<p>Don’t get me wrong, I think the fact that Penn and Columbia have produced such few Rhodes Scholars historically is quite shameful for both these prestigious universities. In all fairness to Columbia, the school has produced 7 Rhodes Scholars in the past dozen years and this correlates quite well with the fact that the institution’s popularity has skyrocketed in the same time frame. My excuse for Penn is that its the most career-obsessed elite school out there and its graduates are perhaps more concerned with pursuing jobs in big law/medicine/banking that aiming for academia/fellowships. I do think Penn is somewhat overrated of a school though.</p>
<p>[The</a> Rhodes Scholarships - Winner Statistics by Endorsing Institutions](<a href=“Office of the American Secretary | The Rhodes Scholarships”>Office of the American Secretary | The Rhodes Scholarships)
Michigan has produced ONE Rhodes Scholar in the past 12 years. That is absolutely embarrassing. Wisconsin has only produced ONE in the past 12 years and ZERO in the past 10 years. UVA and UNC, in my opinion, are better <em>undergraduate</em> institutions than Michigan or Berkeley and even they have only produced 4 and 6 Rhodes Scholars respectively over the same timeframe.</p>
<p>Alexandre, my point is that EVERY SINGLE data point in existence supports the notion that students from private schools like Brown/Duke/etc. perform much better than their public counterparts in gaining admission and acceptance to the top professional schools/graduate schools/fellowship programs either in raw numbers or per capita.</p>
<p>Even if Michigan has produced more Fullbrights than Duke (one of the few measures where UM outperforms Duke in a measure of graduate success even in terms of raw numbers), the fact that LS&A is about 3-4 times as large as Duke’s Trinity College makes Duke’s performance in the Fullbright competition far more impressive than Michigan’s.</p>
<p>You can dismiss each statistical measure of graduate success individually Alexandre, but you can’t ignore the cumulative effect of all these data points that all paint the SAME PICTURE than the non-HYP Ivies, Duke, Stanford, etc. are better undergraduate institutions than UMich, Cal, UVA, UNC, UCLA and William & Mary.</p>