<p>I think those PhD statistics are largely a marketing ploy - and it certainly might be helpful to a student who anticipates pursuing a PhD. But there seems to be glut of PhD’s these days - a lot of post-docs who aren’t able to secure facultypositions. (There’s another thread on CC touching on this, I think in the Parent’s section). And while it is common for STEM PhD’s to be fully funded, the funding is harder to come by in the social sciences – where the OP’s interests lie. </p>
<p>Barnard/Columbia trends more pre-professional: students who are pre-med, pre-law, or might later pursue an MBA or a the type of degrees offered in Columbia’s various graduate programs, like SIPA. </p>
<p>To a limited degree, the numbers may say something about academic culture-- whether courses tend to focus more or less on theory vs. practice. That can be somewhat important in assessing fit. A “life of the mind” type person might really enjoy an LAC where life is more focused on campus than community.Someone who is more outwardly focused might favor a more urban campus precisely because they don’t want to live in an academic bubble – and of course have no intention of pursuing a career in academia… So those broad numbers don’t say much about comparative academic quality.</p>
<p>In a more narrow sense those figures would be useful – that is, while numbers about the total number of future Ph.D’s aren’t very important to students who want to be lawyers-- field-specific numbers might be very important to students who want to pursue advanced studies in those fields. </p>
<p>Of course many students do change focus along the way, like the daughter of @churchmusicmom who started Barnard as a dance major and is now in a PhD program studying neuroscience. </p>