<p>NO LOANS FROM REED??? What??? This is so unfair!!! X( </p>
<p>OP:</p>
<p>Here are some stats about Ph.D. productivity:</p>
<p><a href=âhttps://wfs.pomona.edu/jlr04747/research%20reports/Baccalaureate%20origins_top150%20PhD-producing%20colleges%20and%20universities.pdf?uniq=-tt061jâ>https://wfs.pomona.edu/jlr04747/research%20reports/Baccalaureate%20origins_top150%20PhD-producing%20colleges%20and%20universities.pdf?uniq=-tt061j</a></p>
<p>Although not a perfect indicator, this will give you some idea of the level of intellectual curiosity of students at respective institutions:</p>
<p>For example: Amherst has 12.9% of its grads earning Ph.D.s, compared with Barnardâs 8.2% and Columbiaâs 8.8%. Incidentally, Reed had 20.3% and Grinnell 15.6%. Accordingly, I would not dismiss Amherst as overly jock or pre-professional.</p>
<p>Iâm not a Barnard â â â â â (just a Columbia alum), but I donât think Barnard is anything like what @calmom cracks it up to be. Plainly, its poor endowment relative to Wellesley, Smith and Bryn Mawr says something about the mediocrity of its graduates relative to those of other womenâs college.</p>
<p>You been accepted at some fine colleges, but to pay a $7,000 annual premium for Barnard over Reed is nuts. [-X </p>
<p>If I were in you position I would beg for mercy from Amherstâs FA office for your egregious error of having selected Barnard at a premium price.</p>
<p>@International95â I know I couldnât believe it myself! Itâs surreal, considering Reedâs not-so-amazing fin aid for most ppl. I know Reedâs not super diverse, so maybe theyâre trying to recruit POC? And I live on the east coast, so geographically I might be valuable lol also, Iâm not too shabby at the whole âschoolâ thing ;)</p>
<p>I often wonder why people keep referring to these stats for PhD productivity, If you receive an excellent undergraduate degree, why do you need a Phd. Does everybody need to get a Phd?
D1âs friend graduated from Reed in Economics, is unemployed and getting a certificate in accounting or finance(?) from the local UC. So take that into account as well, one data point only.</p>
<p>There will always be some graduates from LACs who are unemployed. That doesnât say anything.</p>
<p>From the The Center of Life Beyond Reed: for the class of 2013, â88% of econ majors reported they had either accepted a job or started graduate school or are engaged in some âotherâ planned activity such as a post-bac internship, fellowship, or travel.â</p>
<p>From my experience, which is highly influenced by my exposure to international students, international Reedies on aid have done very well for themselves after graduating.</p>
<p>And, as rhg3rd pointed it out, the PhD productivity rate is an imperfect, but useful, indicator of âintellectual curiosityâ of the student bodies. </p>
<p>He was class of 2012. He received a job offer but was considered below par in term of salary and vacation. Iâve heard my daughter said he mentioned it to his parents but they laughed and said they had to suffer too but for some reasons he is back to Southern Cal without employment, I guess not subsidizing from his parents it was hard to live with that salary.</p>
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<p>However, it is confounded by other factors, such as how preprofessionally oriented the students are, and how well they get recruited by employers. Barnardâs location in NYC may result in more local recruiting drawing more graduates into the workforce, for example. Columbiaâs PhD productivity may be lower due to the presence of pre-professional majors that are not offered at Barnard and other more selective LACs.</p>
<p>Indeed, the relatively smaller city locations of Reed and Grinnell may have to do with their high PhD productivity â there are fewer recruiters visiting those schools to lure graduates into the workforce because they are small and out-of-the-way. Amherst, while not in a big city, does have a career center sharing agreement with nearby UMass, so its students and graduates get additional exposure there when recruiters go to UMass because it is big.</p>
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<p>Indeed. A college with so-called vocational majors, such as undergrad biz, nursing, education, engineering,for example, will have fewer % going into a doctoral program. And since it is a rare LAC that offers vocational majors, their % will be higher than the big, multipurpose Unis.</p>
<p>I do not think the location has to do with anything. Plenty of LACs, such as Kenyon and Colby, are in remote locations and attract similarly qualified students but are nowhere near Reed/Grinnell/Swarthmore on that list. On a large part I think it depends on the culture of the school.</p>
<p>The other point is valid. In any case, you can always get a subjective sense of the level of âintellectual curiosityâ at different schools by visiting/vicariously. In another thread, for instance, an admit to Pomona and Chicago chose Chicago simply because Pomona kids seemed to be more interested in talking about video games and other nonsense rather than about, say, books. Her experience was, of course, subjective because of the people she ran into while visiting, but since so many people have had rather similar experiences about the âintellectual curiosityâ at Chicago, the intellectual focus of the school can be clearly distinguished, and is arguably reflected in the PhD production rate.</p>
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<p>If you look in the career surveys of schools that have them, you will find that each one has a local or regional bias for students going on to employment. Employers often recruit locally out of convenience, while limiting traveling recruiting to a few schools (or maybe none at all). A small startup Silicon Valley computer company may not have the need or budget to recruit at every college like GAFAM can; it may just stick with a few schools in driving distance like Stanford, Berkeley, UCSC, and SJSU (and maybe UCD).</p>
<p>^You can apply online now with everything. Recruiters will recruit you base on your linkedin profile. I know my husband received one the other day and he is not even looking, heck he is looking for retirement soon.</p>
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<p>However, many students will not even know that many non-local employers beyond the nationally-known ones even exist. Just look at all of the students posting here who think that GAFAM are the only companies a CS major would work at after graduation.</p>
<p>I donât think most students are that uninformative. I mentioned to my daughter that I like Quora and she already came back with tons of reasons why she doesnât like Quora.
