Getting into Grad School from LAC

Hungryman792
Sat, 02 Jun 2007 05:06:26 +0000

Hey I’m a member of Pomona’s class of 2011…I’ve been doing research on grad school placement from LAC’s like Pomona, Williams, Amherst, etc, and I noticed that despite the fact that Pomona is routinely compared to Williams/Amherst, that Pomona has a lower acceptance rate (16% vs. 17.4% from Williams, for example) and comparable if not higher avg SAT scores, it still fares poorly in grad school placement when compared to Amherst/Williams and even Swarthmore. For example, there are 2x as many Amherst and Williams grads in the entering class for Yale/Harvard Law school than there are Pomona grads; similarly, the WSJ ranks Williams #5 in grad school placement vs Pomona’s 13. And while Pomona grads might simply prefer the west coast environment for grad school, it’s not as if Stanford is being flooded by Pomona grads either. Is it a matter of prestige in terms of Pomona vs. the established eastern LAC’s? Do East coast schools have better connections with elite institutions? Or is the student body just driven in a different intellectual direction? Hopefully someone can shed some light on this…