<p>I see no reason to believe that Ph.D. production on the whole is higher at the colleges mentioned than it is at the Honors Colleges of the state universities, the ability of professors to reproduce themselves. Nor any evidence that they are any better at fostering “intellectual discourse”. Might be true, but I haven’t seen any data suggesting it. About all one can say - and even that can’t be shown from available data - is that they are whiter, wealthier, less likely to be first-generation college students, and more likely to come from private schools. These four characteristics in the main might have greater association with professorial reproduction than anything added by the schools themselves. There will of course be differences within the group. </p>
<p>Don’t misread me: I love these schools, went to one myself, and sent my d. to one. I think it is likely that whiter, upper middle class, non-first generation college folks are more likely to appreciate western intellectual discourse, and this is a value that I happen to share. But not only don’t we know what the gauge mean, we don’t even know what the gauge is reading…</p>
<p>I thought all intellectuals were white, wealthier, less likely to be first generation college students, and more likely to come from private schools. I don’t know why we even bother to educate anybody else. :)</p>
<p>Well, without going into my own family history and with obvious risks of overgeneralization, I don’t think most folks appreciate how undesirable a Ph.D./future professor-type is for an “intellectual” coming out of an immigrant, first-generation, or low-income minority community.</p>
<p>Much of my professional work over the past 25 years has been in such communities. When there is a kid “with intellectual potential”, and that potential is encouraged (it sometimes is not), the pecking order for future education/careers would be something like: doctor, minister, lawyer, school teacher, social worker, engineer, journalist, business leader. Ph.D. professor would hardly hit the scales.</p>
<p>Folks would tell you why, too. Doctors, ministers, schoolteachers, social workers, and, to some extent, lawyers and business leaders, are believed to be more likely to be rooted in their communities. It is much more transparent how they are likely to give back to the communities from whence they came. Folks believe they are much less likely to be peripathetic, having to move regularly from place to place. Products are tangible, folks to be aided and assisted are real, and are more likely to “be like them”. And, given that they are more likely to be earning a living more quickly, they are more likely to be able to raise a family earlier. </p>
<p>It would be hard to overestimate how isolating graduate Ph.D. education can be for folks coming from these communities. There are very few people with whom you can meaningfully talk about your studies. You get lots of blank stares. Folks want to know how you are giving back - or even what you are adding to the intellectual life of your community. The Ford Foundation has been studying the failure of colleges to fuel growth in minority Ph.D. production, but a lot of the story is really about college successes in producing intellectuals who choose to go elsewhere.</p>
<p>You are so right! My family produced one lawyer, one doctor, one engineer, one computer scientist…and me. I was the only one whose career choice was questioned. “What would you do with a Ph.D.,” asked “my lawyer brother, you’ll starve.” Well, no, but I have not done as well as he financially.
Among immigrants and minorities, parents push their kids into professions that are deemed safe and well paying, not necessarily intellectually satisfying. Some of the kids go to college, discover some intellectual passion and set themselves up for massive family tensions.</p>
<p>True, but for many, the intellectual life of their community is in no way tied to Ph.Ds. The community context is often so much more vibrant. White, upper middle class Ph.D.s are often just little atoms floating from school-to-school, and place-to-place - if they’re lucky, their “community” gets defined as their workplace, which they joined as complete strangers. Again, not to overgeneralize, but many non-white or immigrant intellectuals look at that as just bizarre (and certainly nothing to be considered desirable)!</p>
<p>Especially if you mentally normalize for lower incoming SAT scores at Occidental and Whitman, the historic PhD data would tell you immediately that all of these schools, for whatever reason, have an strong focus on students who pursue academic/research career paths. </p>
<p>I suspect that reason involves both self-selection in the applicant pool and campus culture issues. For example, one thing I notice is that very few of the schools in the top-50 of the PhD production list are notorious party schools. In fact, the top of the list is heavily weighted towards schools that are often considered to be non-party schools. Coincidence? Chicken? Egg? </p>
