<p>well, yeah. It just shows how many kids go to top professional schools. Thats good enough, wouldn’t you rather go to a place which has more kids going to top professional schools than less people?</p>
<p>Btw, it correlates almost exactly with SAT scores, proportion of National Merit Scholars, and other selectivity things…so its just one of many ways to look at student strength.</p>
<p>well, there’s something to be said for being surrounded by like-minded people, but i’d want to go to a school that has the best success rate of placing graduates, like how johns hopkins med school placement hovers both just above and just below 90%, schools like Northwestern and Cornell which have higher test scores, etc. don’t even match that.</p>
<p>sorry, but anyone who believes in the WSJ feeder survey needs to go back and repeat AP Stats…</p>
<p>^ Huh? I haven’t given any thoughts to this, but what’s wrong with the WSJ conclusions?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=372596&highlight=wsj+feeder+ranking[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=372596&highlight=wsj+feeder+ranking</a></p>
<p>els yeah, thats true, but what if many kids who wanted to be Pre-Med at John’s Hopkins ended up getting weeded out by the grade deflation and discouraged from applying? That skews the stats too.</p>
<p>Bluebayou, I think an eighth grader could understand WSJ’s methodology. It is Very, Very simple. However, it still indicates what schools place a lot of its grads into top professional schools, and the more the better. Schools that have low rankings might not be bad, but schools that have high amounts of students going to top professional schools are definitely good - I think this should be agreed upon.</p>
<p>The only real problem I have with it is that it has a definite Northeast bias (No Stanford law/biz, no Northwestern anything?).</p>
<p>Btw, it correlates with SAT scores, National Merit Scholars, Class Rank, and in fact for most privates with Peer Assessment scores. So it can’t be that unreliable.</p>
<p>^^^ and even funnier, Chicago GSB is mentioned in the header but isn’t even included in the survey!</p>
<p>Yeah, obviously it was slanted to favor Ivies (after all, Wall Street is NE…)</p>
<p>Still, many schools do well in it despite rough locations, including Stanford, Duke, Northwestern. </p>
<p>And the fact that Dartmouth has such a higher rating on WSJ means that it is definetely great at placement. The fact that Wash U has a low rating just means it might be bad.</p>
<p>sigh…still at work.</p>
<p>still, i am of the opinion that if a publication as reputable and with as much resources as the WSJ releases a “ranking” they should at least make it a legitimate study and not a list that any 16 year old with five hours of time could compile.</p>
<p>Well, the ranking is objective and successfully measures what they want: the number of students from each undergrad attending the 15 best professional schools (in their opinion).</p>
<p>^^^ not the number of students, the number of students as a % of the student body, which, like i already noted, hurts large schools and greatly helps LACs, because even if Williams manages to only get 1 student into Harvard Law, Stanford has to get 3 in to even be equal in these “rankings,” Penn has to get 4.5 in, Cornell 8, etc.</p>
<p>Given the limited spots at these schools, the need for geographic diversity, the lack of adjusting for # applied vs. # accepted, and the fact that it’s possible that a Williams student needs to be twice as qualified as a Stanford student to get accepted, (but Williams only needs to get 1 in to be “ranked” higher than them) the list is highly unfair and misrepresentative of how these schools actually fair in grad school admissions.</p>
<p>Also, what of schools that are very good with financial aid who may have more poor students who are accepted to these programs, but end up matriculating to different (unsurveyed) ones where they are given scholarships?</p>
<p>nothing wrong with their article, but it kinda fails as a “study”. Thoughtprocess: you win the kewpie doll today. </p>
<p>They studied the origin of students who attend top grad schools on the east coast. And, guess what, they found that the students at the top grad schools on the east coast just happen to live on the east coast and attended east coast undergrad colleges. Ignoring Stanford B-school on a technicality is just rediculous. And, anyone care to take a guess where some/many of Stanford’s students hail from? (I’d bet west of the Mississippi.)</p>
