Alma Mater for Doctorate?

juillet
Sun, 23 Aug 2015 19:53:51 +0000

It depends on the field.

In my field (psychology), nobody cares if you went to the same university for all three degrees if the program is highly ranked. If you went to Stanford for undergrad and your PhD…everybody would understand that decision. Michigan, Wisconsin, UCLA, Harvard, etc. They’re all highly regarded programs, and by the time you’re applying for faculty jobs nobody really cares where you went to undergrad. Your PhD program is what matters.

There is the case of potential “inbreeding,” as it’s called, but there are ways around that - inter-university collaborations, postdocs, scholars on your committee, networking at conferences, etc.

There are other fields that may care more about it, but I suspect that if you’re going to a highly-ranked program or have an excellent, well-known advisor, it matters less. If you went and got your BS and your PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and you had publications and worked under a famous professor, I doubt that you’ll get turned down for jobs because you got your BS from MIT. (Now, some PhD programs don’t like to admit their own undergrads - they want to send them to other places - but you can ask about that ahead of time.)

I think the same is pretty true in business. Stanford and Harvard MBAs do pretty well regardless, and a relatively high proportion of Harvard MBA students were Harvard undergrads, etc. Why would a consulting firm or investment bank care whether you went to Stanford or Harvard for undergrad if you have a Harvard MBA?