<p>Another common characteristic of the top-50 or so is that very few of them place much emphasis on varsity athletics. In fact, most are recognized as being notably non-athletic schools. (Stanford, Duke, Rice, Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin being the exceptions). Coincidence? Chicken? Egg?</p>
<p>On the other hand, among the top per capita PhD producers in the country are schools with very large Asian enrollments – Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Harvard, Swarthmore, Wellesley to name just a few off the top of my head.</p>
<p>To address your other point. I totally agree that getting a PhD in many fields is not a terribly attractive career path. I have never argued otherwise. What I have suggested is that having a signficantly large percentage of an undergrad student body deeply immersed in their coursework, academic-type research, relationships with professors, etc. may be positive attribute for a college or university. At the very least, it beats spending $40,000 a year to play beer pong.</p>
<p>“What I have suggested is that having a signficantly large percentage of an undergrad student body deeply immersed in their coursework, academic-type research, relationships with professors, etc. may be positive attribute for a college or university. At the very least, it beats spending $40,000 a year to play beer pong.”</p>
<p>No disagreement from me. Hey, I sent one d. to one. (The other won’t even hear of it - inferior institutions, no Div I Gymnastics!) Whether worth $45k a year? I guess, if you have it.</p>
<p>Many first-generation Americans do not see the need to become personally enriched by studying academic subjects at school. Meaning for many of non-native-born Americans comes from more than books or intellectual trends. They tend to be somewhat more religious and family-oriented and derive a lot of their inner understanding and meaning from these personal sources rather than from generic academic sources. Moreover, they may not be quite as starved of personal meaning as so many Americans are (also less likely to commit suicide or need anti-depressant drugs to endure life, for similar reasons).</p>
<p>For many, education, in the academic sense, is good for a profession, not life as such; thus the idea of becoming intellectual, in this sense, has a limited cash-valueit is not valued as a way of understanding life or acquiring a life-meaning but rather as a means to a specific ability, say medicine, engineering, law or dentistry; that is to say, the practical sciences as they are applied to industry and the legal science as it is applied to civil government. </p>
<p>My Mother has her graduate degrees in engineering (Iran) and Bio-technology (Johns Hopkins) and yet, having grown up in a traditional culture, she can recite more poetry by heart than any humanities person I have ever met, including my English teachers (all of whom had grad-English degrees) she was raised with itshe didnt need Derrida, Lyotard or Foucault to understand it either.</p>
<p>Perfect analogy. For her college hunt, she would be interested in any list that identifies schools with a particular emphasis on gymnastics. Same concept as looking at a list that identifies a particular emphasis on academics, or a particular emphasis on music, or a particular emphasis on theater, or a particular emphasis on frat life. Whatever floats your boat.</p>
<p>From page 8 of the book “Snobbery”, by Professor Joseph Epstein, </p>
<p>Mike Nichols, who went to the Univ of Chicago, said, “Everyone at the Univ of Chicago was neurotic, weird, strange—it was paradise.” The author, who also went to the Univ. of Chicago, said, I’m not so sure about the paradise part, but about the neurotic, weird, and strange, no argument is possible. One of the most astonishing things of all was that life at Chicago was not founded on status—which is also to say, on snobbery–at least not as I had been hitherto accustomed to it. People were not ranked by physical beauty, or athletic skill, or wealth, or family connections. None of these things seemed to matter. All that did was intelligence—or, more precisely, intellectuality, which I would define as the ability to deal in a sophisticated way with the issues, questions, and problems presented by art, science, politics and things of the mind generally.</p>
<p>Swarthmore is similar and that’s why you like the school. You like the atmosphere. You don’t need PHD stats to prove your point.</p>
<p>But, I might need the PhD “stats” to identify schools like Grinnell, or Whitman, or Beloit that aren’t everyday brand names and may not be that familiar. Or suppose I’ve visited both Haverford and Davidson because they have the size and locations I’m looking for, but I need to find out what kind of students they attract and what makes them different? How do I spot that Bryn Mawr and Kalamazoo and Bennington have exceptional track records in languages?</p>
<p>You just asked why Oberlin, Grinnell, and several other schools are overlooked when it comes to identifying so-called “intellectual” environments. You wouldn’t overlook them if you glanced at PhD production numbers.</p>
