afan

Posted prematurely, sorry.

The point about the inhomogeneous preferences among students at different colleges is that those with the most choice are the ones who are the most likely to determine the proportion of students who end up at top professional schools. Since these kids had the most choice coming out of high school, their decisions would lead to differences in the rate of enrollment at these top prof schools.

They might look at the normative careers for students at various colleges, and choose to go to places where the sort of career they want is most common.

Such activity would lead to clusters of preprofessional students at certain colleges, and resulting clusters of graduates of these colleges at top professional schools. This would be independent of any unique aspects of the education or experience of these colleges.

One might conclude a preferential effect of a college if the rate of attendance at top prof schools was higher than expected for the SAT and LSAT scores of the students.

davida1

abl:

I'd like you to defend the idea that the WSJ study is more insightful than mine. Your only argument is facebook bias (and you have no evidence that suggests that the results would be significantly different when this is taken into account). The WSJ study had regional bias, as discussed earlier, excluded many schools that were more prestigious and had better reputations from the list (which gave certain institutions deflated numbers and others inflated numbers), and did not use official sources (in some cases) to collect the data. As quoted from WSJ, "nine of the schools gave us their own lists, but for the rest we relied mainly on "face book" directories schools give incoming students." In other words, they were approximating in some cases based on unofficial sources and some colleges responded to the data by saying that they could not verify WSJ's numbers as correct or thought they were 'suprisingly low.' Again, the professional schools will not provide the type of detailed, specific numerical data that you are looking for. You can't get perfect data, but even if you did the schools at the top would not change significantly - THIS IS KEY.

I have never said this study would pass as an academic statistical analysis in a peer-reviewed education journal; that doesn't make it meaningless. But again, the fact that the WSJ results and my results were consistent when looking for the same kind of information is to some extent indicative of the fact that more data or more appropriate methodology would not actually change what schools ended up at the top. As I went through adding more and more data I realized that the same schools kept ending up at the top even when I added different facebook groups from different schools (the only time there were minor changes in how well schools did was when there were changes of region).

I've never stated that the schools that end up at the top in number or percentage are the "best colleges" as you claim that I have. But, I do think the data indicates which schools place the best in particular fields and and the best (and by "best" I mean reputation in terms of peer review, selectivity, prestige, career opportunities offered, etc.) professional schools that serve those fields. The reason why these fields were singled out is because at top schools they are more competitive than almost all other graduate fields (like public health, nursing, public affairs, education, pharmacy, occupational therapy, library and information studies, etc.), the graduates (at the top) tend to earn very high salaries relative to the average college graduate, the admissions process is standardized and produces consistent patterns (unlike PhD admissions is very subjective, often has to do with your relationship with people that have clout in the field or research done - i.e. academic record and test scores are used but not paramount), for high achieving young people they are often desired fields, etc., etc...

To be frank you can "poo poo" prestige all you want but if you choose Chapman U over Stanford for law school (because it is the "best school for you") the chances of you getting a job at at a top law firm that pays first-year associates $160,000+ are reduced DRAMATICALLY and they may actually be gone entirely. For medicine, the most competitive residency spots at reputable programs in fields like dermatology and plastic surgery are dominated by students that graduate from top medical schools (so you may not match from Medical College of Georgia; FYI, match rates with top choices in residency programs correlate with U.S. News ranking). In business, many top financial services firms simply don't hire from Boston U's MBA program but do hire from MIT Sloan. You can't deny this. Try getting an interview with the Blackstone Group on campus with an MBA from U Wisconsin - Eau Claire. So, again, this is not for people that are looking for a general ranking of the best colleges in some general sense. These are for people that want to enter these particularly competitive industries (i.e. not become a high school teacher), and many high school students do want to do this and should have placement information at their fingertips when deciding on where to go and where to apply.

davida1

Also, some comments have been that there is a correlation between SAT scores or college ranking and placement at top professional schools. This is true. But, certain SPECIFIC schools tend to outperform their numbers or rankings and certain SPECIFIC schools tend to underperform their numbers or rankings. So, seeing a vague, general correlation totally confounds what one should be looking at - the performance of INDIVIDUAL schools. To just explain away the differences in placement due to "self selection" without data or EVIDENCE that suggests that self selection is occurring is mindless. The knee-jerk accurate response would be that these schools have inflated reputations when it comes to placing students into top programs. In the other thread I listed underperformers. Outperformers are the ones that did well in the study.

