<p>Probably the most frequently asked question on CC about LACs is whether any of them have strong science programs. Although many threads have discussed which LACs have good science programs, few have discussed which LACs have large percentages of scientists. With the help of some free time and IPEDS, I compiled a list this afternoon. </p>
<p>I included only the top 60 LACs as ranked by USNWR and excluded USMA, USNA, USAFA, and Bard.</p>
<p>Due to the small size and clustering of many LACs, these numbers are only a snapshot from a single year (Class of 2010) and may change a bit from year to year. </p>
<p>I was gonna say Grinnell was looking awful low, but the number looks better when you include all STEM fields. I thought it was over 26% but I suppose that varies from year to year.</p>
Lack of information. Annoyingly, Bard listed all of its students on IPEDS simply as “liberal arts” majors instead of being more specific. </p>
<p>Even more annoying is Bard’s reluctance to post its CDS. It clearly keeps track of majors, since College Board and US News (which draw from the CDS) reveal that 5% of Bard students major in biology, but the full CDS does not seem to be available anywhere. </p>
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I don’t think any figure around 25% is low. There are four broad fields of study for most liberal arts colleges (humanities, social sciences, sciences, arts), so a well-balanced college would have about 25% of its students studying each. (In theory and for diversity, at least. Whether it would be practical for career purposes is another question.)</p>
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Yes, it’s simply a percentage of students majoring in the sciences. I did NOT factor in graduate degrees – for PhD data, posters can do a search for the many posts by interesteddad. </p>
<p>I didn’t include professional school placement data either. Partly because that was not the intent of this investigation, partly because I didn’t have that data easily available, and partly because that would muddy the water since many pre-med applicants are not science majors (~33% according to AAMC).</p>
<p>Very interesting.
warblersrule, what majors did you (or IPEDS) include in STEM? </p>
<p>The Common Data Set “degrees conferred” categories (Section J) include (among others):
computer science
engineering
biological/life sciences
mathematics & statistics
physical sciences</p>
<p>(Geology and chemistry are not broken out; I assume they are included in “physical sciences”. ) </p>
<p>According to the 2011-12 CDS files, the majors in just the above 5 areas add up to ~14% of Middlebury majors and ~33% of Carleton majors. This is a much wider spread than you get for your 4 “natural sciences” majors (20.6% for Midd v. 25.4% for Carleton). </p>
<p>I don’t know which is the right set of “science” majors to compare … but clearly it makes a difference how you aggregate them. I suppose the appropriate set depends on your purposes. Some people might prefer to zero in on specific majors.</p>
STEM included any field related to the sciences – biology, computer science, engineering, math, and the physical sciences (astronomy, chemistry, geology, physics) were the main ones, with some colleges also having environmental science/studies. A few colleges also had interdisciplinary majors that I counted (e.g. joint math and computer science). </p>
<p>As for the discrepancies, I suspect it is because the CDS counts double majors, whereas my list above is for a student’s primary major only. For most students, a second major is far more likely to be in the humanities or social sciences than in the sciences. It’s not quite fair to have one student majoring in biology and another majoring in English and African-American studies and deduce that 33% of students are majoring in biology, as the CDS would suggest. Unfortunately, this works both ways (i.e. the English major could have a second major in biology), so neither method is terribly ideal.</p>
Not necessarily, though the primary major is often the major declared first. Most colleges require a student to designate a primary major. At my alma mater, for example, one of your majors was considered the dominant one. Your advisor who approved you for registration was in that department, that department determined your academic dean, diplomas were distributed at graduation in that department, etc. Which major was selected as the primary one depended on the student’s interests - a double major in philosophy and econ would likely pick econ if Wall Street was his goal and philosophy if PhD programs in philosophy was his goal. I suspect, though of course have no way of proving, that students are much more likely to designate STEM fields as their primary major, since students rarely major in the sciences for “fun,” given the extensive pre-reqs and potential damage to GPAs. (This was certainly the case for me and all of the other science and humanities double majors I’ve known.)</p>
<p>Usually the only automatic determination of primary/secondary major occurs when a student wants to major outside his college within an institution. An engineering major in a college of engineering wanting to pick up a major in econ in the college of A&S, for example. The other exception is a major that can only be taken as a secondary major (e.g. South Asian Studies at Yale, Canadian Studies at Duke, Policy Studies at Rice, etc.).</p>
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