I am wondering what the best undergrad program in the United States would be for a philosophy/mathematics double major.
Note that I am not referring to studying the philosophy OF mathematics. I am referring to studying both fields independently from each other.
The following draws on the USNWR ranking of math programs and Philosophical Gourmet ranking of philosophy programs. Only universities in the top 25 of both rankings are included.
If your question is where would you receive the best selection of philosophy and mathematics options which match your needs and interest, you have asked the wrong question. Yes, there are rankings compiled by US News and probably others which will supply an answer. Any good student of logic may question the basis of such a ranking.
If you select a small undergraduate school with little or no graduate school it will never make the US News ranking. Does this mean that any of the following schools may not offer you a program better suited to you?
Amherst College
Bowdoin College
Colgate University
Hamilton College
Haverford College
Middlebury College
Swarthmore College
Wesleyan University
Williams College
AND MANY others as these are only a few on the east coast.
Pick a top notch liberal arts college for your undergraduate school and you will have no problem entering the graduate school of your choice. At that point you may consider the ranking of large graduate schools.
:bz
But you’re just starting soph year, according to one thread.
Use the time to research schools. I’d bet the posters above me didn’t need long to find that info. And you need to be the sort who can do this dig, to be the sort most of those colleges want. Learn how practical it is to go for two disparate majors.
And while you’re at it, see what they do value in candidates. It’s more than stats, some award, or what you think is a unique EC.
Agreed. Without knowing what your stats will be, where you can afford to apply, and what else you’re looking for in a college, it’s premature to ask for lists of schools based on what you think you’ll major in four years from now. For math, much will also depend on one’s level of math at graduation. A senior who’s finished linear algebra (and possibly already had an advanced class like analysis, like some CCers) may need to be more picky than someone who’s only had a year of calculus.
I’m not a huge fan of rankings (and I think they’re even more useless at the graduate level than undergraduate), nor do I think organizing one’s college search based on strength in a particular major is the best way of selecting a college for most students.
That said, rankings provide a more systematic way of answering the OP’s question – especially for other posters who may be interested in such an academic combination – than combing through the websites of every top college in the US. Additionally, they help in evaluating the faculty at colleges of interest (more on that below in the PG quotation). Rankings are a possible starting point, nothing more. There are plenty of obvious caveats one could add to the lists above; Princeton does not allow double majors, for example, and NYU is notoriously stingy with financial aid.
As for LACs and other colleges without PhD programs, the Philosophical Gourmet site addresses that in detail.
There have been discussions in the past about how some top-end graduate math programs have definite preferences about undergraduate schools, although it can be difficult to find out which undergraduate schools tend to be favored (and that may vary from one graduate math program to another). But some of the commentary has been unfavorable to liberal arts colleges, since most do not have graduate level math offerings.
Examples:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/13134779#Comment_13134779
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/15052836#Comment_15052836
In addition, advanced math course offerings at LACs can vary considerably:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1830339-lac-math-p1.html
How far do you expect to be advanced in math prior to college?
Below are the top LACs by number of alumni-earned math doctorates for the years 2006-2015,
followed by the number of alumni-earned math doctorates (covering the same years) for the top 10 USNWR-ranked math departments. Keep in mind that some of the LACs enroll < 2000 students (compared to several of the research universities with > 25K undergrads). If you don’t plan to pursue a math PhD, these numbers may not matter much … unless you think they reflect department quality, in which case I recommend you weigh them against other factors that may be very important, including the math/phil course offerings but also net cost, etc.
Alumni-earned Math PhDs … School
70 Harvey Mudd College
42 St. Olaf College
40 Williams College
30 Carleton College, Swarthmore College
27 Pomona College
26 Oberlin College
25 Reed College
21 Whitman College
18 Amherst College, Haverford College, Wheaton College
168 University of California, Berkeley
131 Harvard University
123 University of Chicago, The
118 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
88 Princeton University
86 California Institute of Technology
83 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
66 Stanford University
60 Columbia University in the City of New York
47 Yale University
37 New York University
Source: NSF/WebCASPAR (which doesn’t seem to track Philosophy doctorates in particular)
These highly selective colleges appear in a Princeton Review sampling, “Great Schools for Mathematics Majors”:
Caltech
UChicago
Harvard
Harvey Mudd
MIT
Rice
Bowdoin
Hamilton
Haverford
Carleton
Grinnell
Reed
Macalester
URochester
You could cross-reference by strength of philosophy department using some of the criteria on this page. You might want to eliminate schools with predominantly tech focuses.
As suggested by @retiredfarmer, lists/rankings have the potential to counter-productively limit a college search. Nonetheless, the above selection, however limited, does have the benefit of being oriented toward undergraduate study, a significant factor in my opinion.
You could also look into Amherst, Smith (all female) and Brown for their flexible curricula and generally top-notch offerings across multiple fields. Williams would seem to be another good option.
But, this student seems nowhere near ready for a conversation of this detail. He asked without revealing anything about his own strengths and prep. He wants Ivy League or Stanford and sorry, but it’s too soon to be setting college targets, with only one year of (unknown) grades/rigor, related ECs, an ACT a bit below what most named here will expect.
