Dartmouth vs Cornell

xine
Sun, 16 Jul 2006 14:08:24 +0000

SorGirl, your “reality check” sort of makes a moot point.

1) PERCENTAGE, not actual numbers, is actually a better indicator of the strength of a grad school feeder prgram. Obviously, you can’t expect, say, Williams to send as many pure numbers of people to a grad school as a quality state school like UMich, so percentage is the only accurate way to compare schools of varying size. OF COURSE Cornell sends more people to grad school, simply because it’s 3x the size of Dartmouth.

2) Okay, so Cornell has more kids who don’t NEED to apply to graduate school/law school/med school/whatever because they already have career training. Sure. But the list was never intended to indicate that Dartmouth is BETTER in ALL respects simply because it has a stronger grad-feeder-program; it simply means that, if you want to pursue a higher degree after undergrad, then Dartmouth is a more likely the most suitable choice for you - because it’s more liberal-artsy, and it does it well. The point about a Dartmouth undergrad education being more suitable to direct entry into elite grad programs still stands.

Conversely, of course, that means that Cornell may be better for students looking for a more applicable-in-the-job-market-without-a-higher-degree education, which is just a difference in the school styles - it doesn’t inherently make one better than the other. :)

The nature of that list is that LAC’s rank higher. That’s not a bias or a faulty assumption; the list just ranks one thing (elite grad school admissions) that Cornell may not be quite as good at for a variety of external factors- its preprofessional programs, the tendency of the students to go to work instead of straight to grad school - but it’s not the responsibility of the list to tell us those factors.