<p>papercuts,</p>
<p>Most of those statistics are poorly collected and usually not very telling when universities are so similar in terms of academic quality. I wouldn’t worry about that as much as I’d worry about fit.</p>
<p>ucchris,</p>
<p>How many “average” undergrads are going to even get to touch cutting edge research? How many of them will even get to step foot in the top research organizations? Most people couldn’t care less what Salk is doing at any particular moment, and who can blame them? Undergrads aren’t cutting edge scientists. They’re undergrads. They don’t need groundbreaking research. They need someone to explain to them how things work at the rudimentary level. This is why LACs are so great, and why even in the hard and biological sciences, kick research universities’ butts in terms of PhD program placement.</p>