WSJ feeder score report revisited

<p>Please bear with me as I try to suggest that Penn's feeder score ought to be around # 8 right next to Dartmouth, and NOT #16.</p>

<p>Based on the link of the methodology, here is how WSJ determined this score</p>

<p>The</a> Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition
<a href="http://wsjclassroom.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://wsjclassroom.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Medicine: Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins;Univ. of California, San Francisco; & Yale
MBA: Chicago, Dartmouth's Tuck School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Wharton
Law: Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.</p>

<p>It was basically the number of kids who were admitted to this group divided by class size. Here is how i think Penn's numbers should have been done: </p>

<p>Total class size used: 2,785
Less Wharton: (500) who almost NEVER go to grad school
Less Nursing (100)
Less Engin (100)
CAS grads (200)<br>
Actual class size: 1,885</p>

<p>Divide number accepted to these elite schools: 153/1885 = 8.1%
NOT 5.49% as the survey suggests.</p>

<p>The pre-professional bent at CAS & the desire for their grads to seek employment right after UG should somehow be accounted for & that is the reason to reduce CAS by at least 200. As it is, Penn's Medical School was not on this list, and there are quite a few Penn UG here. If this list was redone today, they would have to use Penn Medical School in their list of elite schools (# 3 per USNWR), and this would only make this number even more favorable to Penn.</p>

<p>Please feel free to challenge and ridicule this new feeder score i have assigned to Penn.</p>

<p>Let the games begin!!</p>

<p>“Let the games begin!!”? </p>

<p>This is kind of what makes me regret going to a place like Penn, where people put so much weight on things like this. :-&lt;/p>

<p>Penn is a great school. Period. For much more tangible reasons.</p>

<p>Penn’s Med school is arguably better than Columbia and Yale and Penn’s law school is arguably as strong as UChicago’s. If they expanded the list of top professional schools then who knows how the rankings would go.</p>

<p>This list also has a huge east coast bias. One west coast med school and one midwestern law and business school. If they put in Stanford business and Chicago med I wonder how these numbers would be different.</p>

<p>Sugar Magnolia, I am a parent of a D starting Penn this fall. She was accepted ED to CAS with stellar stats and EC’s and I was getting tired of people’s general attitude that Penn wasn’t at the top or upper tier of ivies. I’ve gotten the Oh Penn State look, oh did she not get in at Yale etc. etc. </p>

<p>This is just an anxious mom having slight “buyers remorse” and am trying to reassure myself that this was the right decision for her. By using the phrase “Let the games begin” i was merely inviting a lively discussion that typically seems to follow a controversial post like this. I believe the WSJ report has been debated here on CC, but I wasn’t sure if anyone actually broke down the numbers to see that Penn would have actually fared much better had the numbers been looked at the way i presented, I am sincerley asking for input, i am not even sure if my logic is correct.</p>

<p>Thanks Venkat, I do see the east coast bias too now, do u agree with the reductions to the student class size at Penn? This report is basically saying what % of their class got in to these classes. It would be more interesting to see of the actual group that applied to these schools, what % actually got in. That would take into account any discrepancies in class size and show the success rate of these grads getting accepted into any elite school. ie. if a large group of Penn grads are NOT looking for grad school, that should NOT be a factor in determining the acceptace success rate for the schools grads. Make sense?</p>

<p>Thanks for your input!</p>

<p>I wouldn’t reduce the numbers of counted students. They are part of Penn and should lift us up or drag us down in any ranking. The rankings are trying to do a good thing, but no matter how you cut it they won’t be able to give a good representation on which colleges really are the best feeders for top professional schools. The students at HYP are some of the best in the world and would probably have been able to get into Hopkins med whether at Princeton or Rutgers.</p>

<p>Venkat - From what I remember when I was a grad student, Penn’s undergrad is a very pre-professional, status oriented place. Combine this with a very successful and professionally ambitious student body, and Penn’s rank for being a feeder school should be higher. UPenn’s rank would probably be different if you accounted for a wider range of grad schools. </p>

<p>For example, Penn’s law school placement is great:</p>

<p>[Career</a> Services, University of Pennsylvania](<a href=“http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/gradprof/law/law_stats.html]Career”>http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/gradprof/law/law_stats.html)</p>

<p>What one should notice, though, is that Penn is VERY east coast-centric. There is little placement in the midwest, and some (but not an overwhelming amount) on the west coast. I’m assuming if you took out Michigan and Chicago for law and replaced them with Georgetown and NYU, and then took out UCSF for med and replaced it with Penn Med, you’d see a greatly improved ranking. </p>

<p>One note, I have several friends in law school and going the law firm route, and there is still a sizable gap between Penn Law and Chicago Law. Penn has a great corporate law firm placement, but beyond that, Chicago Law has a generally stronger reputation, stronger faculty, and better overall placement for its graduates (when accounting for say, law clerkships with judges and the like). In the law world from what I know, Chicago, Columbia, and NYU are generally seen as peers, and Penn Law is a step down with Michigan and Virginia Law (and probably Berkeley) as its immediate peers.</p>

