<p>I have not read this whole thread or analyzed the statistics, but I want to respond to this comment:
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<p>NO, NO, NO!!! It used to be in the 1960s and 1970s, that this would be true. As a result, one would find Harvard profs who had been Harvard undergraduates and Harvard Ph.D.s. Nowadays, however, Harvard undergraduates had little or no advantage in the graduate admission sweepstakes in GSAS (Law School and Med School may be quite different). In fact, in certain departments, students are positively pushed away and told to get exposure to other profs with different perspectives, specializations, etc…
What is true is that undergrads from a small group of top universities seemto be admitted in inordinately high proportion to the Ph.D. programs at OTHER universities within the same limited group. These would include in no particular order, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Chicago, Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, UCLA, Brown, and in certain fields MIT and Caltech. It certainly does not mean that a Princeton undergrad has a better chance of admission into a Princeton Ph.D. program. But s/he would have an excellent chance of admission into any of the schools listed above, with, of course, the appropriate record. The same would apply to Swarthmore and a few other LACs. These are LACs whose excellence is known to profs at research universities.</p>