psychology undergrad schools

bclintonk
Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:08:44 +0000

^^ I’d want to know not only how many grads got Ph.D.s, but where they got their Ph.D.s. There are an awful lot of underemployed humanities and social science Ph.D.s out there, most of the, I’d wager, coming out of second- and third- and fourth-tier graduate programs. I’d look for a school that was sending its grads to top Ph.D. programs. I have no doubt that Harvey Mudd, Swarthmore, Carleton, and Bryn Mawr grads are by and large getting into the top programs. I’d be a little more careful about LACs further down the list, however.

And by the way, Vossron, I don’t think your second list completely eliminates the “major” bias. Universities with large numbers of undergrads in business, nursing, education, and other undergrad pre-professional programs are almost always going to have fewer Ph.Ds per thousand grads, simply because the vast majority of undergrads in those programs are in college for professional training that will lead to professional employment upon completion of their undergrad studies and have no interest in ever pursuing Ph.D.s. And even in the arts and sciences, many may be in conventional arts and sciences majors but essentially planning a pre=professional path. (For example, back in my day I knew quite a few undergrad psych majors who planned for day one to end up in medical school). That has absolutely no bearing on how successful undergrad psych majors at those institutions are in pursuing Ph.Ds if that’s what they choose to do.

That said, I would note that my initial contribution to this thread was to suggest that especially in a popular field like psych, a strong LAC with a strong psych department might be in important ways preferable to a mega psych department for undergraduate work. I stand by that statement. But there’s no need to hijack that into a general “LACs are always better” claim. That’s something I don’t subscribe to, in large part because the limited curricular offerings at LACs mean that some fields simply will not be available to LAC students at all, and others will be available only in an extremely limited form. There are real trade-offs here, and I just wish people on both sides of the LAC-versus-research university debate would get real and admit it.