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<p>I think it’s a gross exaggeration to say that “the only statistics that are meaningful to prospective students are graduate representation in elite medical, law, and business programs.” That’s just wildly off-base. The vast majority of undergraduates will never go to medical, law, or graduate-level business school, and many, probably most, do not aspire to graduate education in any of those fields. Many want to be engineers or computer scientists or research scientists. Others study business at the undergrad level and never intend to do graduate work that would largely replicate what they’ll learn as undergraduates. Some aspire to dental school, or pharmacy school, or vet school. Some want to be nurses, or teachers. Some want to work in forestry, or conservation biology, or public land management. Some hope to be diplomats, or land some kind of position in public policy. Some aspire to earn Ph.D.s and teach at the college ro university level. The possibilities are endless. </p>
<p>As for WSJ’s “comprehensive” feeder ranking, that has been widely and thoroughly debunked for its poor methodology. Apart from its numerous other flaws, any “study” that doesn’t normalize for the number of applicants from a particular institution and for the objective qualifications of those applicants (e.g., LSAT, MCAT, GMAT scores) is pretty worthless. To use a crude example, if a University of Wisconsin student with an undergrad GPA of 3.9 and a 175 on the LSAT has the same statistical probability of acceptance at Yale Law School as a Harvard undergrad with the identical GPA and LSAT score, then there’s zero advantage to choosing Harvard over Wisconsin if your goal is admission to Yale Law School, even if Harvard sends 50 times as many students to Yale Law School as Wisconsin because it has so many more top LSAT scorers (as one would expect, since it has so many more high SAT-scorers in its undergraduate student body, and LSAT scores correlate strongly with SAT scores). Then the putative advantage of attending Harvard is just an optical illusion.</p>