<p>Wesdad,</p>
<p>It pays to check the cited source. Those top 10 were from a list adjusted for size of the undergraduate college. It was not a simple total of the numbers of students at the law schools.</p>
<p>Fair enough.</p>
<p>as an aside, one of the problems of adjusting for undergrad size is that is automatically benefits LACs, and the LAC-like (Princeont, Dartmouth). Big publics and even big privates (such as Cornell), have a plethora of programs and majors which rarely lead to law school, and are the colleges' size becomes a disadvantage. [Not saying that data should not be adjusted for undergrad size -- just noting an inherent issue in comparing LACs and large resarch Unis. Perhaps a better analysis might be to use Cornell CAS intead of the total undergrad student body, but, that of couse, sets up its own bias since an engineer or two might go to YLS every so often.]</p>
<p>^That is actually one method I think would be interesting. On that particular thread, where I created such a list for YLS, I asked for numbers for CAS at major universities but didn't receive any replies.</p>
<p>Well, that adjustment would only complicate things, unless one went through the universities that do not enroll engineers in a separate school and deducted the engineers from their undergraduate totals.</p>
<p>Then one would have to look at the proportion of math and physics majors vs English and history majors. </p>
<p>This might be more interesting if there were much more deviation of the WSJ list from admissions standards. As it is, if you look at admissions difficulty on academic grounds, such as SAT score, then eliminate the technical colleges, you then end up with a list much like that produced by the WSJ. in other words, it is much less an evaluation of the colleges than it is an evaluation of the kinds of students who go to those colleges. </p>
<p>It would be an evaluation of colleges if you adjusted for admissions selectivity. For example, take the proportion in top law schools, and predict the proportion expected based on entering SAT scores of students. A college that had a higher proportion in top law schools than one would predict based on SAT would have evidence that the college itself mattered. </p>
<p>Right now it is entirely possible that Harvard and Yale have lots of students at these top prof schools because they enroll lots of top students as undergrads. It may be that those students who went to Yale and got into HLS would have gotten into HLS if they had gone to Williams, or Berkeley or UMass. It may be that the students who went to W, B, or UMass and did not get in HLS would not have gotten in if they had gone to Y. In fact, this is the best explanation of the results, and of the similarity of the WSJ lists to the more recent data from HLS and YLS.</p>
<p>Some larger universities have large proportions of students who have no interest in law school, but so do Harvard and Stanford, which are relatively large universities.</p>
<p>I agree. Just because a school has a single undergraduate college, it does not mean that there are not also many students within that college with no interest in law school.</p>
<p>Yeah, they omitted Stanford Law, Stanford Business and Stanford Medical, all of which are on the level of Harvard's respective grad schools (business and law, much more so). Factor these in, and Stanford's numbers would have easily overtaken Princeton's numbers, and perhaps Yale.</p>
<p>So yes, in including top grad programs, it seemed like they had a clear Ivy bias.</p>
<p>"Just because a school has a single undergraduate college, it does not mean that there are not also many students within that college with no interest in law school."</p>
<p>Ya, but it's a matter of the proportion. Students who think they might want to apply to law school eventually might reasonably select to attend a College of Arts & Sciences. As will many individuals who don't want to go to law school, true enough. But one might imagine that the result is a typical range or % of law-interested students in Colleges of Arts & sciences, as a generic matter. </p>
<p>College of Agriculture, or Architecture, Nursing, etc, well not so much. The forecasted typical range of law-interested students for an Arts & Sciences College clearly will not extrapolate well to these other special purpose colleges. By their very nature, few students interested in a law career at the outset will apply to these colleges at all.</p>
<p>Colleges of Arts & Sciences at different institutions- may have varying % of interested students, but more likely to be at least somewhat similar %, so comparison not completely pointless. May be flawed, because %s actually not that similar in some cases; but not obviously overtly pointless from the outset.</p>
