What Graduate Schools Think About Your College

[ucbalumnus]

@planit

I know someone involved in reviewing admissions for a top-5 math Ph.D. program (not my daughter’s), and she says they literally separate the applications into “H/Y/P/Chicago/Stanford/one or two others,” and “everyone else.” The fill as many spots as they can from Pile A and then turn to Pile B if space is available. If you look at the composition of their Ph.D. classes and, indeed, at every other one of the top 5’ish math programs in the U.S., except for the handful of international students, it’s not hard to believe.

Not too obvious from https://math.berkeley.edu/people/grad . Went through A-C. Found relatively few who put up personal web pages; of those who did, only three named their undergraduate schools: 1 Cambridge, 1 Reed, 1 Michigan.

Math PhD programs do have a reputation of preferring PhD program applicants from schools with what the PhD department considers strong (for pre-PhD students) undergraduate math departments. But that may not align exactly with the usual college rankings that are not math-specific.