Better rates of grad school attendance from small LACs than an Ivy?

[Already?]

I think I read this somewhere--that per capita, the small LACs send more students to grad schools than the Ivy League schools -- but now that I am looking for the stats I cannot find them (through Google anyway).

Does anyone know if this is actually true? If so, could you point me in the direction of the data?

[mikenthemaddog66]

Makes sense, more people from Ivys can get jobs right out of college. Better networking/recruiting.

[danas]

For careers in academia (PhDs), this can be true.
The Harvards and Princetons of the world graduate many who continue their educations in medicine, law and business as well as as get PhDs.

[metermaid]

These might help a bit--they lists all schools although they are from the Reed College Website:

UNDERGRADUATE ORIGINS OF PH.D.s:

PERCENTAGE RANKING OF PH.D.S, ALL DISCIPLINES, CONFERRED UPON GRADUATES OF LISTED INSTITUTIONS
REED COLLEGE PHD HISTORICAL RANK

PERCENTAGE RANKING OF PH.D.S, BY ACADEMIC FIELD, CONFERRED UPON GRADUATES OF LISTED INSTITUTIONS
REED COLLEGE PHD PRODUCTIVITY

PERCENTAGE RANKING OF FEMALE PH.D.S, BY ACADEMIC FIELD, CONFERRED UPON GRADUATES OF LISTED INSTITUTIONS
REED COLLEGE FEMALE PHD PRODUCTIVITY

Hope this helps.

[paying3tuitions]

Try this article from Inside Higher Education, as well as the links within it to graphs and stats:

A Brief History of American Ph.D.'s :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs

[interesteddad]

Here is the list of top 100 per capita PhD producers for a recent ten year period. The small colleges and larger universities are so thoroughly mixed throughout the list that I think it would be difficult to support any kind of "couldn't get a job, otherwise" hypothesis.

To make this list, it helps if a school has a high percentage of students majoring in sciences (see Caltech, Mudd, MIT, etc.). It is very difficult to make the top echelons of this list without strong science PhD production. It also helps if a school is sending students to PhD programs across the full range of departments and fields.

I personally believe that there are three reasons that small LACs are over-represented at the top of this chart.

a) LACs tend to attract the subset of all college-bound students who are most engaged academically, i.e. choosing a college for close interaction with professors and giving up brand-name recognition to do so. All schools have these students. These are bulk of the future PhDs. The LACs just concentrate them a bit more due purely to self-selection. Nobody chooses an LAC because the football team won a bowl game or because the neighbors have heard of it.

b) LACs indeed offer an environment of active engaged learning with interaction with professors. All schools do for some students, the nature of LACS simply extends this a bit deeper into the student body, so an "average" student of the sort who may be invisible in the crowd at a larger university may be sparked intellectually by a professor's mentorship.

c) LAC student pools are not "diluted" by vocational schools (i.e. nursing, agriculture, etc.) that send few if any students to PhD programs. This is just a numbers game; a higher percentage of LAC students are theoretically PhD candidates. However, these numbers do speak to the environment in their own way. LACs are like the "arts and sciences" honors college of a comparable university.

Percentage of graduates getting a PhD

PhDs and Doctoral Degrees:
ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database

Number of Undergraduates:
ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database
Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period. Includes all NSF doctoral degrees inc. PhD, Divinity, etc., but not M.D. or Law.

