Hopkins undergraduates are barely ranking in the top quarter of graduate school acceptances, according to a study released last week by The Wall Street Journal.
In a new study by The Journal, Hopkins was ranked 24th in a list of feeder schools for elite professional graduate programs.
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton formed the top of the list, while four other Ivies did not make any of the first ten slots.
While most college rankings are primarily based on test scores and GPAs of incoming students, The Wall Street Journal conducted a one-year study to determine and rank the colleges and universities that are the most successful at getting their undergraduates into top-tier graduate schools.
While Harvard, Yale and Princeton led the way, many smaller liberal arts colleges such as Williams (ranked fifth) and Amherst (ranked ninth) surpassed Johns Hopkins and Cornell (25th on the list).
Hopkins University spokesman Dennis O'Shea did not seemed too concerned about the rankings and stressed that the study was not comprehensive enough, only taking into account the three professions of medicine, law and business.
"People here noticed that The Wall Street Journal rankings are based only on a certain slice of professional schools, and doesn't take into account the large number of students that Hopkins and many other schools have that go into Ph.D. and other grad school programs."
Small institutions such as Pomona College (ranked 13th) and Swarthmore (ranked 10th) ranked higher on the list than larger schools.
Studies show that it is easier for a student to be noticed by a graduate school if he or she attends a smaller-sized college.
According to the Journal report, this is also the reason why Pomona had a higher rate of enrollment in Harvard Law School than Duke or Columbia.
The Journal determined the rankings by first selecting 15 "elite" graduate schools, with five schools each from the respective areas of business, law, and medicine. Next, researchers were sent to each of these schools to find out the undergraduate institution each student came from, including 5,000 students in the study.
When the graduate schools did not give lists of their students and the schools they came from, the Wall Street Journal researchers instead relied on the "face-book" directories given to students.
This data was counted and compiled, and rankings were calculated, taking into account various factors such as graduating class size.
In general, graduate and undergraduate schools do not place much value on these rankings of "feeder" schools, and most agree that there are many factors that go into accepting students into graduate programs.
The Wall Street Journal itself acknowledges certain flaws in its study and that this was the first year that the study was done, and the results are far from indisputable.
"It doesn't mean that these rankings don't have a place, but they don't give as full a picture as they should," O'Shea said.
