Prestige versus Cost

[sally305]

I agree with that. But even if hiring managers "preferred" students from top-tier universities, there are only so many of them per year in every field. And more and more students from a wider range of institutions are supplementing their degrees with internships, research and other experiences that boost their resumes even by the time they finish undergrad.

[b@r!um]

b@r!um, your discussion flies in the face of what limited data I've seen on Mathematics PhD production.

I don't see a contradiction there. Bryn Mawr has a high PhD productivity rate in math, for example. Most Bryn Mawr math majors go to "average" PhD programs though. (And "average" means that you can pretty much kiss goodbye to a research career.)

[qialah]

This is the advice Swarthmore gives to math majors:

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/...GradSchool.pdf

The bad news: Getting into math grad school is a lot harder than getting into college. Example: This year NYU-Courant (an excellent but not top-ranked place except in applied math) had 330 applications for 8 spots. Of course, they admitted more than 8, but you get the idea. The top programs admit at most 5% of applicants. Swarthmore admits around 20%.

Furthermore, most of the things that counted big in getting admitted to Swarthmore – your breadth of interests and activities – count for nothing in grad school admissions. All that counts is your potential to do math research. Not even a broad interest in the variety of roles within the mathematics community, and in the roles of mathematics in the broader community, count (alas). Next, you are up against top foreign students from everywhere in the world (and some US university students) who have done nothing but math as an undergraduate and are well into graduate courses already and may know exactly what they want to do research in. Often half the admitted students are foreign students.

Finally, although there are grads of liberal arts colleges on the faculty of leading research departments (including our own Arthur Mattuck at MIT, Peter May at Chicago, and David Bayer at Columbia), many faculty, especially foreigners, just don’t know anything
about liberal arts colleges and think they couldn’t possibly be good.

Does this mean you should give up? Of course not. It does mean you have an uphill fight to get into the best places, and that you will have to apply to a variety of places to ensure an acceptance with funding. This email is about how to optimize your chances.

It certainly sounds to me like b@rium is correct. If you want a research career, a LAC is not the place to go, and it sounds like the type of person who wants to do research isn't going to apply to a LAC anyway. On the other hand not every mathematician wants to do research, and there are surely ways for brilliant math minds to shine in other mathematical careers.

[Ghostt]

To answer the question of what graduate schools LAC graduates with degrees in math end up at, I looked up the math majors who graduated from my own school--one of the LACs tk21769 mentioned on the previous page--between 2005 and 2011 (2012 data is still unavailable), and it seems they are going/went to graduate school at NYU (2), University of Colorado - Boulder, University of Washington (2), UChicago (5), Harvard, Imperial College London, University of Oregon (2), University of Iowa, Boston University, Portland State University (2), UCLA, Stanford (2), UCD, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, and Berkeley. (I tried to filter out the people who're attending grad school in other fields.)

I don't know what that means in the context of your discussion, but I hope it is a useful piece of information.

/procrastinating

[b@r!um]

You are attending Reed, right? Are you sure that those people are all pursing PhDs in mathematics? According to NSF data, Reed has "only" produced 18 PhDs in the general math and statistics area in the most recent 5 years. I know that we are talking about different time ranges and that not everyone who starts a PhD finishes a PhD, but that makes it highly unlikely that 25 Reed graduates started a PhD in mathematics alone (not even counting statistics or mathematical finance or various flavors of applied math) in the last 6 years.

[Ghostt]

These are all graduate students in mathematics, statistics and applied mathematics (no finance or business). I don't have the time to look through the alumni database again, but iirc around 3 of the people I included have already completed their PhDs. The rest are current graduate students.

I also think we're talking about different time ranges and criteria. I looked up people who graduated from Reed between 2005 and 2011 and are currently graduate students in math (or assistant professors/postdocs). The results of such a query will likely be different from the number of Reed graduates who have received PhDs in math between 2007 and 2012, due to fluctuations in class size, the popularity of the major, the scholarly ambition of the two different sets of cohorts, etc.

[b@r!um]

These are all graduate students in mathematics, statistics and applied mathematics

My point. I was not making any claims about statistics or applied math, just "mathematics" (aka pure math).

