<p>^ Remember that Penn’s 6.5% is out of its total undergraduate student body of 10,000, including 3,600 or so students in Wharton, Nursing, and Engineering (not that some of those students don’t go on to get PhDs–in fact they do, but probably not to the extent that students in the College do, especially with respect to Wharton and Nursing). What that means is that, at any given time during the relevant period, there were 650 undergrads on the Penn campus who subsequently went on to get PhDs.</p>
<p>Again, Penn has an intellectual/academic presence within its undergraduate student body (as measured by PhD production) comparable to that of its peers; it just also has the strong preprofessional presence of Wharton and Nursing that most of its peers do not have. Many would argue that for the truly open-minded, expansive, and interdisciplinary thinkers among us (cough, cough–Ben Franklin–cough, cough ;)), that additional presence is a PLUS, and not a minus.</p>