<p>btw: why stop at only five. In medicine, the top tier is typically considered 10. I’ve read on cc, that the top law schools = six, but not sure if that’s true.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>actually the top tier of law schools (referred to as the monolithic T14) is… you guessed it… fourteen law schools.</p>
<p>including… several public schools! but to no surprise you don’t see any public schools on their survey list</p>
<p>It is interesting to look at the numbers of places like Harvard and Yale law however because they, essentially, are the top choices for almost anyone so regional bias can be eliminated. When a school like Dartmouth places 3-10 times the number of grads into the cream of the crop grad schools than larger schools like WashU and JHU you start to wonder…</p>
<p>thanks, els – I’m not a law school junkie.</p>
<p>perhaps, slipper. But, I would guess that Stanford would win the most cross-admit battle with Yale for those on the west coast. And, quite frankly, of those who might be financially challenged, Boalt would beat Yale. [Not everyone has a Wall Street dream.] The Calif bar (like NY and TX) is extremely difficult, and going to law school in-state has academic advantages, not to mention contacts. And, thus, the other problema with the WSJ feeder article which you quote like gospel: it’s not income adjusted, which eliminates nearly every public college.</p>
<p>The simple fact is that the WSJ ignored 13% of the US population. And, WashU is in the midwest. How many of their graduates REALLY want to go east?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>that’s what i touched on here:</p>
<p>“Also, what of schools that are very good with financial aid who may have more poor students who are accepted to these programs, but end up matriculating to different (unsurveyed) ones where they are given scholarships?”</p>
<p>bluebayou,</p>
<p>What is this kewpie award? </p>
<p>The WSJ is very, very useful in sorting out what schools someone should aim for if they want to go to the best law/med/biz programs.</p>
<p>Btw, I’m sure if a school has plenty of people going to Harv/Yale law, they’ll have plenty of kids going to Stanford law.</p>
<p>Also, I’m pretty sure Chicago and Michigan each have a school on the survey list. </p>
<p>WSJ points out that Dartmouth is excellent for placement. It points out Wash U doesn’t do that well in the 15 schools it surveyed, but that it might do better for other schools.</p>
<p>I guess the one thing that concerns me about that list is (as far as I know) that it doesn’t account for unquantifiable factors like the acaemic culture of a school, which will generally determine how many students end up going to these prestigious law and med schools. Other than the 3 point difference in test scores, and maybe one extraordinary extracurricular accomplishment from their high school years, I really don’t think that students who attend Yale are too different than those who attend Amherst. Or in Swarthmore’s case, many students not there to major in business, because otherwise they would have gone to Penn. As a result, Penn may have a higher proportion of students choosing these elite schools…</p>
<p>Does that follow what the data shows?</p>
<p>"Or in Swarthmore’s case, many students not there to major in business, because otherwise they would have gone to Penn. "</p>
<p>Or they didn’t get in.</p>
<p>Either way, the data means that if a school ranks high, it is good. If the school ranks low, it isn’t necessarily bad. Dartmouth ranks high so its good. WashU ranks low, so it isn’t necessarily bad.</p>
<p>This is humorous. I will concur that Dartmouth is a better school than Washington University. I’m almost laughing out loud as I read posters (slipper and elsij in particular) claiming Dartmouth is “leaps and bounds” ahead of WashU. For business, certainly. For student body quality? For endowment per student? For medical? For science? Mathematics? Psychology? And the list goes on. It just becomes silly to watch people say two schools are practically incomparable. In the end, it makes those with such sweeping claims look insecure. Suffice it to say that both schools are very good and offer an excellent education. Does Dartmouth place better into professional schools and the business market? Yes. Can you get into a top professional school or land a top business job from WashU? Absolutely. </p>
<p>Hey Els, WashU and Northwestern are peers. Do you really consider Dartmouth to be completely in a league above your school? I didn’t think so.</p>
<p>P.S. - Using the RP ranking is truly weak evidence for this case. Brigham Young is also above the likes of many top schools. Does that mean it is correct?</p>