<p>And, relative to Caltech, Berkeley also has more students who do want a PhD, but just aren’t good enough to get into a PhD program, or if they are, aren’t good enough to complete it. Not everybody who wants a PhD will get one.</p>
<p>In fairness, part of this has to do with funding. A lot of Berkeley students are interested in fields such as the humanities and some social sciences where PhD funding tends to be relatively scarce. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of Caltech students are majoring in fields where PhD funding is relatively plentiful.</p>
<p>Uh, I think that statement of mine that you quoted is a defense of Berkeley’s. It (partially) explains why not as many Berkeley undergrads go on to receive PhD’s compared to Caltech undergrads, because the PhD funding of the humanities/soc-sciences is not as good as in the technical fields. But that’s not the fault of the Berkeley undergrads, nor is it specific to Berkeley undergrads. It’s just a general truism that applies to everybody.</p>
<p>If I just wanted to bash Berkeley, I wouldn’t have bothered to include that paragraph you quoted at all.</p>
<p>Including the context “And, relative to Caltech, Berkeley also has …” and considering the 36% vs. 8% relative percentages, it makes sense, especially considering that Berkeley’s undergrad classes are larger.</p>
<p>Thanks for coming to such a ringing one-word defense of the OP/Interesteddad (#63). (I guess, though, that you must have missed my characterization of the post you quoted at length as partly “facetious” and written with the intent to be “provocative.” [#58])</p>
<p>In any event, I’ve gotta tell you, after reading a few of your prior posts - one of which proclaims (surprise!) Swarthmore and Reed two of the top three LACs - I’m beginning to wonder whether you, like the OP, are simply another of Interesteddad’s alter egos. </p>
<p>Could we replace the ad hominen attacks with discussion on the issue?</p>
<p>EG sums it nicely: Students who are more likely to want doctorate degrees are attracted to certain types of campus environments. Some colleges and universities offer experiences that are highly gratifying to such students.</p>
<p>These are basically people who like school. They like the academic way of approaching academic questions. They like reading dense material and writing complex works. They like open-ended assignments and working at the edge of established knowledge. In general, they do not like multiple choice tests (boring). With a supportive professor, it is possible to teach even introductory courses this way. But it is difficult to do it in a large lecture format. It can be torture to try to teach this way without a student body that supports this approach.</p>
<p>The predoctoral undergrads are much more likely to ask “is it interesting?” than “is it useful?”, and they are quite unlikely to ask “Can I get paid for this?” In this way, they are very different from a typical kid headed for professional school, who tends to be much more pragmatic, more concerned about outcomes than processes. Such kids are more likely to ask "what is the answer? -as if these could be only one answer- than “how do I analyze this sort of problem”</p>
<p>When these colleges also enroll very talented kids, then the combination of the orientation of the people who enter and the education they receive yields a large proportion of people who go on to doctorate degrees.</p>
<p>It is probably an indicator of educational quality in the sense that it would be extremely difficult to get a PhD after a poor undergrad education. However, there are lots of people who get great undergrad educations who do not go on to get PhDs. This includes most people who graduate from Caltech, Swarthmore, etc.</p>
<p>This topic generates a lot of complaints from people who have in their minds a fixed list of “top” colleges, based on whatever criteria, and reject vehemently any suggestion that their list may not be perfect. Why they care is another question. If there is some measure by which a college not on their list does well, that measure must be wrong, and the person who proposed it must be attacked. The logic of this approach eludes me, but it is popular. Who cares about the identity of a poster on this board?</p>
<p>I support Afan’s post. When a HS student chooses to attend Caltech, he/she knows that there is a demanding set of CORE classes, including 5 terms of physics, and also at least one humanities or social science class each term. They know that their AP classes won’t be included for credit. They also know that there will be research opportunities from freshman year on. Only a few HS students would want this school. I believe the students have the kind of personalities that make them viable candidates for PhD programs. They more they learn of a subject, the more curious they become.</p>
<p>By the way, my Caltech student is not going to be 1 of the 36% to on to PhD program, at least not for the next few years. I have heard student presentations, and I hope these kids are able to pursue their studies.</p>
