Bates is included in a new Wall Street Journal ranking of 50 colleges and universities that "send the most students to elite grad schools."

In the Sept. 26 story "Want to Go to Harvard Law?" correspondent Elizabeth Bernstein noted that graduate school officials told the Wall Street Journal that, along with the Ivy League schools, the "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."

Bates placed 40th in the list of so-called feeder schools, between CBB peers Bowdoin (19) and Colby (46). Topping the list were Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

In its ranking, the Journal considered graduate schools in medicine, business and law. The selected medical schools were Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UC-San Francisco and Yale. The business schools were Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School, Harvard, MIT’s Sloan School and Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The law schools were Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan and Yale.

The Wall Street Journal said its ranking compared the total number of a college's 2003 graduates with the number attending the 15 graduate programs this fall. Of the 417 Bates graduates in May 2003, eight are attending the selected graduate schools.