[tk21769]

This discussion may be creating an impression that attending a LAC is a risky choice for anyone interested in an academic career. b@r!um's personal observations, and Swarthmore's advice to math majors (above), are certainly worth noting if you do plan to get a graduate degree in pure math. Note, however, that for the arts and sciences in general, LACs have a strong record for PhD completions per capita.

The OP did not even indicate an intent to major in Math ("He will most likely double major in English and something else.") At Swarthmore, less than 5% of graduating seniors between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011 majored in Math. At Williams (another LAC with a good reputation for Math), it was 7.7%.

LACs account for disproportionately many of the top 10 and top 20 colleges for PhD production in many arts & science fields. When this is mentioned in CC threads, it is sometimes suggested that this could be because LAC graduates are attending weak PhD programs. I have never seen any good data to substantiate such a suggestion. b@r!um's observations about pure math, and the Swarthmore advice above, are about the closest I've seen even to strong anecdotal evidence of an issue within a specific field.

What constitutes a strong v. weak program? How strong does strong need to be to get people where they want to go? Pure mathematics is a rather rarefied world. What about, say, anthropology (in which 8 of the top 10 schools for per capita PhD production are LACs)? Are graduates from Bryn Mawr, Beloit and Grinnell (the top 3 schools for anthro PhD production) shut out of graduate programs at Chicago, Harvard, Penn, or Michigan?

[b@r!um]

^ My contribution was not directed to the OP. It was directed to those posters who claimed that an individual's options are only limited by the individual and not by the origin of their degrees. Math may be more extreme than most fields but I'm willing to bet that in every field there are degrees that will open more doors than others. Those "closed doors" may not matter to many, but pretending that it doesn't matter where a degree comes from is plain foolish.

All I am advocating for is an open-minded exploration of the consequences of one's college choices.

[eireann]

Can't speak for Catria, but I do think a "better" education may help a high school teacher. My own father was a high school teacher for 35 years. He had also completed all but the dissertation stage of a PhD program, and he would certainly have said that his students benefited from his range of knowledge and experience.

The best English teacher I ever had was in a similar position. He was definitely overqualified to be a high school English teacher, but it was what he wanted to be doing. And I think that was the only English class in high school where I stretched and grew as a writer.

There are a lot of mediocre high school teachers.

[sally305]

A bit more on tk21769's point: absolutely, LACs are top producers of graduates who go on to PhD programs in many fields. Another thing I have observed is that the faculty students get to work with in their undergraduate major often themselves come from top PhD programs, and thus steer their students toward them (in other words, they might recommend a graduating student to their own advisor in their PhD program).

At my son's LAC (in what most would consider the "second tier"), the English faculty come from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and UNC, among others--some of the best programs in the country. Perhaps the OP's son can find a similar school close to home in Ohio that offers better academics than Cumberlands but that is not as pricey as Kenyon--perhaps using his good stats and accomplishments to get some nice merit aid. This was the path we took and so far it has been working out wonderfully.

[MichiganGeorgia]

OP- Your son has a good ACT score (31) right now. I assume he will be able to raise it when he takes it again. There is merit aid for 31 ACT's if he can get it to a 33/34 he will be in line for even more merit aid at a number of schools. Perhaps more than he could get on a track scholarship,

[frazzled2thecore]

That's what I was wondering, as well. Frazzled kids enjoy sports but were never good enough to get into a school on a coach's recommendation, let alone get an athletic scholarship. Amazing how much money they got at some pretty decent schools for test scores plus GPA, though. And this was just looking at merit money - OP' s S might qualify for need-based as well.

Had lots of peers thinking they were going to go to college for free (and their parents)scratching their heads. At our high school there seems to be lots more prestige attached to being an athletic recruit than getting into a top school or getting scholarship money on the basis of academic merit. Perhaps because athletic recruits get special treatment when they go on college visits and sometimes get to live in special dorms once on campus?

OTOH, I am wondering if OP's S would be content to go to a school where he could get a fabulous education but would not be good enough for the school team and would be relegated to club sports.

[SteveMA]

DD's merit award is 4 times as much as her athletic award, so far. That is just automatic merit, competitive awards TBD yet.

[MichiganGeorgia]

Yes, I think the automatic merit aid is awesome. I didn't realise until my son got his scores back and I started checking for merit aid that along with a high gpa there were a number of schools that were now options that wouldn't have been before. Also with a good ACT some colleges automatically put them in Honors which can make a big university seem smaller.