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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Not the PP you are quoting, but the NSF study does NOT provide support for most of the claims you are making.  Percentages aren’t chances (of completing a PhD program) when they are drawn from a diverse pool (all BA recipients 9 years earlier) with different goals and resources.  We’re not talking about random selection here.  It’s about people making choices.  As posters have already pointed out, students at a public R1 university are likely to have both a wider range of options (including those that don’t require grad school) and a greater likelihood of economic constraints than students at elite private schools.

One could do a study looking at people who started vs people who finished S&E PhDs and then analyze whether LAC-educated undergrads had a higher completion rate than students who got their BAs at universities.  But the NSF study that has been cited here did not do that.  Also, it’s worth noting that, speaking categorically, that study concluded that “Research universities with very high research activity had the highest institutional yield ratio each year from 2002 to 2011, followed by baccalaureate colleges, other doctorate-granting universities, and master’s colleges and universities (figure 1). The institutional-yield ratios increased for all four types of institutions over this period, and research universities with very high research activity and other doctorate-granting universities showed the largest increases.”  So it’s not LACs per se outperforming R1s on this metric.  It’s about a few specific LACs standing out and *public* R1s, who dominate in terms of absolute numbers of PhDs produced, disappearing from the top 20.  It’s also unclear how/whether the numbers have changed since.  The study used BAs granted from 1993 to 2002 for its calculations, so it’s looking at students who matriculated at LACs 20-30 years ago.

As for cohort, realistically, at a school the size of Berkeley, your cohort from an academic standpoint isn’t everybody else getting a BA — it’s the people in your major and/or your courses.  And that group will be numerically much larger than it is at a LAC.  [/quote]

Again, I'm not sure why you are so hesitant to accept the statistics findings. The NSF analysis is of BA origins for PhD completion in the sciences. And yes, of course individual constitution matters--and you will always have outliers at large state schools-- when you are looking at undergrad programs as a whole, there are obvious institutional factors at play that encourage their undergrads to go onto PhD programs. FWIW, it does matter where you go for undergrad if you want to complete a PhD. The numbers are frankly so overwhelmingly in favor of top SLACs that you'd have to ignore factual reality to deny this.

https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/
[i]When institutional rankings are determined according to the institutional-yield ratio based on S&E doctorate recipients rather than the absolute counts of S&E doctorate recipients, the list of top U.S. baccalaureate-origin institutions changes dramatically (table 4). Nine of the top 20 U.S. baccalaureate-origin institutions of 2002–11 S&E doctorate recipients are baccalaureate colleges, 10 are research universities with very high research activity, and only 1 of the top 20 (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology) is a public institution. Of the top 50 U.S. baccalaureate-origin institutions ranked by the institutional-yield ratio, 27 are baccalaureate colleges and 21 are research universities with very high research activity). Only 3 of the institutions appearing on the top 20 list of table 2 also appear in the top 20 of table 4: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and Stanford University.[/i][/quote]

Wow, wherever you went to school, you never learned to interpret data.  Or read a study.  Or both.

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