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[quote=Anonymous][quote]FWIW, you’re demonstrating my point about bizarre aggregation.  In the context of this discussion, [b]why does it matter that 9 LACs combined produced more PhDs than Berkeley[/b]?  No kid is choosing between going to 9 different LACs vs going to Berkeley.  And, presumably, you recognize that the fact that top LACs send (small numbers of, but comparatively high percentages of) kids to top PhD programs doesn’t mean top PhD programs are filled with kids from LACs.  Also the % who have done research with a faculty member stat is so vague as to be meaningless (not limited to science, not school-specific, not limited to undergrads going on to PhDs, and probably self-reported, so god knows what it means.)[/quote]

The point is that statistically, if you gathered all the STEM PhD recipients from the given time frame and asked them where they attended college, you'd be more likely to have someone who went to one of those 9 LACs vs. UC Berkeley. This is despite these 9 having half the undergraduate population. I doubt you would say UC Berkeley is an insignificant force for producing PhDs, since it's literally the #1 school by absolute number (Table 2), so how can you or whomever sweepingly suggest that LACs produce an insignificant number of STEM PhD graduates? They don't.

qz.com/498534/these-25-schools-are-responsible-for-the-greatest-advances-in-science/

I'm going to exclude the top table since it doesn't distinguish between STEM Nobel laureates and excludes anyone with 2 or fewer winners (their quote: "If we had included schools with two winners in the Nobel/Fields/Turing list, [i]Haverford[/i], [i]Oberlin[/i], Rice, and Johns Hopkins would have been in the top 25 on both") and focus more on the second table, national academy memberships. There are 8 LACs with 0 overlap in members between each other (unlike the universities with both undergrad/doctoral programs), totaling to 186 in total  (#1 is Harvard with 326, #2 is MIT is 255). Again, let it be reminded that these schools have 0 doctoral programs and are extremely tiny (even cumulatively, they have ~13000 undergrads), and unlike STEM focused MIT, don't even have that high of a percent majoring in a STEM field. [/quote]

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