<p>The top 50 research universities in the US according to the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index are listed [here](<a href=“http://academicanalytics.org/TopWholeSchool2006-07.html”>http://academicanalytics.org/TopWholeSchool2006-07.html</a>).</p>
<p>From a student website
"PhD programs in Business Administration</p>
<p>The problem with PhD programs is that information about them is hardly available. The only reliable sources are respective program’s websites and of course this site. Another place you can check out is a web site of my friend: Pranab Majumder. Your best bet is to communicate with other PhD applicants on one of the discussion boards mentioned above. Also, invest some time to visit web sites of the top PhD programs and read through catalogs and other materials that are available there. I do not mind answering some occasional questions by PhD applicants so drop me a note. Here is the list of several top PhD programs in no particular order:</p>
<p>My former school, University of Rochester, Simon School of Business has the most comprehensive web site with downloadable application and catalog.
New-York University, Stern School of Business
Stanford University, Graduate school of Business
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon University, Graduate School of Industrial Administration
Columbia Business School
Harvard Business School Warning: Harvard Business School administers both a PhD program and a DBA program (Doctor of Business Administration) which are very different.
Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Business.
Chicago University Very comprehensive site with admission statistics."</p>
<p>Phd rankings are useful in deciphering the ‘personality’ of the student body at schools. The ones ranking higher are commonly touted as more intellectual. I highly doubt that the colleges in question are responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, they have cultivated a certain appeal and reputation, to which their students are suited. </p>
<p>I’d expect that the students at these schools would be the most knowledgeable, because they are more intellectual, not so much because of the school. In general, there is way too much credit given to institutions in regards to results, the output, the student when he comes out. People don’t look enough at the inputs, at the kids coming in.</p>
<p>Like someone else said, SAT scores are probably the best raw measure of quality. Though say, the quality of being intellectual is more frequent among the more intelligent, it is by no means guaranteed. So schools of roughly equal SAT score/avg. intelligence can vary greatly in this dimension, or a number of others.</p>
<p>In regards to size, just thinking about the sort of person likely to apply for a Phd, I can see them preferring a smaller school. Small and large schools each have a host of associations that will attract and repulse different sorts of students. Small schools are reputed to be more engaging, with smaller class sizes, more active classroom discussions, all attractive traits to one of an intellectual bent. Large schools, on the other hand, have a better social life, bigger classes, more impersonal, often Greek life, etc. So size and the propensity to earn a Phd are not independent factors. You may have multiple, conflicting answers depending on whether you control the other variables or not. </p>
<p>It’s like asking if boys are better than girls at basketball. Girls aren’t, but maybe (for the sake of argument) they would be better if you controlled for height, because height is an advantage and boys are taller. Two answers, both right, but different questions.</p>
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Debating the reasons that Caltech students are more likely to get PhDs is fine. I made no claim as to the why. But that they are more likely to get them is undebatable.
I agree that a major reason for the discrepancies is that students at some colleges (like Caltech) are more likely to want PhDs than students at other colleges (like Berkeley), and that this doesn’t really have a bearing on quality of education in an abstract sense. But it does chance the atmosphere of a college when it has many future academics vs many future professionals, and that different atmosphere may be important to some people.</p>
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Many colleges promote what they view as their best features; in particular, Reed promotes its high future PhD percentages, as in the link at the top of this thread, trying to attract students seeking the highest intellectual and scholarly standards. But they have indeed “cultivated a certain appeal and reputation, to which their students are suited.”</p>
<p>Given the fact that the pursuit of a Ph.D. involves learning more and more about less and less - a “retreat into a specialized and cloistered environment,” [Big</a> Brains, Small Impact - ChronicleReview.com](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i18/18b00501.htm]Big”>http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i18/18b00501.htm) - a strong argument could be made that the most intellectually alive college students - the most curious, creative, and energetic - are likely to wind up anywhere but a Ph.D. program after graduation. If that is so, then perhaps the OP (aka Interesteddad) has it right in one sense and wrong in another. Yes, there’s a correlation between the “quality” of the education provided by a college and its Ph.D. “production” (what an odd, though perhaps unintentionally revealing, metaphor - one that conjures up images of assembly lines, drudges, etc.). But that correlation moves in the opposite direction of what the OP suggests. That is, one indicator of whether a college provides a truly stimulating and enlivening education is how few - not how many - Ph.D.'s they “produce.”</p>
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Wow, cool. The same would then be true for colleges producing master’s degrees, and high schools producing college graduates: The better they are, the fewer they produce!</p>
<p>One might reference the data at: mup.asu.edu/research2006.pdf – the Center for Measuring University Performance. This site provides interesting data on both numbers of doctorates, research dollars, endowment, etc., and the methodology is clearly delineated.</p>
<p>I dunno, I don’t think high PhD productivity means that competition will be more cutthroat than otherwise. Anecdotally, anyway, it seems that competition is stiffest where large numbers of students are aiming for professional programs where you apply right after the baccalaureate. I guess it would depend on field, among other things.</p>
