<p>Okay, we’ve settled it: More significant research is done at the Big U, and those researchers are trained at the LAC.</p>
<p>Bunsen Burner:</p>
<p>Nobody that I know of is advocating rushing students past the basics by sending them to university instead of a LAC. Please show me who is doing that on this or any other thread.
What I have seen is people advocating skipping some classes in k-12. My S did so at the instigation of my S’s 6th grade science teacher who predicted that my S would find both 7th and 8th grade science boring. Which he would undoubtedly have done.
That, however, is not really a consideration in college. Those students who try to take more advanced courses than they can handle soon realize they are in over their heads and avail themselves of the add/drop option. What is far more likely to happen is students who got 5s on their AP-Calc repeating Calc 1 & 2.</p>
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<p>Oh please, suddenly backpedaling from your previous snide remark? At a LAC, even after mastering balancing equation, there is no hope for doing something else beyond that. That was the point.
And the 2 dimwitted folks gleefully responded “second that” to your non sequitur & snarky comment. It’s funny. =)</p>
<p>I plead guilty to the charge of being dimwitted because I am still reading and responding to this thread. :-)</p>
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Well, not in my program (biological sciences at Harvard) – our top feeders are MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, which together account for about a quarter of the students who have attended my program over the past four years.</p>
<p>There are only three LACs in our top 20 feeders – Brandeis, Bucknell, and Swarthmore.</p>
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<p>We “know” this part only by assertion. We don’t have any data. </p>
<p>Those “Ph.D. Production” data tables that tiny schools always win are based on a per capita or population analysis, not the total number of Ph.D.s produced. Thus they tell us what percentage of students at College X go on to get a doctorate but tell us nothing about their total impact - neither in terms of total number of Ph.D.s or where those Ph.D.s end up working.</p>
<p>my neighbor, who is an MD, noted that many colleagues at his research hospital obtained their undergrad degrees from LAC’s. he suggests that they received much more attention, and a better grounding in the sciences, than he did at yale.</p>
<p>middsmith, that is exactly my point: to be able to do any meaningful “research” a scientist need a solid foundation of knowledge in his/her chosen field. I’m not saying that LACs are superior to Big Research Us in producing publications in Nature or Science.</p>
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<p>Not in mine either, although that was decades ago. When I was in grad school here in California our top undergrad feeders were the UCs. I’m sure that Pomona College, the other Claremonts, and all the other western LACs were producing many fine graduates, but pretty much none of them were going into Immunology Ph.D. programs that I could see.</p>
<p>“We “know” this part only by assertion. We don’t have any data.”</p>
<p>Someone just needs to take roll at a representative Big U and note the faculty’s undergrad affiliations.</p>
<p>^^Being a scientist, I’m interested in doing this experiment and finding out the answer. But it’s turning out ot be harder than I thought. I first picked UCLA and looked at the School of Biological Sciences, since that was the fleld I analyzed for the publications. But of the first ten profs I looked at three went undergrad to universities and the other seven didn’t say anything at all about where they went to school.</p>
<p>So then I tried the Univ. of Minnesota. There the profs all listed only where they got their doctorates - no undergrad data at all. </p>
<p>Hmm…just searching for a useful school website could prove tedious. Anyone know of a representative State U where nearly all the profs list their undergrad colleges? I need a cooperative website in order to generate accurate data.</p>
<p>Here is a study that supports everyone’s position: [HHMI</a> Beyond Biology 101: The Baccalaureate Origins of Ph.D. Biologists](<a href=“http://www.hhmi.org/BeyondBio101/phdorig.htm]HHMI”>http://www.hhmi.org/BeyondBio101/phdorig.htm)
and this:
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<p>I just look up the faculty pages of my school’s CS and molecular biology departments, and this is a lot of people, I only found 2 professors who listed LACs in their educational background. Strange. Maybe LAC people don’t like naming their schools in their web pages?</p>
<p>Following Idad’s lead, this report, dated July 2008, covers the period up to 2006 for science & engineering.:</p>
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<p>[nsf.gov</a> - SRS Baccalaureate Origins of S&E Doctorate Recipients - US National Science Foundation (NSF)](<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/]nsf.gov”>Archive Goodbye | NCSES | NSF)</p>
<p>This suggests that proportional to their absolute numbers, LAC graduates are over-represented, but in absolute numbers they are in a distinct minority.</p>
<p>I’m feeling like this discussion is very skewed to the hard sciences, but I looked at the UC Berkeley sociology website. There are 32 faculty. 8 are LACs (Reed, Oberline, Weslayan, Bryn Mawr, E. Lang, Catabwa, Antioch, so 25% are LACs</p>
<p>^ So 25% of them come from LACs, but we need to know how many sociology PhD earners did their undergrad at an LAC, and how many at a Big U.</p>
<p>those who catagorically consider LAC’s as second tier also have second tier minds. ;-)</p>
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<p>I never said he was more credible, but I personally thought his opinion was interesting, and others might also, for the following reasons:
(1) Being a professor at a research U means he has first-hand experience with the readiness of graduate students
(2) Being a friend, he is genuinely interested in what is best for my S, and not just pitching for his particular school
(3) I threw in that he was Chinese, because many of the internationals I know tended to only have heard about research U’s and not LACs, so I wondered if started out with some bias against LACs</p>
<p>Qialah. For the great majority of students in the humanities and social sciences, there is no reason to be at a research university rather than a LAC, unless one develops a passion for a topic for which there are not enough faculty. This was the case of the young man I met who became interested in East Asian history via his prof, the lone prof of East Asian history at his well-regarded LAC. And for many students in the humanities and social sciences, good LACs (yes, there are mediocre ones just as there are so-so universities) can offer a superior experience as small classes are better able to deliver the kind of interaction that help students sharpen their reading and writing skills than do large classes. At large universities, this can be achieved through undergraduate seminars.
As well, the humanities and social sciences do not require access to expensive labs and so can thrive at LACs with more modest endowments than a lot of research universities.
Swarthmore, with its enviable endowment, is included among the top S&E producers, but most LACs are not in the same league.</p>
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<p>This discussion is skewed to the hard sciences because I was disputing the notion that LACs have great labs and do a lot of important research. Thus I started looking at where the lab-based research was coming from.</p>
<p>For non-laboratory academic departments, say Philosophy, Mathematics, or History, for all I know the LACs totally rule the research world. I wouldn’t know. I don’t read those journals.</p>