<p>College of Arts & sciences at one institution vs. College of Nursing at another, or Nursing mixed in with Arts & Sciences- not as likely to be a fair comparison, based on obviously disparate % students interested in law from the outset at the specialized college.</p>
<p>To some extent it's a numbers game. If the number of students in the specialized colleges, or programs other than traditional Arts & sciences, is relatively small at a particular school then the error introduced by lumping together the disparate schools is not that great. However, when the number of students attending the specialized colleges/programs is high, and in at least one case is greater than the number of students in the Arts & Sciences College, well then you've got a serious applicability problem.</p>
<p>In other words, it is reasonable to compare colleges with similar missions, who offer programs of study or which a law career is a reasonable result. For others, with dissimilar missions, not so much.</p>
<p>IMO.</p>
<p>I agree with that. Comparing CAS at different colleges seems logical, just noting that there will be discrepancies in any case.</p>
<p>The situation becomes stark when looking at it from the other direction- from the perspective of the specialized programs. Because, since these programs are often smaller, the distortion in the denominator caused by lumping in all these irrelevant other programs/colleges has a more clearly evident impact.</p>
<p>A few years ago someone posted a %engineering PhD list. This is from memory now, but dominating the top of this list were a number of schools with name"tech" in them, not all of which are known as the world's absolute intellectual powerhouses. Several such schools had a higher % future engineering PhDs than Stanford, for example. </p>
<p>These are just examples, I don't remember the actual list.</p>
<p>But if, say WPI showed up as significantly higher in % future engineering PhDs than Stanford, does that mean it is a better place to study than Stanford if you want an engineering PhD eventually? No. What it means is that, in addition to a great engineering school, Stanford also has lots of students in its college of Arts & sciences who have no intention of pursuing an engineering PhD from the outset. Whereas these other schools do not have nearly as high a proportion of students who have no interest in engineering from the outset. If Stanford's denominator had been limited to the students in its engineering school a different story would have clearly emerged.</p>
<p>Mony,</p>
<p>This would matter if it were a ranking, but it is not. It is a description of the career paths, and qualifications, of the students. So a place like Harvard has a large proportion of students who want to go to professional school and have the qualifications to get into top schools. That does not make Harvard a better university, even for people who share this interest. It simply describes what Harvard is like.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the comparison of numbers of students who are interested can be overstated. Cornell, for example, has LOTS of students who go to Law, Business and Medical schools. It just has a smaller percent who go to the very top schools. This is hardly surprising, since they had, on average, lower SAT scores entering college, they are likely to have lower MCAT, LSAT, etc scores when applying to prof school. So they are less likely to get into Yale law.</p>
<p>collegeresults.org has a handy table of degrees by program area. One can see what proportion of undergrads received their degrees in certain broad fields. For example at Middlebury, only 8.8% of students received their degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields. At MIT the figure was 75%. A lot higher proportion of potential lawyers at the former than the latter. </p>
<p>At Cornell, the STEM percent was 35. Few of these people are headed for law school, but quite a few may be on their way to medical school. At Stanford, 37% were STEM. </p>
<p>The difference in proportions of students who end up at top prof schools may be better explained by differences in median SAT scores -1385 at Cornell, 1455 at Stanford- than by differences in majors.</p>
<p>This same stratification is seen in PhD attainment rates. Higher for Stanford than for Cornell, both overall and in STEM fields. </p>
<p>These differences seem more closely related to SAT scores on admission than to what happens at the college. </p>
<p>The list of colleges with the highest proportion of students at "top" prof schools as defined by WSJ looks nearly identical to the list at Yale or Harvard law schools- which I believe are beyond debate top schools. It also looks very much like a simple list of highest median SAT scores- with no arguments about which prof schools should be included.</p>
<p>"This would matter if it were a ranking, but it is not."</p>
<p>What is the third word you wrote in your post #16 of this thread?
