The Effect of College Name on Grad School Admission?

<p>How much do graduate admissions factor in the college a student attends? I am looking at a few colleges to complete my degree (returning to school) and realize there is some give and take with each choice. While a good name school will be helpful, I am concerned that the “good name” college will also be far more difficult (it has been a while for me and I am rusty!), and at this school it is likely to be be more difficult to connect with the professors for research, recommendations, etc. My other choices are a large state university that lacks in reputation, but it’s a place I can shine and there are a lot of resources available to me. I will also be able to get in some other classes, like professional writing and intro to info systems, which may also help my entrance into a good grad school. There is also a small college that offers personal attention, but resources are limited, faculty very small, and the cost is a little higher (but managable). </p>

<p>My overall question is, how much does the college name play into graduate school admissions? Am I better off doing with a great record at a mediocre school, or a mediocre record at a great school? Any suggestions?</p>

<p>If it’s important at all, I have not decided between terminal master’s or Ph.d., but want to keep my options open.</p>

<p>You will be surprised to know that a high prestige school might actually be quite a bit easier that a state flagship in engineering. To be honest, the hardest engineering schools (household name ones that is) are Stanford, CalTech, Rice, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UT Austin, UI Urbana Champagne, Cornell, etc. The Ivies have relatively weak engineering compared to these schools. </p>

<p>Go to the school that is: best price, smallest most intimate faculty and/or where you feel happiest at. I suggest the latter because you will perform better that way.</p>

<p>Can you be specific at all?</p>

<p>Yeah, to get into grad schools like MIT and Stanford, does one have to go to a top 20 undergraduate school?</p>

<p>^^^ Short Answer: No. </p>

<p>It just doesn’t make sense for a grad program to turn down a phenomenal applicant just b/c they didn’t go to a top 20 undergrad. There’s probably some “advantage” to going to a prestigious school, but if you can’t rely on that alone to get you in the door.</p>

<p>^ Agreed.</p>

<p>At all of my grad school interviews (the top 4 in my area of study), only half of the attendees, roughly, came from top 20 undergraduate institutions.</p>

<p>Thanks for the replies. I decided on the state school and am very happy about it! I realized it was just a more comfortable fit for me and ultimately I will do better and get more out of a school where I am happy. Plus I can ride my bike. :slight_smile: Now I can worry about which classes to take in what order!</p>

<p>Yay! Good job and good luck!</p>

<p>No question that the higher ranked schools I interviewed with, on the whole, the people I was interviewing with, came from higher ranked schools.</p>

<p>I’m in a top 10 doctoral program in my field and I think maybe two of us in my primary came from well-known schools - both from Michigan. The rest come from schools I’ve never heard of; one did her undergrad in Mexico.</p>

<p>In my other department, most of the students do not come from top undergraduate schools either.</p>

<p>I’ve talked about this with my advisor. They are impressed by who you do research with and what you do, not your school name. So if you come from Harvard, big deal. If you did research with Nancy Krieger (big name in my primary field) at Harvard, now THAT’S something for us to be intrigued about. When my advisor (the former director of graduate studies, who was in charge of admissions for the grad program) talked about students from their schools he didn’t say “Oh Molly went to Harvard” he said “Molly worked with Professor Famous at Harvard.”</p>

<p>So that’s what top schools are good for - working with someone good, or having access to resources. Not the name. From this point on in academia, name alone isn’t going to get you anywhere. Not that the name can’t give you a small edge, but if you have nothing to pair it with, it doesn’t matter. A Harvard grad with no research experience isn’t going to get in over a Georgia State grad with a publication just because of the Harvard name. Unless he paid someone off. The advantage that top schools have is 1) research money 2) fancy names. Not that an undergrad would ever get to work directly with Nancy Krieger or the other fancy names anyway, but sometimes just working in their lab is good enough.</p>

<p>Brando - thanks! </p>

<p>Juillet - good to know stuff. I have been looking through the faculty bios to see where each studied and how much publishing, etc. they do. My main focus will be finding someone good to work with.</p>

<p>I know you guys are talking about med school, but How about for engineering grad programs? Does the ranking of your undergraduate engineering program have any effect on your admission?</p>

<p>Just to give you some reassurance- you don’t have to go to a top tier school just for the sake of attending a great grad school. I just graduated this year from high school and my spanish teacher is an example of that. He attended Arizona State University (99% acceptance), he did phenomenal there receiving a Full-bright scholarship for research? (Don’t know much information on that) </p>

<p>Anyways, he was telling us that he wasn’t returning next year for teaching because he was going to grad school at Harvard. He was also accepted to Columbia and Stanford. :)</p>

