Princeton or Columbia?
Princeton shows up more often on this list:
http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/
But I am sure Columbia is an excellent launching ground in many subjects for PhDs as well. I doubt the difference is significant.
You will note that many LACs show up repeatedly on this list, too.
Washington Monthly calculates the bachelor’s to PhD ratio each year for their ranking. From 2017, the universities are as follows for PhD production:
- Caltech
- MIT
- Yale
- Chicago
- Princeton
- Brown
- Stanford
- Dartmouth
- Cornell
- Rice
- Harvard
- Duke
- Columbia
That said, I’ve never found PhD production a useful metric, except perhaps for identifying particularly strong programs at LACs. It’s certainly not useful as a point of consideration between schools as strong as Princeton and Columbia.
We don’t have the formula used to determine ranking in that Washington Monthly list, so don’t get too excited about the difference between #5 and #13. The scores used to rank them could be 99.99996 and 99.99988, which is to say a difference almost certainly well within the range of error for the data set.
If you absolutely know what it is you want to study, and you absolutely know that a PhD is needed in that field, then you need to be looking at BA/BS to PhD statistics for your specific field of interest. And depending on what that field is, Princeton and Columbia could both be absolutely horrible choices for your BA/BS.
You can also look through the NSF GRFP results over the past years on NSF Fastlane. The fellowship winners’ undergrad institution and grad school institution are listed as well as their area of study.
Because a lot of students apply for this fellowship as college seniors and rely on undergrad advisors/professors for letters of reference it can give you an indirect/anecdotal feel for which schools best inspire and support their undergrads to be successful in PhD programs and in what fields. NSF GRFP is the largest federal fellowship for US citizens/PR, other well known PhD fellowships are the NDSEG and Hertz, and you can look through the results for those too.
The answer that matters is that you can go on to get a PhD in virtually any field from either of those two schools. They’re both excellent undergraduate institutions.
The National Science Foundation counts PhD recipients and their baccalaureate institutions every year. Between 2002 and 2011, 1,131 Princeton alumni and 829 Columbia alumni got PhDs. They’re both in the top 50 PhD producers by absolute numbers. Proportionately, between those years about 10 out of every 100 Princeton alumni got a PhD, whereas about 6 out of every 10 Columbia alumni got one.
But this isn’t necessarily because Columbia is ‘worse’ at preparing students for a PhD program - there are a lot of factors at place. The type of student who wants a PhD may be more drawn to Princeton than Columbia. Columbia’s in a large city with a lot of internships, so many students (even some who might want a PhD) may get internships or jobs that lure them into full-time work instead of academia. The culture at Columbia may be a bit more pre-professional, so students who are choosing may be drawn to work. Who knows. That doesn’t mean that an individual student who is committed to a PhD would be better off going to Princeton than Columbia. Both schools are in the top 50 PhD-producing list regardless of whether you count absolute numbers or institutional-yield ratio (how many get PhDs out of every 100 who graduated 9 years earlier).
The truths are
- You could go to any school and get a PhD, anyway. What you do in undergrad is far more important than where you go.
- To the small extent that undergrad school matters, the difference between Princeton and Columbia is like splitting a hair and then splitting it over again.