What is the third word in the title of this thread?</p>
<p>"So a place like Harvard has a large proportion of students who want to go to professional school and have the qualifications to get into top schools"</p>
<p>And Harvard is basically a college of Arts & Sciences, with a very small engineering department thrown in. Whereas Cornell's Arts & Sciences College, where students coming in might well have similar aspirations, are in the minority on its campus.</p>
<p>"The difference in proportions of students who end up at top prof schools may be better explained by differences in median SAT scores -1385 at Cornell, 1455 at Stanford-"</p>
<p>And Stanford has an Arts & Sciences School, and an engineering school I believe, And nothing else. So compare their career paths to the students in Cornell's Arts & sciences College and engineering School, if you want to compare fairly. Are the scores you gave pertinent to only Cornell's Arts & sciences College and Engineering College, so they would fairly compare to what Stanford offers? If people are enrolling in a specialized college, from the outset they proably have different priorities than people who are enrolling in an Arts & sciences College.</p>
<p>Finally a student applies to an individual college of a university, not some imaginary amalgam of its various disparate colleges. If one college of a university has a high proportion of qualified students interested in professional degrees, and an applicant plans to apply to that college, he is not worse off in achieving these goals simply because someplace else on the same campus there is a Hotel school which has different entrance criteria which are not so focused on standardized test scores, separate courses and degree requirements , separate faculty, etc., and relatively few students who plan to seek professional degrees. It simply doesn't matter.</p>
<p>The artificial aggregation of separate colleges which in fact have different admissions standards, missions, and student priorities simply serves no purpose for use in selecting colleges. It simply disguises the true nature of the individual colleges by lumping them all together, as if they were all the same, or function as one. They aren't, and they don't.</p>
<p>
[quote]
he is not worse off in achieving these goals simply because someplace else on the same campus there is a Hotel school
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Exactly, so rather than try to explain away the differences between one college and another, accept the data as descriptors. Some colleges have a higher percentage of students who will go to top professional schools than do others. Why is that so difficult to accept?</p>
<p>I know Cornell Human Ecology students who are now doctors, and Hotel school grads who have MBA's and law degrees. I know of ILR and AAP grads who have law degrees. It is not so clear that one can predict lack of interest in professional school based on which Cornell school someone may have attended.</p>
<p>Yes, one could try to define the population of students at Stanford who might be interested in law, medicine, and business schools, then calculate a proportion using only them as a denominator, but what would be the point of this exercise? They are who they are. A large portion of Stanford students end up at top professional schools, whatever one uses as the list of such schools. A smaller proportion of Cornell students do so. This says a lot about who attends these colleges. This says absolutely nothing about whether any Cornell student would be better off at Stanford. It says nothing about which is a better university.</p>
<p>Due to grade inflation, Stanford and Harvard grads will also fare well in the competitive grad school process, test scores notwithstanding.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It says nothing about which is a better university.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It also says nothing about which college one should attend if they aspire to a top grad program.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Due to grade inflation, Stanford and Harvard grads will also fare well in the competitive grad school process, test scores notwithstanding.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, I don't know about that. One would have to show that, taking into account admission selectivity, grades were higher at H and S than at C. Since, as far as I know, the grade distributions are similar at all three universities, but admission to H and S is more selective, I am not convinced there is higher relative grade inflation at H and S than at C.</p>
<p>In fact, if someone has access to the data, I suspect that the average LSAT scores of YLS students who graduated from H, S, and C are the same. I suspect the difference is that a larger percentage of H and S undergrads have LSAT scores in the YLS range.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It also says nothing about which college one should attend if they aspire to a top grad program..
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Precisely.</p>
<p>marite, who has a son at H has posted often about the 'gentlemen's C' which is now a B+.....</p>
<p>But is it harder to get that B+ at H than at C?</p>
<p>
[quote]
According to Sun archives, 17.5 percent of grades distributed to students in 1965 were As; by 2000, that number had risen to 40 percent.</p>
<p>Furthermore, 17 courses last semester had a median of an A+, while only 13 had a median of a B-, according to the Fall 2006 Median Grade Report. No classes had a median below a B-.</p>
<p>“I was struck by the number of As,” said Dean of Faculty Charles Walcott ’59. “I am concerned when I look at a course of 400 students and see a median grade of an A. It doesn’t show a fair distribution.”
[/quote]
</p>
<p><a href="http://cornellsun.com/node/23297%5B/url%5D">http://cornellsun.com/node/23297</a></p>
<p>By 2004, virtually all grades were A's and B's, with about 50% of all grades being A's. As students use an online report of grade distributions by course, enrollment in the courses with historically low median grades have declined. This trend is particularly strong for the weaker students (defined by entrance SAT scores). So those at the top of the SAT distribution appear to pay less attention the median grade information, while those lower on admission criteria seem to use it to guide their course selection.</p>
<p>Lots of handwringing about this, from economists no less, who should have predicted exactly what happened.
[quote]
Students’ GPAs and class ranking play a role in hiring and graduate school admission decisions, in allocation of fellowships, and in other circumstances. ... Our study confirms intuition — grade information biases students’ course selection towards leniently graded courses.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Surprise, students know that their GPA's affect their career options, so they seek to maximize their GPA's. Students know that some courses give higher grades than others. So they select courses that give high grades. Any economics major who behaved otherwise obviously was not paying attention.</p>
<p>WSJ is awesome woot</p>
<p>It isn't that easy to get a B+ at Harvard and definitely not A's.</p>
<p>A very good friend of mine double majored in Econ and EE at Stanford and graduated with a 3.5 GPA. He also had 5 years of experience with Cisco and was frequently promoted. His weakness was his GMAT. He scored under a 700. He was rejected by all the MBA programs he applied to including Chicago, Kellogg, Ross, Sloan and Haas. There are no guarantees.</p>