As a first gen high school student, I went into high school with no preparation for how college-admission-centric it is. As a result, I didn’t know how to “play the game” so to speak. So, my transcript and resume, while still good, don’t truly reflect my ability. I don’t want to feel this way again when I apply to grad school. But I am worried that I’ve already set myself up for disappointment? How many students, percentage wise, of the grad students at top grad schools like Harvard, Stanford, etc. came from undergraduate schools that weren’t considered nearly as prestigious? Of course I know it happens, but how often?
Look at LACs - look up " where PHDs got their start" for instance.
Depends what you mean by “grad school”. Do you mean a JD, or a [professional masters in pharmacy or nursing? Do you mean a professional doctoral degree in medicine, dentistry, or vet school? Do you mean for a PhD or a non-professional MA/MS, or an MFA? “Grad school” is not one specific thing, so you need to be a lot more specific.
It happens all the time. I was first-generation, went to a low-ranked state college and moved on to a top-ranked graduate school and know many other people who did as well. If you are capable and have a great undergraduate record and do well on whatever the relevant exams are (LSAT, GRE, etc.), there will be lots of opportunities wherever you start out.
Google Harvard Law School undergraduate college. The document will show 173 different institutions. But that’s one school.
Realistically, if you are applying for PhD programs in engineering and you have an exceptional record at MIT as an undergraduate, nobody will doubt your qualifications and the assumption will be that if you could stand out there, you are probably truly “all that”. Generally, exceptional undergrad performance anywhere is enormously helpful. But know that exceptional means “exception” so is hard to plan!
It all gets murkier if you are applying to grad school as a B+ student. The school you’re coming from (and major) may matter more. But what kind of grad school you are considering matters here. Business schools have different criteria than med schools and from doctoral programs in physics.
A PhD is a research degree, and the ability to study and do well on exams is not a very accurate way to predict your ability to be able to be successful in a PhD program, even if your undergraduate was from MIT. An undergraduate from a solid college just means that you do not need to be educated in the basics. A kid with a BS with a 3.5 GPA from Ohio State, who has published an article in a peer reviewed journal demonstrates a lot more potential for success in a PhD program than somebody with a GPA of 3.9 from MIT who has not demonstrated any abilities to perform original research.
There is a vast difference between the ability to do well in a classroom by regurgitating material, or even by learning concepts and applying them successfully, and the ability to do research, which requires a lot more intuition and original thought. That is also why applications for PhD programs are not reviewed the same way that they review applications for undergraduate programs (and also why applications for graduate programs are reviewed by faculty and graduate students, not by professional admissions people). That is also why, to get your PhD, you do not take standardized tests, but are interviewed and tested by a panel of PhDs on your original research project.
The things which are important for being accepted to a PhD programs are, more or less in this order, your accomplishments (mostly related to research), your letters of recommendation from professors and researchers (providing information regarding your qualities as a potential researcher), your statement of purpose (which demonstrates whether you have some idea as to what doing research entails), your transcripts (to make sure that you have the required mastery of the background topics), and your GRE score (which demonstrate much the same things as your transcript). The importance of demonstrating research ability and the importance of LoRs are major reasons that Liberal Arts College graduates are highly over-represented in PhD programs. LACs support undergraduate research far more than other colleges and universities, providing this edge for their graduates, and LAC students interact a lot more with the faculty of the college, which means that their LoRs are generally more personal.
Two older brothers. Each went to state U. One is a Harvard MBA. The other got his PhD in neuro something or other from UT - Austin (considered a top school for that).
Not a brag. Just saying provided you do really well in UG (grades, test scores, letters of rec), and do well professionally for a few yrs (MBA specifically), you’ll have a great shot at anywhere.
The tl;dr for this post is I would argue that the answer to this question is unknowable and, frankly, not super useful to you, and that if you do what you need to do to be competitive you can get into top grad programs in your field of choice.
All you need to know is that it’s very possible and very common, and that as long as you get the kinds of experiences that make you competitive (and your college is accredited and solid), you can go to a top graduate school if you want and need to.
Unknowable because:
-What’s a top grad school? Harvard has lots of great programs in many fields, but in YOUR field, the top program could be at Ohio State or Michigan or Iowa.
-What’s a top undergrad? What’s considered ‘not nearly as prestigious’? We know Harvard and Stanford ‘count.’ What about state flagships like Michigan? What about small schools that are hidden gems like New College of Florida? What about top HBCUs that provide a lot of the diversity for top programs, like Howard or Tuskegee?
Not useful, because:
-The percentage is a descriptive statistic, but it doesn’t have any predictive value. For example, maybe I went to Super Mario Bros. University, which has only sent 1% of their students to Harvard Law and equivalent schools in the last 5 years. But that’s because SMBU is a place filled with many first-gen and low-income students who need to work right after college to feed their families, or who can’t afford Harvard Law. Or maybe it’s a prestigious tech-heavy university where any student who WANTED to go to Harvard Law, but they choose not to.
-Or, maybe I went to Pikmin University, in which 65% of the students who want a PhD go onto great programs. That’s actually a statistic to pay attention to when choosing a college, I’d say, because that means PU probably prepares students well for PhD programs. But the probability of an individual student getting in isn’t the same as the percentage that ultimately goes. if I don’t do any research in undergrad, my chances have functionally become 0%, not 65%.
Department web sites may have rosters of PhD students. Some PhD students put up profiles or CVs that list their undergraduate schools.
“How many students, percentage wise, of the grad students at top grad schools like Harvard, Stanford, etc. came from undergraduate schools that weren’t considered nearly as prestigious?”
This is only one person’s experience, but in my experience, a LOT. I got my masters at a “top 10” grad school (Stanford) which happened to have a great program in my major. The other students there were from a VERY wide range of schools. Many came from in-state public flagships (at the time I had a good friend from Michigan and another from UNC). The only case where I happened to know multiple other grad students from the same undergraduate school was a group that had done their bachelors’ at Rutgers, and then went to Bell Labs, and then came as a small group to get their master’s at Stanford. Completely separately (and more recently), I know someone very well who did their undergrad at a school that is barely not in the top 100 in the US, and did their master’s at an Ivy League university that has a great program in their major.
If you want to get into a highly ranked grad school, you should take advantage of opportunities that you get as an undergrad student. Your undergrad GPA is going to matter. Research experience is going to matter. References will matter. Test scores (such as GRE scores) will matter. Again in my experience it appears that the research experience could be something that you do while you are an undergrad, or could be a job that you do for a year or two or three after you get your bachelor’s and before you go to graduate school.
One point which @juillet sort of says: You don’t have any control over the past. You have some control over the future. You are where you are. Do the very best that you can. My expectation is that if you do very well where you are then you will get very good opportunities going forward. I also agree with her that the top program in whatever you want to do in graduate school might be at Harvard or Stanford, but it also might be an any one of a very long list of other schools.