Why is the graduate school placement not that good?
Looking at the post graduation surveys conducted by the Johns Hopkins career center, I don't see many graduates attending top ranked schools in the respective major. For example, from 2007-2011 for neuroscience majors, only 5 got into Harvard, 3 into Columbia, and 23 in JHU (but I accredit this to JHU being the native school). For 4 years of graduates and 236 total graduates, I don't find this assuring as I'm planning on majoring in neuro and going onto graduate school.
Here's the link:
http://pages.jh.edu/~careers/NewMattinProject/majors/2007-2011_major_break_out/Neuroscience 2007-2011.pdf
Any thoughts? One explanation I found is the response rate of surveys is only 60%, but naturally people that do well postgrad would respond right?
Replies to: Why is the graduate school placement not that good?
http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/files/Class2013CareerPlans.pdf
Penn has 2,035 graduating seniors. Ignoring students choosing penn grad, we have 3.5% of all graduating penn seniors attending Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, MIT, Cornell. JHU, Duke, Princeton, and Yale (sum up the numbers at the end of the above pdf enrolling at these top schools divided by the number of respondents or 2035 students). Keep in mind, this is for Penn as an ENTIRE graduating class for all majors within arts and science. You'll find comparable numbers if you add up JHU's placement for a given year for all arts and science majors as well.
For reference, 3.5% of 236 neuroscience students is 8 for Hopkins. So for Hopkins to place similarly to Penn and other top privates (assuming normalized distribution over 5 years), it would need to place only 8 Neurosci students to Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, MIT, Cornell, etc. etc. over 5 years. Needless to say, Hopkins shatters this barrier.
So include JHU's grad school placement for engineering if you want an apples to apples comparison - eventhough JHU compares well without engineering. You'd have to use proportions and not absolute numbers as JHU is nearly twice as big as JHU for graduating seniors.