What are the most DIFFICULT schools?

interesteddad
Tue, 20 Sep 2005 22:10:38 +0000

GradStudent:

You may be reading more into what I wrote than intended. I didn’t say that the colleges and universities with high PhD production are “better” than others. There are many truly incredible schools, both colleges and universities, that have a strong pre-professional orientation. Perhaps as clear as any example, look at the two excellent universities in the Chicago area, one that produces a lot of PhDs and the other that does not. Is UChicago “better” than Northwestern? Absolutely not. But, it is very different. Much less party scene. Much higher percentage of serious academic “types”. And, a reputation for academic intensity that pushes students hard.

When you look at the top-20 PhD producers (with % of PhDs among grads over the most recent 10 year period), you see most of the schools that people generally regard as “hard” in the sense that we are discussing here, starting with Caltech at the top:

1 California Institute of Technology 36%
2 Harvey Mudd College 25%
3 Swarthmore College 21%
4 Reed College 20%
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 18%
6 Carleton College 17%
7 Bryn Mawr College 16%
8 Oberlin College 16%
9 University of Chicago 15%
10 Yale University 15%
11 Princeton University 14%
12 Harvard University 14%
13 Grinnell College 14%
14 Haverford College 14%
15 Pomona College 14%
16 Rice University 13%
17 Williams College 13%
18 Amherst College 12%
19 Stanford University 11%
20 Kalamazoo College 11%
21 Wesleyan University 11%
22 St John’s College (both campus) 11%
23 Brown University 11%

This is not to say that a thousand other schools are not equally “hard” or equally “academic” for a sizeable proportion of their students. But, on a percentage basis, these are very large numbers, from 11% to 36% of ALL graduates getting a PhDs.