<p>It is not this remotely simple. Only in ‘highschool land’ is the world divided tidily into “Ivy League” and “other” and where dichotomous choices rule. </p>
<p>Quality of school matters, quality of program matters, GPA matters, among many other things. And each partially predicts the likelihood of ‘acceptance’ (but also the weight given to each factor in the model is going to vary by individual decision maker, company or school, as well as possibly other factors in the overall package or comparison others in the pool). Moreover, even if someone feels they can give you a straight answer, research shows that people are actually poor at estimating the weights they actually give to different factors in complex decision making tasks (when tested out with protocol analysis). </p>
<p>As for grad school, since I have served many years on those selection committees, we could not possibly care less if someone went to “Ivy League” (in fact some such schools do not even offer coursework in the area in which we are strong so those schools are less relevant to us). What we care about is the quality of the school and program (defined by their reputation in our field and subfields), which faculty they worked with there, what those faculty have to say about the candidate and what kind of research experience and success they have had. That could come from lots of different schools. (Anecdotally, it appears that the folks who end up strongest in our field as academics are not those that went to Ivy League schools or even top USNWR schools, but rather ones who were clear outliers at large publics…but I don’t have data to support this). </p>
<p>Likewise we couldn’t care less about mincing GPA of 4.0 to 3.8, or 3.8 to 3.4. It depends very much on where they went to school and their major(s). And we look closely at transcripts. We like to examine what grades they received in particular courses and also how the transcript jives with their GRE performance and other factors. And we are looking for an applicant’s sense of their work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and cognitive abilities (all of which matter, and of which GPA is only one indicator and sometimes a poor one).</p>
<p>BTW, at least with regards to grad school, no one cares about UWNWR rankings of schools or if something belongs to a league. They may care about ranking but it will be specific to a school’s reputation in a given field. Look at rankings such as The Times, which break down by field and are based more strongly upon research reputation (rankings that are closer to what academics care about). </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/[/url]”>http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/</a></p>