Amherst vs. Georgetown SFS vs. UMich

tk21769
Sun, 26 Apr 2015 00:47:03 +0000

What kind of graduate/professional program do you think you’d want to attend?
In a strong PhD program, your tuition and living costs should be fully funded by the university.
An MA/MS/MBA program may be covered (in whole or in part) by an employer.
For law school, you (or your family) probably would be covering the entire cost.

Amherst’s small size seems to cover that, but they don’t seem to send many people outside of med/law to graduate school.

According to the numbers I’m seeing on webcaspar (National Science Foundation data) and IPEDS (National Center for Education Statistics), Amherst alumni earn more PhDs per capita in economics and political science than Georgetown or Michigan alumni do. I’m not too confident of the exact numbers (due to the judgement calls one must make in counting alumni). However, the spread appears to be big enough, and consistent enough with other data I’ve seen, that I would expect Amherst to be quite competitive with Georgetown or Michigan with respect to social science PhD production. Selective LACs generally out-perform state flagships in alumni PhDs earned per capita.
http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html (see “other social sciences” column, with Amherst at #9).

What’s the annual out-of-pocket price difference between Amherst and Michigan?
Would you need to borrow more per year than the federal student loan maximums ($5500-$7500/year) to make Amherst work? If so, go to Michigan. If not, then seriously consider Amherst (especially if you don’t need to save money for law school or other professional degree.)