It is becoming very rare for a universities to offer scholarships for employees at schools other than their own.
Statisically people with PhDs are more likely to have attended LACs. So chances are faculty who promote LACs for their own kids also attended one.
Where’s the data on this? There’s a difference between LAC’s sending a higher percentage of their grads on to grad school/doctoral studies, and the claim that a higher percentage of PhD’s did their undergrad at LAC’s. Given that LAC’s educate a fraction of college going students every year, this is an aggressive claim and I’d love to see the numbers.
Very few PhD’s in any of the engineering disciplines went to an LAC because few LAC’s have engineering.
So would love to see the study you reference.
It is hard for students to get one of the coveted Tuition Exchange slots- but I’m not aware that the actual number of those slots has decreased in the last few years. Evidence?
The statistics are that people who attend LACs are more likely to go on to get a PhD. LACs produce fewer than 5% of all graduates of 4 year colleges, so even though they go on to do PhDs in much higher proportions than research university graduates, numerically, they are outnumbered. Public research universities produce the largest number - among the top 50 colleges which produced the largest number of graduates who go on to do a S&E PhD 2010-2020, all were Research universities, and 32 were public research universities. Among the top 50 which produced the largest number of graduates who go on to do a non-S&E PhD, 49 were research universities and one LAC (go Oberlin!), and 35 were public research universities.
Overall, R1s produced 32.7% of all undergraduates in 2020, while LACs produced 3.8%
However, when looking at what NCES calls Doctoral Yield Ratios (number of doctorates conferred per year on graduates of a college divided by the number of students who received an undergraduate degree from that college 9 year previously), LACs (Carnegie classification “baccalaureate colleges: arts and sciences focus” outstripped every other type of college. For science and engineering PhD’s LACs have a DYR or 3.5-3.7, while R1s have 2.4-2.7. For non S&E PhDs, LACs have 1.4-1.8, while R1s had half of that, 0.7 to 0.9 (though the numbers are dropping for both). Over DYRs would have been 4.9-5.5 for LACs, and 3.1-3.6 for R1s.
So while DYR for LACs is around 1.5-1.6x that of R1s, Those R1s produce around 8.5x as many undergraduates. So there are are about 5-6x as many people with PhDs who did their undergraduate at an R1 and those who did their undergraduate at a LAC.
In short, around 8% of all people with PhDs did their undergraduates at a LAC, while 45% or so of the people who have PhDs did the undergraduate at an R1. In humanities, social science, and life sciences, the percent of LAC graduates is higher than that, but in engineering and physical sciences, it is far lower (especially in engineering).
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Thank you for posting actual numbers!
I’m an LAC fan…. but posting erroneous facts does not further the discussion. And it just boggled the mind that LAC’s could produce more PhD’s than research universities given the relative size of their graduating classes!!!
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Is @Franklynn talking about tuition exchange or tuition assistance?
My employer offers tuition assistance for dependents, in the form of direct tuition payments to other universities for the dependents of faculty/staff. Under these programs, the employer university school will pay a portion of tuition (usually one-third to one-half of the employing school’s tuition amount) to any other accredited university, generally for up to 8 semesters/12 quarters, for dependent undergraduate study. Hopkins, Duke, Pomona, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Yale all offer this sort of assistance, which used to be more common but not surprisingly is pretty rare now (which is what I assumed @Franklynn was referring to).
If your argument to attend a LAC is that Trump has never heard of them, that’s fine. The flipside though is that he goes after Harvard because it’s the most prestigious and most powerful university in the world. When they went ED, so did the rest of the ivies, when then went EA, so did the rest, when they went SCEA, so did Yale and Stanford.
I wasn’t talking about that at all in the post you are responding to.
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Ironically, Harvard got the idea from Wesleyan, Williams, Amherst and Bowdoin:
By the late 1950s smaller New England colleges had come up with the first early-decision plans, as a way to make inroads with these same students. Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Wesleyan, and Williams, allied at the time as “the Pentagonals,” offered what has become the familiar bargain: better odds on admission in return for a binding commitment to attend. “What’s interesting is that from the start competitive considerations among colleges seem to have been the driving force,” Karl Furstenberg, of Dartmouth, says. Soon after, other colleges began to adopt early decision.
The Early-Decision Racket - The Atlantic
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