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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My child is a junior and I'm wondering how much your undergrad school matters if you are planning to go on to get a Ph.D.  - If so, what  specifically does matter in college selection? [/quote]

GPA extremely important. Plus prior research experience.

So, a top (4.0) student from U of Oregon will do better than a 3.8 kid from Harvard. Top SLACs will have faculty more involved with their students, more research opportunities, mentoring etc. All of which helps too.[/quote]

I think this depends.  I'm a prof at a R1 that is highly regarded in my field in STEM. We have a hard min of 3.0 GPA and a soft min of 3.5 for PhD admissions (meaning if you're below a 3.5 we need to understand why and it needs to be offset by other factors).  But over 3.5, we're looking at the quality of the undergrad institution and what we know about past students coming from there in terms of preparation.  One thing about SLACs is that we usually don't have a lot of students applying from the same school in a given year so they are less in competition with each other.  
GRE is more of an "are there any alarm bells here" from low scores than valuing the highest scores--though very high scores are attractive.  But middling scores don't really help or hurt your chances much.

Research experience is critical--so do the 'optional' capstone project and try to get involved in faculty research.  It's so common now that if someone doesn't have it we want to know why.  LoRs from undergrad faculty are very important also.  Fit with faculty research interests matters a lot so it's best to identify several faculty at a school that are doing work of interest to you than just choose a particular program based on reputation.  At many programs it's the faculty who advocate for candidates who meet all the threshold criteria as it's often the faculty who generate the lines of PhD funding through their grants.[/quote]

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