<p>Wharton is not an exception, just a school where people take the time to scour Facebook to get the incoming class demographics (there are similar studies for Harvard). Business school is professional school, so the point stands there.</p>
<p>For engineering graduate programs, my point also stands: you’re admitted based on research. It’s easier to find a good research position at a better research university. If you look at graduate engineering programs, for example GT’s, you’ll see this holds. Students aren’t all necessarily from the very top engineering schools, but with few exceptions people come from large first tier research universities (schools like Penn State, Texas A&M, Florida, Purdue, Ohio State, etc). This isn’t by accident. It’s because these schools have the research opportunities necessary to allow students distinguish their research abilities. </p>
<p>UCF only had $34 million in funding in science and engineering research in 2009 (the last report from NSF available). That’s spread across 5400 undergraduates. Also the grad student / undergrad student ratio (traditionally undergraduates work for graduate students) is more than 4:1. Those numbers really worry me that there’s just not a lot of research to go around for students. Sure you could be a superstar, graduate with a 3.9 GPA, and get the choice research positions, but that’s a big gamble to take (for the sake of comparison, GT had $380 million in research funding for 8000 undergraduates and a ratio of ugrad/grad of 2:1)</p>