<p>I thought they were talking about graduate school, not professional school. Isn’t there a distinction?</p>

<p>^ oh well they were talking about doctoral programs. I just wanted to know what its like for engineering programs.</p>

<p>mathsciencedude:</p>

<p>yeah–med, law, and business schools are professional schools and are not “true” grad schools. the term “grad school” is sometimes used as an umbrella term to include those professional schools, but an actual, “true” grad school is what is being discussed here–one that produces Ph.D’s, Masters, and pure academics who go one to become scientists, researchers, and professors (vs. producing a doctor, lawyer, businessperson).</p>

<p>Just thought I’d pipe in on a semi-unrelated note…</p>

<p>^^^^quinonez07, ASU’s acceptance rate is 90%ish, not quite 99% lol… and is actually really involved with international-related things (like the Fulbright).</p>

<p>Just thought I’d make a quick correction regarding the acceptance rate in case anybody reading this was interested in ASU (rockin’ school), considering we are on college forums! =).</p>

<p>^^
Yeah It was a wild guess. I live across the street from it, but I don’t pay to much attention to it considering I’m going somewhere else. ;)</p>

<p>I went to two of the top grad schools (probably each the top 1 depending upon how you sliced the field) when getting my PhD and was a professor for a while and I would not give the unequivocal answer that all of the respondents seem to give. What matters, I believe, is the quality of the person and high quality people can be found all over. But, being able to discern who is high quality is hard and people use shortcuts to figure that out. So, a recommendation from a professor whom they know can count for a lot, if that person is well-known and has produced good students in the past. Undergraduate admissions are one pass at filtering for quality, but there are a lot of other things going on there: athletics, legacies, URMs, leadership, … that grad schools may not care about (well, they may care about URMs). A person who isn’t at a school with well-known faculty can still get and (and they do) but the barrier is a little higher. They may have to publish a paper (or papers) or otherwise demonstrate talent and creativity – good grades and a good recommendation will mean less. </p>

<p>Let me give you a couple of data points from my experience. My undergraduate advisor was a genius and a great man of American academia who was rather eccentric and apparently it was difficult for undergraduates to work with him. His recommendations, apparently, seemed negative but anyone that he gave a semi-positive reference to was a shoo-in everyplace. I later read a letter from him written when I was applying to be a professor. Apparently I had gotten better significantly better results on my undergraduate thesis than he thought technically possible (it was published in the top journal in the field). The most positive thing in the letter was apparently the statement that I had some talent, which meant that I got a full ride at each of the top 5 departments (no teaching or RA duties, just full support to get on with my work). I could have been the same kid at a lesser school and it wouldn’t necessarily have been so obvious. The critical thing, though, is working with a well-known guy, not going to a name school. However, there is often a correlation between well-known professors and name schools.</p>

<p>Second data point. I took a year off in the middle of grad school and was interviewing for a job at a firm run by Wharton professors. I had lunch with two of them and one was grilling me on what I knew, etc., and the second turned to the first and said, “He’s Princeton magna, Jerry” and Jerry said, “So, why do you want to work for us?” I didn’t work for them, but I think they knew what the label meant, and if I had wanted to study in grad school with them, it would also have been easy.</p>

<p>Nothing I wrote above is meant to imply that not going to a name school means that one won’t or can’t go to a highly-ranked program. I had classmates in grad school from UBC, University of Washington, Pomona, Hampshire, SUNY Albany, as well as Harvard, Princeton, and Chicago. But, I think the folks from the name schools probably found it a little easier to get in.</p>

<p>You’d be surprised. </p>

<p>Grad School admission committees are extremely analytical.</p>

<p>I can only speak to the admissions process of Stanford’s MBA program, however. There’s no notion that an ivy-league candidate is automatically better or more competitive than someone from a state school with a similar degree, work experience, GPA, and GMAT test score. However, the admissions committees do track the performance of people in the program and use that to figure out which schools are good feeder schools. If the admissions committee notices that all MBA students from University A rock and all the students who hailed from University B are bad, the admissions committee will favor people from University A than University B. The top feeder schools into the program are Princeton and Yale. I don’t know the rankings beyond that, but I know that Brown and Ann Arbor are favored at equal levels and the University of Minnesota is favored at the same level as Dartmouth. </p>

<p>TLDR: The admissions committee doesn’t go “ZOMFG ivy league. This person is superior to the candidate from a state school who is otherwise exactly the same.” What they say is, “schools that are known to be rigorous and difficult to get into produce strong candidates. However, we notice that some schools that aren’t so highly regarded produce good candidates for our program.”</p>