<p>What you mention is certainly what all the LACs with high rankings in Ph.D. production will tell you. But I don’t completely buy it. One reason I don’t buy it is that many students who graduate from research universities in X discipline have already gone farther, as undergraduates, in X discipline and thus end up getting lucrative job offers in X discipline. Once they go into the world outside college, they don’t stop learning, but they do stop being counted in Ph.D. production statistics. As earlier replies have noted, Ph.D. production statistics tend to favor colleges whose undergraduate degree holders have limited prospects for employment outside academia, which I do NOT take as a proxy for undergraduate academic quality.</p>
<p>If this is directed at me (and I’m not sure that it is, but it seems that it may be), it’s off the mark. Not only do I not have any “fixed list of ‘top’ colleges” in mind; as I’ve often indicated in other posts, I think that the whole notion that there exists, by any meaningful set of criteria, some determinable set of “top colleges” is utterly absurdly (which is, in part, why I found the OP’s position so preposterous in the first place).</p>
<p>Well, this hardly describes the graduates of Caltech, MIT, and Harvey Mudd, which usually lead the lists of percent of undergrads who get PhDs.</p>
<p>Many PhD holders pursue careers that require doctoral degrees. So an undergrad coming out of a top university, no matter how far she may have gone on the way to her BA, is not going to get a faculty job at that or any other university. She is not going to get a job leading a research group in industry. If she could be hired by a think tank at all, it would be as an intern, not as a scholar. She might get hired by a hedge fund, but the people designing trading strategies would be expected to have far more knowledge than even a very well educated grad of a top university. Maybe she could work her way up to being a trader, but she would have very little chance of becoming a quant. Now you may say “traders can make as much money, or more, as quants”. Apparently true. But the people getting PhD’s might not want jobs as traders.</p>
<p>Many people who get PhD’s are not looking at their education as a route to a higher paying job. It may work out that way, particularly in some of the fields noted above. Many of them could certainly make more money by going to professional school instead. But they are often pursuing the PhD because they want to know more about the subject.</p>
<p>Hi, afan, I agree that there are students who enter undergraduate institutions of higher learning desiring to become Ph.D.s, and others who develop that desire after they’ve studied for a while. But of course the counterexamples you give to respond to my general statement are two research universities and one polytechnic. In other words, perhaps you and I agree that Ph.D. production as such is not a reason to guess that Liberal Arts College Y is better than Research University X.</p>
<p>token, carefully reading what you quoted and that you don’t buy it: Do you really think that, considering the high percentage of students who attain PhDs in physics who studied at CalTech, doesn’t that imply that CalTech produces qualified students of physics who are serious and, therefore, CalTech probably has good teachers of physics? This makes complete sense to me. Make any other substitutions and it still makes sense.</p>
<p>I think the OP’s original thrust, back when the thread started, was to find some close-enough-for-goverment work numerical criterion for judging colleges. I think the criterion has some degree of plausibility, along the lines of what you mention, vossron, but it’s NOT close enough for government work when comparing College A with a strong academic program and many students who go directly into occupations (or into professional schools) to College B with also a strong academic program but many more students who aspire to gain Ph.D. degrees. </p>
<p>But because the OP asked a question about rating colleges on numerical data, I would mention to him a rating that includes the criterion he proposes and more. </p>
<p>Like all other attempts at rating colleges, it is debatable. Just like the U.S. News and World Report ratings, it exhaustively considers liberal arts colleges and research universities. It considers Ph.D. production as an important criterion.</p>
That’s not how I read it. I read it as looking for a measure of academic quality, a subset of various criteria for judging colleges. Few objective numerical measures are available to measure academic quality, and the OP found this one. Don’t we agree that earning a PhD is mainly an academic endeavor, etc., etc. Maybe we don’t agree! :)</p>
<p>Actually, a lot of research shows that what distinguishes people who gain Ph.D.s from people who don’t, even more than academic ability, is family income. </p>
<p>As for which colleges offer the strong academic programs that best prepare people to excel as Ph.D.s, it might be a good idea to look at the colleges attended by the participants in the Study of Exceptional Talent. </p>
<p>A good metric is 25th percentile SAT score. While imperfect, it shows the “quality” of the weakest students in the classroom, who unfortunately will set the pace as to the rigor and intellectual level of the class.</p>