Yes. Some other Honors program also have a dedicated research opportunity facet. And so on.
So there is more than one way to pursue these relationships. Necessarily these schools-within-schools sorts of programs won’t help that college’s overall PhD stats that much, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work for those specific kids.
I have to concur although with lots of caveats: 1) My subset of MIT alum is extremely small (like, 2 over the space of about 50 years.) Neither were what I would call geniuses. It’s also possible that the real geniuses wouldn’t be caught dead in my social circle - which includes its share of non-STEM Ivy graduates.
And there is always the possibility for kids at big schools to get close to faculty just by getting to know them. Being persistent, showing up at office hours, being on the lookout for opportunities, etc. My friends who teach at big universities say that it’s not as common as you might think for students to simply reach out to them, so it’s not so difficult for a student to stand out in this way… one friend was just telling me how their department has undergraduate research funding that sometimes goes unused because they do not have enough students seeking out research.
Anyway, this sort of thing can affect PhD admissions. But PhD admission is, as you say, mostly about the professors who are recommending you, so it is different from some professional schools being discussed here.
I note I think in-state law schools sometimes work really well for some folks.
But most of those have pretty good rankings anyway. Like a lot of the ones I have in mind are still like top 80ish law schools per US News (I think, I haven’t looked at those rankings closely for a while).
Regarding employment outcomes associated with law schools, wouldn’t consulting the required standardized disclosures at Standard509Disclosure or the derived more graphical summaries at LawHub — Law School Transparency be helpful in this respect?
For PhD admission, wouldn’t any reputational halo effect be mostly based on (a) a specific faculty recommender, particularly as a research supervisor of the applicant, and (b) the department at the undergraduate school, as opposed to the undergraduate school as a whole?
Yes, I don’t think it is remotely impossible in any significant research department for top students in the major to build those relationships. But as an undergrad, you may need to show more initiative, hustle, and so on in some larger grad-student-heavy departments. As your friends are saying, that sort of initiative might be rarer among these still-young adults than many remember, and that could easily end up cutting the percentages down significantly.
I gotta believe St. John’s (NY) is right up there.
So not really believing in reputational halo effects in the first place, I find that a challenging question to answer! But overall, I think it is complicated. Like I had a visiting professor as my senior thesis advisor, and it didn’t stop me from being admitted to top PhD programs in my field. But she was straight out of a top PhD program herself, and I think could speak credibly to my fitness for top programs. And I don’t think I had any competition for her recommendation (I believe I was her only advisee).
Of course that was a long time ago now, but I don’t think things have changed too much. There is always some sort of tradeoff between your professor being particularly famous and actually getting that professor’s attention and most enthusiastic recommendation. And yes, that can carry over to departments, not least because many departmental rankings and such are research-based and/or graduate-program-based, so the top faculty at top departments using this sort of measure often have a lot of grad students competing for their attention along with undergrads.
But again, possibly the junior faculty at such departments, or faculty at not research heavy departments, including at LACs, can work out. It is just really complicated.
Yeah, law schools in the top few legal markets like NYC basically need their own separate analysis. I do think there is sometimes a bit of feast or famine effect, like above a certain line the grads are doing very well, too far below and things can look pretty different suddenly. So there is risk in paying a lot for such law schools, but it sometimes pays off.
For me as an undergraduate, having lots of grad students around was really beneficial! They were friendly, they had lots of time available, they had just negotiated the admission process themselves, and they were able to help me to get to know professors (and also could give me lots of tips on how to get on those professors’ good side, which professors to steer clear of, etc). So for an undergraduate who has some level of initiative, I think grad students can be assets rather than liabilities.
What is the difference in median pay between a T1 law school and a T14 law school, and what is the difference between a T14 law school and a T30 law school? And are the tails for comp far different?
An important part of the reason this strategy is even under consideration is that law schools try to build a class that represents a wide variety of undergraduate institutions so they can brag about it on their website.
Some elite private employers demonstrably don’t see it as part of their mission.
Similarly, elite law firms do not, in turn, go out of their way to seek out Arizona-educated lawyers.
Here is a comparison of the #1 and the three tied for #13 law schools in USNWR law school rankings:
Since law school has one major which is aimed at the professional licensing exam and law jobs, and ABA has a standardized reporting requirement for some admission and outcome measures, these kinds of comparisons are more doable and useful than for undergraduate schools.
Thanks
I note some law school graduates are not trying to maximize earnings. They may, for example, be interested in academia, government agencies, politics, non-profits, and so on.
And these sorts of law school graduates may be more concentrated at certain law schools. Like Yale, for example, traditionally has at least one of the top few law schools in the US News (currently tied for #2), but tends to have much lower median earnings statistics than a lot of other top law schools, largely because of this effect.
Thanks
Not entirely accurate. In many, if not most cases, faculty are the ones who aren’t utilizing these funds, which require undergraduate participation in actual research.
Research is planned with the main purpose of winning grant money and in producing publishable and impactful results. Those are what the university expects from faculty. Incorporating undergraduates in research will not help produce more publishable results, and will require additional work on grant proposals and in mentoring the undergraduates. While there is funding for that, it is pretty small amounts compared to research grants and compared to the perceived inconvenience.
At research universities, having undergraduate research as part of research projects does not directly help with tenure, promotion, or pay increase. Because it can reduce research output, it can indirectly hinder tenure, promotion, and pay increases.
The REUs are generally untouched because faculty are disincentivized from using these funds by tenure and promotion practices.
Faculty who do have active participation of undergraduates usually employ them in all sorts of grunt work. This does not require additional requests for funds, since these generally fall under “research tech” which doesn’t need any additional work on a grant proposal, and it doesn’t require that the faculty member commit to mentoring (the undergraduate is usually given into the care of a grad student or a experience tech).
This doesn’t qualify for REU or similar funds (for good reason), though, but they often do provide opportunities for actual research.
Faculty who actively care about providing undergraduates with research opportunities are the ones who usually create undergraduate research opportunities that can utilize these finds.
Thanks for all the detail! I do not know if it works any differently in my friend’s department (technically part of the medical school), but I didn’t ask her for details so it is good to hear them from you. She does really enjoy mentoring students and takes a lot of pride in “not being one of those profs who assigns undergrads to exclusively grunt work.” So she was mainly venting to me about not enough undergrads reaching out to her.
This. Wesleyan strangely enough, gets no REU funding even though it is, fundamentally speaking, a liberal arts college (instead, there is institutional money available for summer research.) Grunt work is plentiful, but so are Wesleyan PIs with multi-year grants. The grunt work often leads to projects that require undergraduates to stay after graduation. When that happens, they have the option of earning a tuition-free master’s degree.