Another supposedly objective criterion that Posselt found to be influential during the screening process, especially with
elite graduate departments, is the standing of an applicant's undergraduate school.
Drawing on annual reports from one
elite department — the biology
department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Liu was formerly a
graduate student — Liu and Conti put together a dataset of 119 PIs and 5694 laboratory members from 1966 to 2000.