WSJ: Want to Go to Harvard Law?

Want to Go to Harvard Law?

By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


When it came time for Porter Leslie to pick a college, Washington University
looked pretty tempting -- after all, a scholarship there would save his
family $13,000 a year. But with plans for a top graduate program after
college, his parents decided to pick up the tab for Columbia. "That's one
reason we're paying all this money," says his mother, Sally Leslie. "He
should go to the best college he can so he can go to the best grad school."

But is that assumption correct? For years the focus in higher education has
been about getting into the best possible college. Yet when it comes to
professionals -- the future doctors, lawyers and executives out there --
it's all about the right grad school. So with families all across the
country getting ready for this year's college admissions, we decided to look
at which schools are most successful at getting kids into the nation's most
prestigious graduate programs.

To compile our list of the most effective feeder colleges, we researched the
background of more than 5,000 students starting at more than a dozen top
business, law and medical schools this fall, including names like Harvard
Law and the Wharton MBA. Our survey canvassed grad-school admissions
offices, spoke to officials at more than 50 colleges and in some cases
counted up kids one by one in student "face book" directories. Then we put
it all together, factoring in the class size at each of the undergraduate
colleges so that small schools wouldn't be penalized.

To no one's surprise, Harvard, Yale and Princeton easily dominated the top
of our list. But after that, we found things don't always stack up the way
you might think. Four of the other Ivy League schools failed to crack our
top 10 (sorry, Penn). State schools like Michigan and Berkeley came in
further down the list, and so did NYU (No. 69), which trailed Kalamazoo
College (No. 57). And if you're looking for a college with a track record
better than UCLA or Barnard, look in Minnesota -- St. Paul, to be exact,
home to Macalester.

Colleges see an opening here. Indeed, our survey showed many smaller schools
catching on to the feeder idea as a way to stand out. Taking a page from
elite high schools, they're looking for -- and finding -- ways to package
students so they get noticed by the top grad schools. Georgia Tech started
handing out $250,000 in stipends for undergrads to do research that looks
good on med-school applications. State schools from Wisconsin to Colorado
are stepping up efforts to bring grad schools to campus-recruiting fairs.
And when a rejection letter goes to a student from New College of Florida
(No. 31 on our list), administrators and faculty blitz the offending grad
school with phone calls about the strength of their curriculum.

Small College, Big Job

Then there's tiny Pomona College in California, which sent a higher
proportion of its kids to Harvard Law this fall than Columbia or Duke. No.
13 on our list, it's created a separate office to handle grad-school
admissions and fellowships, including its own full-time director. They do
everything from grilling students in mock interviews ("How do you deal with
stress?") to hounding professors who've fallen behind on their
recommendation letters. Dean of Students Ann Quinley pens about 100
testimonials a year herself. "It's a huge job," she says.

Grad school, of course, wasn't always something families worried about in
high school. For years, the emphasis has been on finding the best
undergraduate college, with parents studying guidebooks and schools pumping
up everything from the faculty to the cafeteria food to draw kids in. Even
when they got there, students usually didn't worry much beyond taking
required courses (like the premeds always complaining about organic
chemistry). As for who got in to the Harvards and Yales of the grad-school
world, Ivy Leaguers often had the edge.

They still do. Almost one out of every seven students in the new fall class
at Harvard Law came from, you guessed it, Harvard College. And it doesn't
stop there: According to Weekend Journal's survey, add in Ivy rivals Yale
and Princeton and the top three schools account for more than 750 students
at our 15 grad schools, out of a pool of 5,100 openings. Not that the grad
schools, which have been criticized about a lack of diversity, are
apologizing for their Ivy addiction. "They've done the work of selecting for
us, to a large extent," says Andrew Frantz, associate dean for admissions at
Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Beyond the top Ivies, things tilt quickly in favor of small schools, like
Williams at No. 5 in our survey, Amherst at No. 9 and Swarthmore at 10.
Indeed, of our top 20 colleges, seven have a senior class smaller than
600 -- and only one graduates more than 2,000 students a year. Grad schools
told us these small liberal-arts colleges tend to do a better job of
advising their students, in areas like picking courses that look good on an
application. And when students work directly with professors in small
classes, they tend to get better recommendation letters.

Obviously no approach to ranking colleges is perfect, including ours. While
most of our top-15 grad school list are no-brainers, some of the names are
open to debate. (One, Stanford's MBA, might have made our list but didn't
because the most recent information we had was for the 2002 MBA class; based
on that, the overall rankings wouldn't have been significantly affected.) We
relied heavily on student face books, which may not include last-minute
changes; depending on a college's size, that could affect some of our
rankings. And our focus was on enrollment into the top schools, not how many
students applied.

Still, while questioning our emphasis on the grad schools we picked (No. 25
Cornell disputed the survey's "lasting meaning"), few colleges took any
issue with our results. Most said they didn't keep these kinds of numbers,
which guidebooks haven't typically tracked, either. All of which means
families like the McKinnons of Corunna, Ind., have to do the guesswork. This
spring, 18-year-old James McKinnon turned down undergraduate offers from
Chicago and Penn. His reasoning: It's easier to stand out at a small place
when grad-school applications roll around. "My grades will be better," says
Mr. McKinnon, now at Wabash College (No. 59 on our list).

