Reply to I go to a top LAC for history and stem. It is overrated.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ignoring whether OP is a troll, the question raised can be easily settled.  My kid is now choosing among a few LACs and a few research universities for physics, with an aim at PhD placement. As far as we can tell, LACs can be just as good as the best research schools.  See here: https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs?utm_source=pocket_shared#physics
Mudd (one of his options) comes in second, per capita, right after CalTech and above MIT, with many other LACs also near the top. It's possible these aren't good PhD placements, for Mudd and the others -- is that the worry?  I don't have any but anecdata on that, but it seems implausible.

As for humanities fields, I work in one (not English), and many of our best PhD applicants have LAC degrees.  So here too, the general worry is unfounded.

That said, I can think of some LACs beloved by DCUM that are quite weak in my field, with little hope of placing their students in a good PhD program, so maybe OP has a legitimate local gripe. But I don't think it generalizes to LACs as a whole.[/quote] This doesn't control for the quality of the PhD program. Mudd, Reed, Williams, Amherst if you take grad courses at UMass might be exceptions, but it's not at all implausible for the rest. Why would a top grad school accept a 4.0 lac grad with no grad coursework and a bit of undergrad-friendly research over a 4.0 r1 grad with two years of graduate classes and published research of the type they intend to do in their PhD?[/quote]

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