<p>One set of “stats” that many people use as a bible is the USNEWS ranking. Personally, I like to see various sets of metrics that list colleges in completely different orders – be it PhD production, Mini’s “preppy index”, PR’s student satisfaction, the Sears Cup rankings, etc. Each snapshot adds to the mix. That way, I might not overlook some very interesting choices because they happen to be on page two of the USNEWS list. </p>
<p>Reed is a great example of this. Being an East Coast guy, I wasn’t familiar at all with Reed and USNEWS certainly shed little light on the kind of school it is. But, when you see it pop up in the top five per capita PhD producers, across a wide range of fields, you learn a lot about the school.</p>
<p>Now, maybe I’m wrong and it is not a service to prospective applicants to encourage them to broaden their search horizons or to attempt to identify great schools that don’t take 1500 SATs to get into. Perhaps it’s OK to just stick with same tired list of two dozen schools xerox’d from USNEWS.</p>
<p>Great. So that takes care of about 380 graduating HS seniors next spring. I would assume there’s a need to identify a much wider range of schools.</p>
<p>I’m looking at it from the perspective of a parent of a rising high school senior trying to help identify possible “fit” schools from this huge amorphous mass of hundreds and hundreds of schools, many of which mean absolutely nothing except a name. We were able to identify Swarthmore from having attended schools in that “circle” and knowing its reputation. But, what I don’t think we did a particularly good job of was identifying a broader list of safeties and matches that had similar characteristics. And, I think we would have been even more in the dark had “stats” put the search in a somewhat less-selective range. </p>
<p>Carolyn was able to do it, but only through incredible amounts of research. As it turns out, I believe that every single school on Carolyn’s daughter’s short list would have been immediately identified from a five minute perusal of the PhD production list. Her two top favorites, Earlham and Beloit would have jumped off the page.</p>
<p>Now, that doesn’t mean you pick a school just because of that. But, it could be extremely useful for the other Carolyns in putting together an initial list of several dozen schools to begin exploring.</p>
<p>“On the other hand, among the top per capita PhD producers in the country are schools with very large Asian enrollments …”</p>
<p>Which “Asians” are you talking about? Descendants of Chinese immigrants who came during the Goldrush, upland Hmong from Cambodia, or Pakistani immigrants in the last decade? The term lacks explanatory power, which is why I try to refrain from using it.</p>
<p>Even using the colleges’ own data (as reported in IPEDS), one can see the drop off in Ph.D’s among “Asian-Pacific Islanders” (whoever they are.) Swarthmore has one of the highest dropoffs in the country, with 23.5% of white graduates going on to Ph.D.'s, vs. 10.5% for Asian-PIs(which is still extremely high) (in contrast, at Princeton, the dropoff is 15.4% to 12.8%). But this could be a “good thing” - it could represent the possibility that Swat has a higher percentage of first-generation, low-income Asian-Pacific Islanders. </p>
<p>The Williams diversity data indicates that “Asian” students are more likely to receive need-based aid than white students - 39% to 27%, but it still means that 61% of them are paying full freight, hardly a characteristic of low-income, first-generation-college, minority students.</p>
<p>What does it all mean? I have no idea. (for all I know, the Honors colleges at the major state u’s are 95% white, upper middle class folks.)</p>
<p>This is a joke about higher education. An old man used to live with his four sons in rural Asia. The old man used to brag about his three sons who happened to be a doctor, an engineer and third one a PhD in Physics. The man did not boast about his fourth son. One day a stranger asked what does your fourth son does. The old man said he is a farmer. The stranger said why not you kick him out, as he is not accomplished. The old man said I could not since he is the breadwinner of the house. So moral of the story is having higher education is nice but it is not end of the world. I would trade my higher education with my friend who own five Marriott hotels despite failing out by 10th grade.</p>
<p>I can’t help you with the lack of precision in racial/ethnicity reporting. It is what it is. “Asian-American” indeed covers a very broad swath including students of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, Nepalese, Indian, and Pakistani ancestry.</p>
<p>BTW, I suspect that the high Asian-American enrollment at many schools with high historic PhD production rates is perhaps a secondary correlation. It is possible that these students do not gravitate towards these schools because of PhD production, but because schools with high PhD production often have characteristics that they find desireable in a college or university. This would be the same value I see in looking at the PhD productivity rates.</p>