Could be different if this OP were one of the rare kids who truly is advanced and could share more than a freshman ACT. And, we don’t know his plans with this double major. He hasn’t said grad school. For all we know, some nice LAC or state U that allows cross studies could serve him very well.
Thank you to everyone who responded.
I am most certainly aware that the lack of information on my part is concerning and makes satisfactorily answering my questions more difficult. But just to clarify,
*The composite of 33 on the ACT was scored when I was a freshman, and with very little prep. I will be preparing rigorously for the next time that I take it, though.
@merc81 I should take AP Calculus (hopefully BC) in my senior year. Note, however, that I plan on taking philosophy to the doctoral level; I am only considering double-majoring in undergraduate for job safety reasons.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/angst/201111/realities-studying-philosophy-non-elite-school suggests that there may be significant undergraduate school bias in philosophy PhD program admissions.
Go Oxford! Many of the most interesting programs on PBS regarding philosophy and theology end up visiting Oxford! :bz
retiredfarmer, by their very nature, Mathematics and Philosophy are considered “unusual” majors. Even at larger universities like Columbia or Michigan, classes will seldom exceed 25 students in those majors. For example, Michigan currently has 150 Philosophy students (that includes incoming freshmen all the way through PhD), and a faculty of 24 professors dedicated to instruction. One of the intro-level Philosophy classes that I took at Michigan had 30 students in it, and that was considered gargantuan. As such, I would recommend the larger universities because you will get the personalized attention that you would receive at a liberal arts college, but along with it, the resources and options that can only be found at a large research university. For those seeking degrees in popular majors, say Political Science, Economics, Psychology etc…, there are obvious benefits (and drawbacks) associated with attending LACs, but with less popular majors like Mathematics or Philosophy, larger universities are usually the better option.
tk, while it is true that some of those universities are 10+ times larger than LACs, the number of Math and Philosophy majors will not be anywhere near 10+ times greater. That’s because schools like Michigan have very large non-traditional programs such as Engineering, Business, Music, Architecture, Nursing, Public Affairs etc… Michigan, which has 29,000 undergraduate students typically graduates approximately 200 or so Mathematics majors and 50 or so Philosophy majors (including PPE majors) annually. The number of Mathematics majors is likely to be 4-6 times than that of a LAC, but the number of Philosophy majors is probably only 2-3 times greater. For example, of Amherst’s 450 graduates and Williams’ 500 graduates, roughly 60 from each college will be Mathematics majors, which is 1/3 Michigan’s number.
Alexandre, I don’t think we necessarily can explain away LAC performance in PhD production just by noting their absence of engineering and other pre-professional programs.
IPEDS does track undergraduate degree completions by major, but unfortunately not for every year. 2009 is the most recent year for which I see Math/Stat bachelor degree completions. For that year, Amherst College graduated 6 Math/Stat majors; Michigan-AA graduated 125. So the size disparity by major was even greater than the size disparity by institution between those two schools. I doubt the T10 LAC v. T10 RU size differences by major have changed greatly, on average, since 2009.
(I’ve seen other data and analysis that makes me skeptical of the explanation you’re suggesting, but I’m afraid getting into that would take this discussion off track since the OP already has indicated he’s not interested in LACs.)
tk, in this case, the IPEDS must be incomplete. You honestly think that only 1% of Amherst students major in Mathematics? That is highly implausible. According to Amherst College itself, 14% of their students majored in Mathematics in 2016. That’s the second most popular major after Economics. And according to Williams, 12% of their students major in Mathematics. In both cases, we are talking about roughly 60 graduates annually. In the case of Michigan, the number is roughly 200.
@retiredfarmer It’s interesting that you bring that up, as I actually was considering Oxford for graduate (doctoral) study.
I really wouldn’t want to go out-of-country for undergraduate, though.
Alexandre, as I wrote above, I found no IPEDS data for graduating math majors past 2009. So yes, maybe that IPEDS data was incomplete (and it’s definitely not up-to-date.) According to Amherst’s 2009 CDS, 3% of degrees conferred were in math; for 2004, it was 2%; for 2001 it was only 1%. So at Amherst, the percentage has been going up. But the WebCASPER PhD totals I cited are for the whole decade, 2006-15. The earliest of those would have been earned by students who graduated from Amherst in the early 2000s or perhaps even in the 1990s.
The IPEDS 2009 number for Michigan math majors also was lower than your number (125 v. your 200). But even after adjusting the number of math majors up, in line with the numbers you suggest, it doesn’t appear that we explain away the relatively high LAC PhD production rates per capita. Now, some other selection effects may be confounding the patterns. Or not. Perhaps the top LACs, through strong student-faculty engagement and other features, actually do an excellent job of motivating and preparing students to complete graduate degrees. Whether that would be enough to compensate for more limited course selection, for a very advanced math student, is another question.
For the OP, I would think any of the research universities listed by @warblersrule would be good choices (if the net prices are affordable, locations are ok, etc.)
Thank you @monkey2001! This is an informative and fun discussion! One is hard pressed not to put "likes"on the wealth of information generated. :bz