1	35.8%	California Institute of Technology
2	24.7%	Harvey Mudd College
3	21.1%	Swarthmore College
4	19.9%	Reed College
5	18.3%	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6	16.8%	Carleton College
7	15.8%	Bryn Mawr College
8	15.7%	Oberlin College
9	15.3%	University of Chicago
10	14.5%	Yale University
11	14.3%	Princeton University
12	14.3%	Harvard University
13	14.1%	Grinnell College
14	13.8%	Haverford College
15	13.8%	Pomona College
16	13.1%	Rice University
17	12.7%	Williams College
18	12.4%	Amherst College
19	11.4%	Stanford University
20	11.3%	Kalamazoo College
21	11.0%	Wesleyan University
22	10.6%	St John's College (both campus)
23	10.6%	Brown University
24	10.4%	Wellesley College
25	10.0%	Earlham College
26	9.6%	Beloit College
27	9.5%	Lawrence University
28	9.3%	Macalester College
29	9.0%	Cornell University, All Campuses
30	9.0%	Bowdoin College
31	8.9%	Mount Holyoke College
32	8.9%	Smith College
33	8.8%	Vassar College
34	8.7%	Case Western Reserve University
35	8.7%	Johns Hopkins University
36	8.7%	St Olaf College
37	8.7%	Hendrix College
38	8.6%	Hampshire College
39	8.5%	Trinity University
40	8.5%	Knox College
41	8.5%	Duke University
42	8.4%	Occidental College
43	8.3%	University of Rochester
44	8.3%	College of Wooster
45	8.3%	Barnard College
46	8.2%	Bennington College
47	8.1%	Columbia University in the City of New York
48	8.0%	Whitman College
49	7.9%	University of California-Berkeley
50	7.9%	College of William and Mary
51	7.8%	Carnegie Mellon University
52	7.8%	New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
53	7.7%	Brandeis University
54	7.6%	Dartmouth College
55	7.5%	Wabash College
56	7.5%	Bates College
57	7.5%	Davidson College
58	7.2%	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
59	7.2%	Franklin and Marshall College
60	7.1%	Fisk University
61	7.1%	Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL)
62	6.8%	University of California-San Francisco
63	6.8%	Allegheny College
64	6.6%	Furman University
65	6.5%	University of Pennsylvania
66	6.5%	Washington University
67	6.5%	Bard College
68	6.4%	Northwestern Univ
69	6.4%	Rhodes College
70	6.3%	Agnes Scott College
71	6.3%	Spelman College
72	6.2%	Antioch University, All Campuses
73	6.2%	Kenyon College
74	6.2%	University of Dallas
75	6.1%	Ripon College
76	6.1%	Colorado College
77	6.1%	Bethel College (North Newton, KS)
78	6.0%	Hamilton College
79	6.0%	Goshen College
80	6.0%	Middlebury College
81	6.0%	Erskine College
82	5.9%	University of the South
83	5.8%	University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
84	5.8%	Drew University
85	5.8%	Wake Forest University
86	5.8%	Tougaloo College
87	5.8%	Goucher College
88	5.7%	Chatham College
89	5.7%	Cooper Union
90	5.7%	Alfred University, Main Campus
91	5.7%	Tufts University
92	5.6%	University of California-Santa Cruz
93	5.6%	Colgate University
94	5.5%	Colby College
95	5.4%	Bucknell University
96	5.4%	Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
97	5.4%	Concordia Teachers College
98	5.4%	University of Virginia, Main Campus
99	5.3%	Sarah Lawrence College
100	5.3%	Southwestern University

[JHS]

I like interesteddad's analysis a lot. I think there is another factor, too, that came into play in my case and that of several academically inclined friends: If you spend your undergraduate career in a university, you have a much better sense of what being a graduate student or a recent PhD entails than if you go to a liberal arts college. In my experience, that does not exactly encourage going to graduate school. (Note that my university is one of the top percentage PhD producers on the foregoing list. I'm trying to explain why a somewhat smaller percentage of its alumni obtain PhDs compared to very similar students at Swarthmore or Reed, not why no one goes to graduate school, since that's not the case.)

[slipper1234]

I'd actually say the Ivies encourage going into professional school, areas like politics or media, or into a business area while at LACs getting a PhD is a mark of honor. Its a cultural difference. I visited a friend at Swarthmore during my senior year and I was shocked to see how many students wanted to get a PhD. I felt that at both Columbia and Dartmouth this was a far less travelled route.

[JHS]

As the chart shows, at Columbia and Dartmouth (and Penn) it IS a far less travelled route. The difference between Swarthmore and some other comparable universities is much less striking. I think this has more to do with Columbia and Dartmouth (and Penn) than with "Ivies".

[mini]

ID's point A (self-selection bias) pretty much overwhelms all the others.

The OP's question was about grad schools. The terminal working degrees in grad school for social work, engineering, architecture, and education (where Ph.Ds/Ed.d's are possible, but are almost always for academic careers) are not Ph.D.s

The Ph.D. story is basically about future academics (or taxi drivers ), but not about grad school attendance.

[interesteddad]

I think this has more to do with Columbia and Dartmouth (and Penn) than with "Ivies".

Correct. Certainly Yale, Princeton, and Harvard are future PhD factories based on the statistics.

[interesteddad]

The Ph.D. story is basically about future academics (or taxi drivers ), but not about grad school attendance.

I thought you had to go to grad school to get a Ph.D.

[marite]

I think Mini's point was that for certain professions, one has to go to "grad school" to obtain the professional degree but not grad school in the narrow sense of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Namely, Law School, Medical School, School of Architecture, etc... which confer post-graduate degrees but not Ph.D.s

Given that HYP have pretty much the same proportion of graduates going on to Ph.D.s as some top LACs and research universities such as Chicago (famous for its intellectualism), it would be interesting to know what the 85% or so at HYP and other colleges/universities in the same range who do not go on to Ph.D. do after getting their B.A.s

[ellemenope]

Most likely professional degrees--JD, MBA, MD, DDS--or just working with the BA.

[mini]

"I thought you had to go to grad school to get a Ph.D."

Yes, but a very, very large number of students go to grad school (and not only professional schools) and do not intend to get a Ph.D., which is the terminal degree of academics, but not for engineering, architecture, social work, nursing, public health, or education, except for those who intend to become academics.

So the Ph.D. measurement measures those who intended to become academics, NOT those who go to grad school. If you want a measure of grad school attendance (without the professional schools), you have to add all those in; if you want to a total measure, then you have to add in the professional schools.

Not that I think it really means a lot - most of this has to do with self-selection bias anyway.