The younger generation are much more well verse in technology, they are native to technology while we are immigrant(not the usual sense) to technology.
My humanities kid was able to set up her IT for her company so that 4-5 people can work together. She even helped us setting up our new computer and we are both engineers in the computer field. Either we grew older and became outdated and she grew smarter.</p>
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<p>You probably received a Presidential Scholarship or whatever itâs called, which is basically a loan-free fin aid package and is awarded to 20-25 needy accepted students based on merit.</p>
<p>@Ghostt yeah I received the presidential scholarship</p>
<p>âIâm not a Barnard â â â â â (just a Columbia alum), but I donât think Barnard is anything like what @calmom cracks it up to be. Plainly, its poor endowment relative to Wellesley, Smith and Bryn Mawr says something about the mediocrity of its graduates relative to those of other womenâs college.â</p>
<p>What a silly statement. Barnard might have a nominally smaller endowment than these other LACs, but it has access to all the facilities and resources of one of the greatest universities in the world. The campus is only 4 acres, for crying out loud. Of course theyâre not going to need 800 million dollars to maintain that.</p>
<p>Students at Barnard can cross-list almost any class at Columbia, an Ivy League institution. I think that says more than enough about the quality of the education youâll receive there. </p>
<p>@Englishman, your boyfriend went to Barnard? I find that interesting considering itâs a womenâs college⊠</p>
<p>@englishman wrote: âbtw I did mean best friend female as :bf, thxâ</p>
<p>Read the whole treadâŠnot just partsâŠ</p>
<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 PhDâs these days - a lot of post-docs who arenât able to secure facultypositions. (Thereâs another thread on CC touching on this, I think in the Parentâs section). And while it is common for STEM PhDâs to be fully funded, the funding is harder to come by in the social sciences â where the OPâs 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 Columbiaâs 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 âlife of the mindâ 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 donât want to live in an academic bubble â and of course have no intention of pursuing a career in academia⊠So those broad numbers donât say much about comparative academic quality.</p>
<p>In a more narrow sense those figures would be useful â that is, while numbers about the total number of future Ph.Dâs arenât 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>
<p>DrGoogle - the data point of one kid you know isnât really evidence of anything --but Reed does have a somewhat quirky culture that might lead more students who are weak in the area of marketable job skills, or unrealistic expectations when it comes to work & career. That could be simply the students who are attracted to the somewhat counter-cultural environment that Reed offers in the first place â or it could be influenced by an overall academic culture that is more focused on academic theory than on practical applications. </p>
<p>I mean â I donât know the OP but I can understand whyshe might have felt Reed to be a poor fit. Reed was my sonâs top choice for a college â but he had to turn down the spot they offered him due to inadequate financial aid. It probably would have been a good fit for him at the time â but in no way appropriate for my daughter, who is much more of a âdoerâ than a âdreamer.â </p>
<p>Myd. has never been unemployed â she had a job lined up in her field the day she graduated. But by the time she graduated she already had a work resume of about 20 different short term and part time jobs she had held over the years-- college isnât the only source of job skills or job training. So it may just be that the more career-focused students like my d. tend to also gravitate toward campuses in or near the urban centers where they think the jobs are, and they are more likely to ask about internship opportunities than PhD numbers. </p>