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[quote=Anonymous][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]

Why? Many reasons.

1. The advanced university students don’t do 2 years of grad work as undergrads. You lose all credibility saying that.

2.  Advanced undergrad classes often cover the same material as intro grad classes.

3. An LAC prof is far more likely to actually know well the student they write a recommendation for, making for a more credible and meaningful letter.

4. Undergrad research led by undergrads with LAC faculty mentors is more compelling in displaying research skill than university research led by a prof mentoring a grad student who can use undergrads if needed but is not in any way evaluated for doing so.

5. Cheating is more rampant in universities because there’s less contact and fewer assessments.

But all that is academic, as it were. If universities were truly better for preparing students for research you wouldn’t have higher grad school placement rates from LACs than universities, or studies like this showing students from LACs take less time to finish their PhD.

From p18:

“Graduates who completed undergraduate study at selective American liberal arts
colleges, or whose undergraduate training was in Britain, Canada, Ireland, Australia, or New
Zealand, earned a Ph.D. in economics sufficiently faster than the large group of undergraduates
from American Ph.D. granting universities so as to save almost a full academic year. The
savings from an academic year could be viewed as a full year's opportunity cost to graduates,
and/or a year of financial aid from the Ph.D. department. Applicants from Swarthmore,
Williams, or Carleton, therefore, might be viewed appropriately as likely "less expensive" Ph.D.
students than those with a bachelor's degree from Harvard, Berkeley, or Stanford. Accordingly,
Ph.D. program admissions committees might reasonably dip further into the credentials pool for
those with an undergraduate degree from a selective liberal arts college. On the other hand,
expanding the pool of selective liberal arts college graduates attracted into Ph.D. study, which
such a policy could induce, may add prospects whose expected time-to-degree differs from the
expected length of Ph.D. study of existing matriculants.”

https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/bitstream/handle/1803/15800/vu06-w11.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
[/quote]

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