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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ops statement for top phd placement is true for math and psychology, but not other disciplines. [/quote]

R1 top-ranked universities, whether public or private, are better for phD placement in Math, Physics, Chemistry, and all Engineering disciplines, for every LAC except the very top LACs (WAS). R1s that are mediocre do not show the same clear benefit in STEM phD placement over LACs, especially known academically rigorous T15 LACS. The R1 standard is not what it once was. [/quote]

Incorrect on a couple fronts. Only 3 of the top 10 and 7 of the top 20 (by rate) of STEM PhD feeders are R1s. Look at the far right column in below link.  Also, minor point but Williams and Amherst aren’t in the top 3 for LAC feeders to PhD programs, though they are top 10.

https://www.swarthmore.edu/sites/default/files/assets/documents/institutional-effectiveness-research-assessment/Doct%20Rates%20Top%20100%20Tot%20Sci%20Rankings%20-Summary%20to%202022.pdf[/quote]

This is just a list of the share of each school that goes on to receive a doctorate, though. It doesn’t really measure relative placement.

It’s a bit strange that boosters of a type of school that is accused of graduating kids that are less employable and that hiring managers haven’t heard of are so eager to highlight their high rate of kids going to PhD programs.[/quote]

If you are saying it would be nice to have full transparency on where everyone goes, sure, but I trust NSF PhD conferral rates more than anonymous statements about which ones are placing into "top" PhD programs.  For starters, there is no public repository that shows where exactly everyone goes. Also "top" is undefined. All funded PhD programs are highly selective, and one need not restrict their selection to a USNWR ranked T5 or T10 to have excellent career options.  Ultimately, if a student is considering going into a field that requires PhD-level training and expertise, it's sensible to be interested in undergraduate origin rates when selecting a college. (As an aside, the posts earlier in the thread suggesting readers look at Princeton's math dept ignored the issue that their undergrad origins are not displayed there, at least not publicly.)

There are all sorts of reasons why someone might be interested in getting a PhD, especially in STEM where the majority of recipients use their research to find a match in industry. A published PhD recipient with relevant research will often (but no one said always!) be a better fit to lead a commercial research program to invent some new technology or solution.

It's funny that when many posters talk about the greater fame of universities they are happy to point to their research prowess or rankings largely based on them, but when a student is actually interested in identifying the best educational route to do such research, the same poster acts like one is crazy to be interested in paths to graduate programs.  
[/quote]You can find the math students undergrads by looking them up. I just did, past 3 students' undergrads were MIT, Stanford, and Caltech. Doesn't take much effort to check your claims.[/quote]

My best guess is you mean you are checking by hand by googling each student and trying to find where they went for college... Ok, but given the numbers at play you would expect to have to do that a few hundred times before getting a meaningful sample, and even then it would be just for that one program. Remember that only about 3% of US undergrads go to a LAC.  Now factor in that around half of the PhD students come from overseas.  So just based on raw numbers you would expect to see ~1-2 LAC alumni per 100 searches.

A more time efficient approach is to research what an LAC of interest has on their site.  When we did this during our college search, we found that the overwhelming majority of known outcomes were for schools ranked in the top 20% of their field. [/quote]
For the size of the department, a sample of around 15 is pretty demonstrative. Sure, I wouldn't personally spend my time looking up 15 people's names, but it really isn't an extreme amount of effort.[/quote]

No, a sample of 15 is not demonstrative if trying to detect a signal arising from less than 2% of the source. We are talking about per capita rates here, no one disputes that universities send larger raw numbers to a given grad program when there are 30 times more university students graduating with undergrad degrees each year in the US and maybe 300 times more when including the international pool.[/quote]
You make a lot of excuses.[/quote]

Saying that normalizing by school size is an "excuse" makes about as much sense as saying an aspiring CEO is better off going to Wisconsin than Harvard or Stanford.[/quote]

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