<p>
Three more issues:</p>
<p>1) The stats say nothing about where graduates end up. Penn, for example, places fairly low on the list. Looking over the list of graduates, however, one sees that biology graduates have attended the following graduate schools:</p>
<p>Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Penn, Princeton, UCLA, UCR, UCSD, UNC, Oregon State (marine science), Yale…and more. All elite and highly selective biology grad programs.</p>
<p>Although I do not have the stats at hand, I can assure you that U Memphis is not anywhere within five leagues of this, although the percentages would lead you to think otherwise. Graduates there count themselves extremely fortunate if they get into Ole Miss or UT Knoxville. That’s not to knock on those schools, and academic fit matters more than name, but realistically there are probably superior programs with those same research foci.</p>
<p>2) The stats say nothing about how many students apply and/or are admitted. A department can have very few students plan to go to graduate school, but that does not mean it has inferior placement. Using my own college as an example, the biology department at Duke is rampant with pre-meds, but it has extraordinarily good graduate placement.</p>
<p>3) The stats do not break down biology by specialty. Colleges like Colorado and Washington are feeder schools for ecology programs, whereas Hopkins, CMU, and MIT funnel nearly all of their graduates into molecular biology. Eckerd and Miami produce many times more future marine biology PhDs than Hendrix or Davidson. That’s not to say one could not pursue graduate studies in another field at one of those places, of course, but the percentage of PhDs produced should not be treated as a dependable measure of department strength.</p>