surprising, coming from the website of such a prestigious school.</p>
<p>Anyhow, if you go to Wharton undergrad with the intention of getting an MBA, you’ll probably get better placements at schools than you would with a degree at any of the non-HYP Ivies. But strictly looking at Dartmouth, Brown, and Penn CAS, I would have to agree that Dartmouth wins for placement.</p>
<p>^ It’s a typo, not a grammatical error, and it’s probably a Freudian slip–they subconsciously didn’t want to include the words “one of.” :)</p>
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It is helpful to point out the flaws or limits of studies like the WSJ or HEDS, but where is the better data that makes it so painfully obvious that Wellesley cannot possibly have better placement than Penn?</p>
<p>I’ve seen data indicating that Wellesley has a much higher endowment per student than Penn and a much lower student:faculty ratio. It’s not hard for me to believe it has outstanding placement services, too.
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<p>Again, why is this so painfully obvious? Why guaranteed? 5 other Ivies, MIT, CalTech, Chicago, the top LACS (AWS, Pomona, Carleton, Mudd, etc.) all are plausible contenders for those top 10 spots.</p>
<p>According to Washington Monthly’s 2009 rankings, Penn was 25th in “Bachelor to Ph.D.” rank solely among national universities (not even counting LACs). If you counted admit rates, maybe Penn would do much better, maybe not. I suspect it would but where’s the evidence? Absent such evidence, I’m with those who say that among top colleges (at least) the individual effort is likely to matter more than the brand; though class size and other institutional factors may have significant effects on motivation or preparedness.</p>
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<p>This is irrelevant, to say nothing of the fact that Wellesley is objectively less selective than Penn.</p>
<p>Wellesley average SAT - 1390
Penn average SAT - 1440</p>
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<p>Columbia placed 11th, which - when you adjust for Penn’s actual size (it has 2400/class, not 2730) - is around where Penn places, as well. And I still consider that a poor showing, certainly not true to the facts.</p>
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<p>Recruiting has much less to do with endowment/student than it does with STUDENT QUALITY. Firms want smart workers, not well-catered ones. Does this make any sense to you? Because it’s true.</p>
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<p>The career website at Penn carries that evidence in spades. From the last graduating class to complete the grad placement survey, only 40 students pursued PhDs. 30 of them went to the top schools in their field (Stanford, Penn, Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Caltech, etc.). The other 10 went to still-respectable schools (Northwestern, UWisconsin, UT-Austin). I’d be willing to bet that compares favorably (if not FAR better) than Oberlin, which is ranked in the top-5 for producing PhD students.</p>
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<p>No argument here. Duke truly has some of the best placement out there, and probably deserves its ranking.</p>
<p>“Yes. Wellesley is the premiere women’s college.”</p>
<p>I just have to LOL for a second here. Howard is the premiere Black man’s college; is it going to automatically have better placement, too? What the hell does “premiere [enter race or gender here]'s college” have to do with ANYTHING placement related? Besides quotas, maybe - but I have a secret: minorities and women go to Ivy League schools, also!</p>
<p>Seriously, what a joke.</p>
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I’ll be blunt – this is an exceptionally useless way to select a school.</p>
<p>The differences between Brown, Columbia, and Penn run significantly deeper than nonexistent differences in placement.</p>
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My thoughts as well! :D</p>
<p>To the extent the Wellesley/Penn SAT score spread is significant, then it would be all the more remarkable that Wellesley slightly out-performed Penn in that WSJ feeder school study. Unless we can be convinced that Penn grads disproportionately pursued professional education at schools better than the ones the WSJ sampled (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Hopkins, Michigan, Dartmouth/Tuck, etc.) Some of the WSJ’s 15 choices may be a little controversial for their individual fields, but not nearly all, and not by much.</p>
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<p>Very conjectural. And talk about sampling bias. Who would be more motivated to complete a graduate school survey than the students who’d been placed into the most prestigious schools? I doubt that only 40 students out of the Ivy League’s largest graduating class went on to pursue Ph.D.s That would only be about 1 per field in a class of ~2400. That would not speak too well of Penn’s ability to motivate its students for academic pursuits.</p>
<p>I’m sure that Penn is excellent, and that any bright hard-working student there can get into an excellent graduate school. However I am very skeptical of assertions that its brand alone confers a reliable, measurable placement advantage compared to any number of other good schools, certainly not enough to override issues of personal preference and “fit”.</p>
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<p>Penn was outplaced by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Williams, Duke, Dartmouth, MIT, Amherst, and Swarthmore, if you want to adjust so that UPenn is proportional to Columbia in size and performance (ho ho!). It’s not a poor showing if you consider the quality of the institutions–and the students enrolled at those institutions–that outperform UPenn.</p>
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<p>What’s a joke? Women’s colleges? Historically Black Colleges and Universities?</p>
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<p>Well, Wellesley is on this list. As is Morehouse.</p>
<p>I’m inclined to agree with the tone of tk’s post. UPenn is a perfectly fine, top school, and it is unnecessary for you to feel insecure about it that you have to question a reasonable ranking that merely intends to show: “Now, here are the handful of schools–excellent in their own way–that send significant proportions of their student bodies to strong graduate programs.”</p>
<p>Kwu, I actually don’t understand large portions of your last post.</p>
<p>However, my point is that those schools really don’t outperform Penn at all, and the ranking is completely flawed. Furthermore, I wonder how much Columbia benefited from having its grad schools on the list, while Penn’s were excluded - I’m willing to bet that were the roles reversed, the ranking placement would be, as well…</p>
<p>Bottom line is that the WSJ study can’t generally be trusted to say ANYTHING: yes, as a penn student it seems a bit self-serving to say that, but I think all of our schools with the exception of Dartmouth were under-reported, while others such as Wellesley were reported to highly. Does it really beat Cornell so handily?</p>
<p>A notable example of the ranking’s oddities: the fact that Penn heavily beats higher-ranked schools on this list for cross-admits (Duke, Chicago, etc.) and has objectively higher student quality really makes me question what “placement” would purportedly rely on in the first place. Does Duke’s curriculum pump out corporate-sycophants in a way that Penn’s and Columbia’s don’t?</p>
<p>Anyway, there’s no point in going in circles. No need to respond.</p>
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<p>There are a number of errors in this: 1) Penn isn’t the Ivy League’s largest graduating class - Cornell takes that honor by about 4,000 students.
2) There’s no sampling bias - the survey is completely anonymous, and about 70% of the class returns it. Presumably there’s no “lying” on the survey for precisely that reason.
3) The entire point I tried to make was that Penn IS NOT very academically oriented, and that many of its students have little interest in academia. Wharton is obviously excluded (they’re entirely preprofessional) and within the remaining 1800 in the College and Engineering (also very preprofessional), usually only around 60 go off to pursue PhDs. The survey usually catches about 40 of them. That doesn’t seem like a very small number to me, and certainly in line with peer schools like Dartmouth, Duke, Columbia and Brown.</p>
<p>Another thing to remember is that when Penn students seek graduate education, it often comes in the form of MD or JD - recall the aforementioned 4th most represented undergrad at Harvard Law, before Princeton? It’s Penn. (Wellesley isn’t up there).</p>
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<p>Why are you laughing here? That IS Penn’s real size and rank within the study.</p>