<p>Maybe a contributing factor to high PhD productivity among students who attended quality LAC’s is that while undergrads, they get a pretty up-close and personal look at an intellectual and professional lifestyle that appears appealing. And the view of scholarly life, as seen through the eyes of an LAC undergrad, might be more attractive than that seen through the eyes of an undergrad at a larger place. </p>
<p>I am one of those people who…how was it characterized?–had no motivation except to stay in school, heh. I didn’t become a faculty member, and my aims were determined by a number of factors, but when I was thinking about grad school it was helpful to me that at my dinky undergrad I knew so many professors well, so many of whom who were leading interesting, satisfied lives. I felt like I had a lot of good examples to think about. </p>
<p>My examples might have been more diverse had I been at a big school–I would have known them less well. Perhaps I would have been more likely to run into a professor who didn’t like the part of the job I was seeing (teaching/grading undergrads). Plus I might have seen more of the grad school grind via my TAs. This is speculative, of course, but I wonder if these kind of things might contribute to why some students might choose – or not choose – to pursue a PhD.</p>
<p>Oh here we go again…another thread attempting to rationalize rankings of colleges whose only purpose is to make someone feel better than their neighbor. It is absurd in my humble opinion.</p>
<p>If you like Reed, Stanford, USC, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Georgetown, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Williams, Pomona or …Iowa State. Great. Go there. But go there for your own reasons and not to gloat.</p>
<p>THEN what would we do here?</p>
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<p>Yep, “Berkeley - it’s just BETTER”! :D</p>
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<p>Uh, no. </p>
<p>(This would follow only if the relationship between the educational experiences offered by high school and college were analogous to the relationship between the experiences offered by college and graduate school - which, of course, it isn’t [just ask anyone who’s been in high school, college, and graduate school].)</p>
<p>Sure they are. At each step, students get more specialized. We have majors in college, not in high school. For master’s, we typically study one discipline, but take GE courses as an undergrad. At each step, we learn more and more about less and less, just as you said. :)</p>
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<p>Anyone whose college experience consists simply (or even principally) of this - narrowing and deepening - has in my view missed out on a liberal education altogether.</p>
<p>“And the view of scholarly life, as seen through the eyes of an LAC undergrad, might be more attractive than that seen through the eyes of an undergrad at a larger place.”</p>
<p>There is the large difference in sheer personality between the typical LAC student and university student. I haven’t visited any LACs myself (but I go to Cornell), but multiple people have told me that the kids at LACs are usually more eccentric/weird; in any case, the students of LACs are palpably different from universities. That’s going to have a bearing on everything, propensity to acquire a Phd included, all else equal. Like I said, people tend to attribute far too much to, let’s call it, institutional influence, and not enough to the incoming student’s character.</p>
<p>epistrophy - being a professor is a profession. Since you seem to think that it involves a narrowing of interests in a way that is worse than anything else one could pursue with a college degree (you wrote “a strong argument could be made that the most intellectually alive college students - the most curious, creative, and energetic - are likely to wind up anywhere but a Ph.D. program after graduation”) please describe to me how the other professions students may pursue after graduation don’t involve a narrowing and deepening of knowledge.
Frankly, your descriptions of PhD students and academics are ridiculous and offensive. A PhD is the one advanced degree that people pursue primarily because they are interested in something, rather than out of a desire to make more money. Students who care about learning and care about their academic pursuits in college are invariably more likely to go on to a PhD program, not less. To claim that students at institutions like Caltech, Reed, MIT, Chicago and Yale (5 of the top-10 PhD producing schools according to the list in the OP) are insufficiently “curious, creative, and energetic” is nothing but silly. All of the schools at the top of the list have strong and well-deserved reputations for intellectualism and for having brilliant and talented students. Of course, schools that graduate fewer future PhDs are also full of amazing students, and I’m not trying to imply that PhD production is correlated with some abstract form of academic quality (as suggested by the OP). But your claims about PhDs are blatantly false and can only be made by someone determined to ignore reality. Your only argument to support your claim is that the knowledge acquired in getting a PhD is narrower and deeper than that acquired earlier in one’s education. This is obviously true. But you’ve given no reason to believe that having narrow and deep knowledge is bad, or that this is any more true about PhDs than it is about any other sort of person (in fact, it seems that it should be less true about PhDs; after all, they retain their undergraduate education just as much as anyone else, but add to it in a more specific field).</p>
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<p>Actually, I never said this; of course there are “curious, creative, and energetic” young people who attend these colleges - they’re just not the ones who go on to pursue a Ph.D.</p>
<p>Just kidding! </p>
<p>There are of course brilliant, well educated young people who pursue a Ph.D. - just as there are brilliant, well educated young people who do not.</p>
<p>I was being in part (though not entirely) facetious in order to be provocative, and in an effort, albeit indirectly, to highlight the (in my view) absurdity of the proposition with which the OP (aka Interesteddad, the parent, not so coincidentally, of a student at Ph.D. factory Swarthmore) started this thread - that there exists a correlation between a college’s “Ph.D. production” and its “academic quality.”</p>
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This could be just a matter of semantics; if you consider “academic” and “academia” to be sufficiently related, and “quality” and “level” to be sufficiently related, then a correlation between a college’s “academic level” and later “production into PhD academia” doesn’t seem so absurd. This still says nothing about how good a school is; it just relates a school’s particular feature(s) to a statistical outcome.</p>
<p>vossron:</p>
<p>Well, as to that all I have to say is this: Huh?!?!?</p>