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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]UVA is weak in STEM. So much for academic ratings. Another BS ranking. [/quote]

Rankings are BS. No doubt about that. But why do DCUM people say UVA is weak in STEM?  I’m not saying it is strong, I just don’t know. The same way I dint know about 99% of colleges.  [/quote]

I think there’s more than one way of determining whether a university has strong STEM programs at the undergrad level.

[b]One is to look at STEM PhD production rate as a percentage of students completing their undergrad there.  I don’t think UVA is in the top 100[/b].

Another is to look at UVA grad program ranks and extrapolate to undergrad.  I don’t think any are in the top 20.

Another is to look at the percentage of majors in STEM (the idea being students tend to self sort into the strongest depts.)  UVA is around 27% for traditional STEM (ie not counting social sciences.) Not a low number but not a high one either.

There are other indicators but those are usually the things I first consider when getting a sense of a school’s strength in STEM.

That said, it could still be a perfect STEM school for some. [/quote]

There is probably correlation with percentage of undergraduates going on to get STEM PhDs and undergraduate STEM strength.  The top 6 national universities for this are Caltech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and Stanford University.

But among national publics, only Berkeley and William and Mary crack the top 50.   This is because the list is dominated by privates (including SLACs). You can run your own analysis to see if UVA is any worse than UCLA, Michigan, etc.  The data is available from the NSF.  I doubt UVA is behind UCLA and probably not Michigan as well.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-50-schools-that-produce-science-phds/
https://www.highereddatastories.com/2020/12/baccalaureate-origins-of-doctoral.html[/quote]

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