The schools that made the top 20 on all four lists both for the WSJ study by number and percentage and my study by number and percentage are Georgetown, U Pennsylvania, Brown, Columbia, MIT, Dartmouth, Duke, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard. So, when I refer to the top performers or outperformers those are the schools.

afan

Davida1,

I agree with most of what you have said. The similarity of your results to the WSJ, but with a different year under consideration argues that neither result is contaminated by gross error.

How do you define outperformers? The list you give is a list of places with very high admissions standards. Are they really outperforming, or are they just following a cohort of high achieving students from high school to professional school?

0.78 is by no means a "vague" correlation. It is very high. It is striking that ALL of your top 20 colleges were in the top for median SAT. For your list of places that made the top in all four rankings, there were only 29 colleges with median SAT as high as the lowest on this list. Of these, 12 are small colleges that could never send large numbers of students anywhere.

So again, this looks very much like a list of high performing students on entry to college. If you want a more complete list, generate the % values for all of the top 29 by SAT (all with median SAT greater than or equal to 1390):
California Institute Of Technology
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
Harvard University
Princeton University
Yale University
Harvey Mudd College
Amherst College
Pomona College
Stanford University
Dartmouth College
Columbia University In The City Of New York
Swarthmore College
University Of Chicago
Washington University In St Louis
Brown University
Rice University
Williams College
Duke University
University Of Pennsylvania
Webb Institute
Carleton College
Northwestern University
Tufts University
Wesleyan University
Bowdoin College
Claremont Mckenna College
Georgetown University
Grinnell College

bluedevilmike

It's also possible that nobody is outperforming -- which is also a very valuable thing to know.

posterX

Your SAT figures are out of date.

bluebayou

david:

While insightful, your last par in post #48 can be interpreted a different way. For example, on the cc law school thread, posters indicate that the LSAT is ~60% of the admissions game for T-14 law schools, and gpa is close the balance, at least for the first cut. Obviously, a 2400 SAT person is a good test taker, and likely extremely bright. That same person could attend any of your "outperforming" schools, and would likely score 170+ on the LSAT. But, they could also attend Podunk U and would still score 170+ on the LSAT.

It just so happens that the "outperformers" on your list accept nearly all of the 2400 scorers. Since these kids are likely to perform extremely well on the LSAT, which is 60% of T-14 admissions, they will likely fill a lot of the T-14 slots. Of course, Harvard, Princeton (but as much anymore) and Stanford also offer grade inflation, which helps with the other 40% of T-14 admissions.

Thus, IMO, your analysis, like the WSJ article (can't call it a study at all), is still correlation, not causation.

abl

Even assuming your numbers are correct, the disparity between the placement of the 20th school and the first school would be significant enough that a jump of 5+ places from the selectivity ranking (which also has a pretty significant variance), I believe, would indicate either some degree of outperforming or professional tendencies at that school. Accordingly, schools like Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore, which fall in the 15-20 range in terms of selectivity but the 5-10 range in terms of placement according to both yours and the WSJ's study, are either outperformers or more professional school-oriented than some of the other schools on the list.

Now, none of those schools is particularly well known for being professional school-oriented (on the contrary, in fact--they all have relatively high rates of PhD candidates as well as relatively high rates of students joining Peace Corps and Teach For America), so I think a reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that they must be outperformers.