<p>I agree with Venkat- you have to count all the students. I live with two Wharton grads. Both are headed to top MBA programs next year, I think you can’t assume that they don’t go to graduate school. Also all the Ivies have engineering to some extent. You would literally have to take out these students as well.</p>

<p>Thanks all. I can see validity in all of your points about adjusting Penn’s class size.</p>

<p>cue7 - can you please post a similar link for admission to medical schools? the law link clearly shows the data i was looking for - the number of students who applied & # who got in - regardless of class size. </p>

<p>Thanks all!</p>

<p>lovemom- As a parent of a rising senior in CAS, I think you need to file this whole issue into a mental circular file (trash). Your concern needs to be that your daughter finds challenging and interesting classes and adjusts to college, not placement in professional schools. Let her enjoy her Penn experience and explore different areas. There is a high probability that her interests and career goals will change several times over the next few years. She is attending an elite university and is, obviously, qualified to be there. Enough said.</p>

<p>lovemom - Penn doesn’t have the med placement stats listed online. Please keep in mind, med school admissions is a totally different beast than law admissions - just getting into ANY med school is an accomplishment, and even top schools can’t send dozens and dozens to the top medical schools.</p>

<p>Also, I agree with what a lot of the posters have said, you can’t discount engineering, wharton ug, etc. when looking at placement rate - you have to look at the school as a whole. Just as Wharton probably buoys Penn in some rankings, you can’t just leave it out in other rankings. </p>

<p>With that in mind, I think all the WSJ report really shows is how, after the very very top schools (Harvard, Princeton, etc.), there is a lot of clustering. Dartmouth, Columbia, Chicago, Brown, Penn etc. are all clustered together pretty tightly. This shows that, at any top 10-15 school, one’s performance matters more than anything else. </p>

<p>Final note, lovemom, don’t worry too much about Penn getting confused for Penn State, etc. Penn’s a great school, and in the professional world, world of prof grad school admissions, etc., it’s a known and valued commodity. The general population only knows like a half dozen schools. Penn is right in the pack with the other ivies, Northwestern, Duke, etc.</p>

<p>Momofwildchild - i hear you, will try to file away in trash, it is tough. i have to stop this now.</p>

<p>cue7: thanks for reminding me that where it does matter, Penn is recognized and valued. it appears shallow to want people to recognize the greatness of a school your kid is attending, but she is our oldest and this is all new to us.</p>

<p>this report seems to be biased and probably a bit outdated now, as Penn has been on an upward trajectory for the past few years and this may not yet be reflected in this old report.</p>

<p>thanks all for chirping in!</p>

<p>Lovemom,</p>

<p>The truth of the matter is that most Penn students would have matriculated at HYPS if they had been accepted, however, that is not to say that there aren’t some highly qualified students who love Penn more than any other school in the world and would have turned down HYPS regardless. </p>

<p>Penn students as a mass need to stop fretting over these rankings. Ultimately rankings are not objective holistic measures of a schools performance, especially per field of study. You shouldn’t need to smash rankings to prove that your daughter isn’t some ivy league sideshow to the HYPS extravaganza.</p>

<p>Rferns- That is not really true. Many Wharton kids pick it over HYPS. There are so many factors involved in choosing a college other than where the school falls on the latest US News ranking.</p>

<p>Wharton kids almost always go to business or law school eventually. If you wanted to cut them out of the denominator, you would be cutting them out of the numerator as well, and that isn’t going to increase Penn’s percentage of anything.</p>

<p>Engineering students also go to business school, law school sometimes, and even med school.</p>

<p>Nursing students can wind up in med school (I have a good friend who started out in the Nursing School and wound up in the Med School), and sometimes law school or business school.</p>

<p>

Just to nit-pick for a moment, although one might reasonably make that assumption, it’s apparently not the case:</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>[Wharton</a> Undergraduate Program](<a href=“http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/subPage.cfm?pageID=7]Wharton”>http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/subPage.cfm?pageID=7)</p>

<p>^and how many get law degrees?
The real question to ask is how many in industries where an MBA is the norm feel no need to go back.</p>

<p>Let’s put it another way: The fact that 1/3 of Wharton graduates get MBAs before they are 40 indicates why the OP’s analysis was seriously flawed. My guess is that at least half of Wharton grads get professional degrees of the sort the WSJ was tracking – much higher than the percentage at CAS.</p>

<p>lovemom, you need to clean out your inbox–I tried to reply to your message, but received a return message that your inbox is full.</p>

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<p>And in other news, the sun will set in the west tonight!</p>

<p>Hehe pizzagirl - except that, especially on this board, I think everyone tries to draw meaningful distinctions between pretty much identical (for placement purposes) - schools. The only thing the WSJ ranking showed was that HYP was a cut above the rest - with 16-20% of the class going on in heavy numbers to the grad schools used for the ranking.</p>

<p>Oftentimes, people try to show the differences between Brown and Penn or Columbia and Dartmouth or Chicago and, as the WSJ “study” shows, all these schools do well, and all are a cut below the very top.</p>