But what about state schools? Parents have always fretted over whether
sending kids to less-expensive schools would hurt their postgraduate
chances. According to our survey, only Michigan made the top 30, and that's
with the help of Michigan Law, one of our 15 elites, taking more than five
dozen Wolverines in this fall's class. Among the other well-known names,
Virginia was 33, Berkeley came in at 41 and UCLA was 61. "They seem a little
reluctant to visit," says advisor Glenn Cummings at the University of
Virginia, who says three top law schools he invited to come meet students
this year never got back to him.

State schools argue that students can improve their chances by enrolling in
their honors programs, the "college within a college" option at many top
public institutions. Indeed, grad-school officials said beefier course
lineups and more rigorous requirements at these honors programs can score
points on an application. (Not always: One Harvard Med official told us flat
out, "Honors doesn't matter that much to me.") In many cases, the honors
colleges don't track how their kids do, though that's starting to change as
families wake up to the feeder-school issue. The University of Washington
(No. 142) plans to start, partly in response to parent concerns.

Built-In Bias

Still, even if most people don't realize it, there's a bias in favor of some
schools that is practically built into the system. At law schools, there's a
number called the LCM -- the LSAT College Mean, which tries to identify the
students attending the "tougher" colleges (usually Ivies and small
liberal-arts schools). With each new group of applicants, it evaluates
schools based on their average LSAT test scores; someone with so-so grades
from a high-LCM school can wind up looking better than a 4.0 student at a
lesser college. Besides, many admissions officers are Ivy alums themselves,
says Mark Meyerrose at Admissions Consultants Inc. "They're biased toward
elitist institutions because that's where they went to school," he says.

Of course, grad schools say that no one factor decides a student's fate.
Undergraduate alma maters are only one of the things looked at, along with
grades, test scores, extracurricular activities and essays. And several
shied away from the notion of feeder colleges. "We don't have a ranking of
undergrad schools that are better or worse than others," says Richard
Silverman, director of admissions at Yale's School of Medicine. "That would
be a terrible way to do business."

In the end, the bigger question may be whether it's worth obsessing about
Harvard anyway. True, graduates of private law schools, including the elite
places, nabbed starting salaries 15% to 20% higher than their public-school
counterparts. But the tuitions are higher, too, with places like Columbia
costing students $38,000 a year -- compared with $14,000 for some highly
regarded state schools. Even some MBA types are starting to question the
bottom line: One Stanford professor concluded that a business degree often
didn't mean truly higher pay, but instead effectively got MBA graduates
treated as a few years more senior for compensation purposes.

Don't tell that to Ryan O'Connor. To further his chances of getting into a
top business school, Mr. O'Connor just transferred from the University of
Miami to the Berklee College of Music in Boston this fall to study music
business and management. He figures Berklee professors are more connected in
the grad-school world. "That should help me," he says.

--Brooks Barnes, Nancy Keates, Lauren Mechling, Paula Szuchman and Heather
Won Tesoriero contributed to this article.

Behind the Rankings
Traditionally, college rankings have focused on test scores and grade
averages of kids coming in the door. But we wanted to find out what happens
after they leave -- and try to get into prestigious grad schools.

We focused on 15 elite schools, five each from medicine, law and business,
to serve as our benchmark for profiling where the students came from.
Opinions vary, of course, but our list reflects a consensus of grad-school
deans we interviewed, top recruiters and published grad-school rankings
(including the Journal's own MBA rankings). So for medicine, our schools
were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San
Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth's Tuck
School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Penn's Wharton School. In law, we
looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.

Our team of reporters fanned out to these schools to find the alma maters
for every student starting this fall, more than 5,100 in all. Nine of the
schools gave us their own lists, but for the rest we relied mainly on "face
book" directories schools give incoming students. Of course, when it comes
to "feeding" grad schools, a college's rate is more important than the raw
numbers. (Michigan, for example, sent about twice the number as Georgetown,
but it's also more than three times the size.) So our feeder score factors
in class size.

How did colleges react to our list? Some were quick to point out that it was
only one year of data, and many said they didn't track their feeder rates
closely. "I have no way of verifying this," a spokesman for Cornell said.
Others said they didn't think this was an important way to judge schools
because so many factors play into grad schools' decisions. Still, the
colleges in our list did not dispute our findings and neither did the grad
schools.

Not that they necessarily want it out there. "We keep a lid on this data,"
says Mohan Boodram, director of admissions and financial aid at Harvard
Medical School. Otherwise, "high-school students will think they have to go
to certain schools."

Copyright 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Abe Kohen" wrote in message ...

> We focused on 15 elite schools, five each from medicine, law and business,
> to serve as our benchmark for profiling where the students came from.
> Opinions vary, of course, but our list reflects a consensus of grad-school
> deans we interviewed, top recruiters and published grad-school rankings
> (including the Journal's own MBA rankings). So for medicine, our schools
> were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San
> Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth's Tuck
> School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Penn's Wharton School. In law, we
> looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.

An interesting story, unfortunately another bad study. It would seem
that before people embark on such studies that they would review the
plan first.

Thanks,

KSG