For full disclosure's sake, I am a fan of LACs so I think this is an easy conclusion for me to reach. An alternative conclusion to draw from the data is not that they are relative outperformers, but rather, that they're selectivity data is artificially skewed lower because they are self-selecting. I think this is also a reasonable conclusion to draw from this--the LACs have a reputation of being self-selecting, at the very least.

afan

In order to separate colleges that "perform" well in getting their undergrads into top professional schools from colleges that simply enroll a lot of students who have that as a goal, one would need details that are not generally available.

What proportion of entering students plan to go to professional school? What proportion of students actually apply? To what extent do admissions to these schools depend on test scores? Do students from some colleges systematically do better (or worse) on the LSAT, MCAT, GMAT than their high school records would predict? To what extent do admissions depend on gpa? Do students from some colleges systematically do better (or worse) on admissions than their college gpa's would predict?

Since plans for professional school and grades and test scores in college that keep this as an option, both correlate with academic ability and high school performance, students at the most selective colleges are far more likely than college students nationally to stay on the preprofessional track and actually apply to professional school. To find a place that outperforms you would need to say something like

"College A had 60% of matriculating students planning for professional school. Years later, 45% of them actually applied. Among colleges with median SATs above 1400 this is an unusually low attrition rate from freshman to senior year .

"Overall, students at College A scored higher on their professional school admissions tests than their high school records would predict, had higher gpa's than their high school records would predict, and did better in professional school admission than their gpa and test scores would predict.

"Therefore, an individual student, with a given level of high school academic accomplishment, drive, and orientation toward professional school, would be more likely to end up at a top prof school after attending College A than if (s)he were to enroll at the average highly selective college."

The alternative, as others have pointed out is

"College A enrolls an unusually high proportion of highly talented, driven, focussed, and ambitious kids who want to go to professional school. Essentially everyone admitted to College A has the ability to excel academically if they want to put in the time and effort. Therefore, the high proportion of preprofessional students at this College manifests itself as a high proportion of students who do what it takes while undergrads, and then move on in their careers as planned.

"College A students do about as well on professional school admissions tests as their high school records would predict, they get about the grades their high school records would predict, and they display the same energy and purpose that got them into College A initially.

"When they apply to professional school their high test scores, high gpa's and overall strong applications result in lots of admissions.

"College A is a fine institution, but the success of its graduates is entirely a consequence of who attends, not any special treatment effect while they are there."

All of these colleges provide research opportunities. All provide rigorous educations for those who want to take advantage of them. All provide pre professional advising. All have impressive names with which admissions committees are familiar. But those at the top of the pecking order in enrolling students who want to go to professional school get the students with the best prospects for admission.

This list is a reasonable description of the student bodies at these colleges- their abilities and interests. Yes, one could quibble about whether College C should be 7th or 12th on the list. With perfect data, the ranking would vary form year to year. Within any given year, the ranking would not likely be identical for medical, law and business school. However, no one is particularly surprised by which colleges end up on a top 20 list, and the overall ranking is pretty much what one would expect based on admissions selectivity and institutional orientation.

So, like median SAT scores, it is a description, not a ranking.

brassmonkey

People are going to interpret this in the wrong way.

ice.frappuccino

wow intense

laxgurl0707

thanks for the info!

gellino

"And schools with high selectivity do not always perform well (that is sort of the point of the WSJ study and my study, actually). US News selectivity rating, as a proxy for selectivity, does not equal strong professional school placement."

USNWR is not a proxy for selectivity. 25% of the score is completely subjective reputation and then faculty and final resources are also a big component. Selectivity is much less the 50% of the score.

SAM2008

Med. school stats are pretty deceptive.

After a long collge search I found out it really does not matter where you go to undergrad. All it matters is ur GPA, MCAT score, Hospital intership & research. If you have all in place there is a 80% chance you will get into the med. school - it really does not matter you attend Harvard or a State collge

santabanta

can you, dear thread starter, please make a list just for med schools? thanks and much appreciated!!!