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<p>That won’t be useful unless we manage to cut the research uni student bodies to just their liberal arts students, otherwise the two student bodies wouldn’t even come close to being comparable. After all, we wouldn’t expect the hordes of business and engineering students to desire PhDs as much as liberal arts students… at least in principle.</p>
<p>Who says that LACs are not filled with students aspiring to be lawyers, doctors, Wall street tycoons, same as students at universities?</p>
<p>For a lot of students, the main reason for choosing a LAC over a university is not the vaunted focus on undergraduate teaching or the supposed excellence in preparing students for “the life of the mind.” It really comes down to size.</p>
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<p>Although, “more than one student” does not exactly make for a “feeder”. Geography and social relationships probably play some role along with academic quality. The LAC numbers are so small it would be hard to draw any interesting conclusions about the strengths of Bucknell or Smith per se, relative to other LACs, based on a few placements into specific science programs.</p>
<p>When the WSJ did its study of top “feeder” schools, it counted one year’s placements into a set of 15 professional school programs. At least 20 of the top 50 per capita feeders were LACs (depending on what counts as a LAC), but in many cases the number of placements even into the entire set of 15 schools was in the single digits per LAC. From such low numbers (e.g. 3 for “#31” New College), how can we conclude anything about the strength of the school per se compared to another small school just off the edge of the list? You’d probably want to account for the number of rejections as well as acceptances, too. </p>
<p>For all we know, LAC graduates disproportionately favor 2 choices: going to grad school, or living in their parents’ basements eating Cheetos all day. So they enter grad schools in disproportionate numbers, but maybe they’re rejected from grad schools in disproportion, too. The HEDS findings are suggestive but there’s still a lot we really don’t know.</p>
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<p>Hypothesis: the number of these students at LACs is much lower per capita than the number at peer national universities. LACs attract disproportionately high numbers of introverts. They attract disproportionately high numbers of kids from wealthy families who are smart, but who have less drive to achieve high incomes and greater tolerance for postponing careers. These factors, not relative academic quality, account for the higher rate of Ph.D. production by LACs. Furthermore, although their overall rate of Ph.D. production is high, their rate of Ph.D.s from top departments is relatively low. </p>
<p>Now, how would we know if any of this is true or false?</p>
<p>^^ We don’t. I mean, for scientists, you all seem predisposed toward anecdotal evidence.</p>
<p>^ If that’s true it would not be too surprising, since we’re making real world decisions involving things dear to us (our children and our money) based on a dearth of non-anecdotal evidence for instruction quality. We do have a lot of good numbers (average SAT scores, faculty salaries, endowment size, graduation rates, class size, etc.) but as far as I know, not much that directly indicates undergraduate department quality especially at liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>By the way, Coureur, I find 9 articles in the journal Cancer Research with Haverford College faculty members as co-authors since 1987. I find 8 articles in the journal Nature and 11 in the journal Science with Haverford College faculty members as co-authors or sole author since 1986. </p>
<p>You can check my findings here:
<a href=“http://165.82.168.47:591/facultybib/FMPro?-db=citations.fp5&-format=basic.html&-view[/url]”>http://165.82.168.47:591/facultybib/FMPro?-db=citations.fp5&-format=basic.html&-view</a></p>
<p>This would not exactly shatter an observation that the LAC contribution to major journals is low … but it’s not zero.</p>
<p>^^Oh I know it’s not zero in the long view, because I’ve seen a small handful of LAC papers go by in the literature over the years myself. But I was surprised to find zero in the sample of >600 authors I looked at last week. Prior to the count I was guessing there would be about ten in a random sample of that size. But given the many thousands of authors Cancer Research, Science, and Nature have published since 1986-87, it would be truly astonishing if a respectable LAC couldn’t scare up a few authorships.</p>
<p>Look, let’s do something verifiable and accessible: NSF/NIH research money. By my rough estimate, the total awarded to Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Swarthmore Haverford and Oberlin alone, amounts to some $30 million a year: [nsf.gov</a> - SRS Academic Institutional Profiles - US National Science Foundation (NSF)](<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/profiles/alphlist.cfm]nsf.gov”>404 Page Not Found | NCSES | NSF)</p>
<p>Assuming something on the order of 100 science majors per college that’s $300,000 per student that are either a waste of tax payer dollars or do indeed constitute “fabulous research opportunities”, for labs that are almost entirely dependent on undergraduates.</p>
<p>^^That’s one way of looking at it if you want to measure resources going in. I was more interested in measuring results coming out - to see whether they really are doing a lot of important research. And put in larger context, I’m not sure that these grant figures are in the LAC’s favor. If they’ve got riches going into their research but very little top quality results coming out, that would suggest an inefficient use of the resources.</p>
<p>John Wesley:</p>
<p>I think you are making the point that not all LACs are equal.
Citing a handful of tippy top LACs is tantamount to suggesting that HYPS are typical of all universities.
The problem in this thread has been generalizations about LACs vs. universities, not to mention about students as well.</p>
<p>An undergraduate student does not need to do top quality cutting edge research in order to learn how to do top quality cutting edge research. It is entirely possible that an undergrad at Harvard might work in a top notch prominent research lab and get authorship on a Cancer Research paper as part of a big team, but not necessarily learn how to do science. On the other hand, an undergrad at Swarthmore might work on her own project under a faculty member’s direct supervision and maybe present an abstract in a specialty conference but get never get published, yet she might really learn more about what it takes to do good science. The Harvard student with a paper would most certainly look better to medical school admissions officers but a careful PhD admissions officer might spend the time to actually look at what the student did, and realize that the Harvad student just did a whole lot of Western blots and generated one figure while the Swarthmore student designed, executed and presented her own research project on Saccharomyces.</p>
<p>ETA: None of this contradicts what coureur has been saying- LACs are not a very big source of top notch cutting edge, high-impact scientific research.</p>
<p>Based on a study quoted in Post #33, LAC’s account for 11% of all degrees issued in the US, but LAC grads account for 17% of all PhD’s. This info. is for all disciplines, not just science. . </p>
<p>NSF research shows that liberal arts grads are “overrepresented” in science PHd programs…and Mollie’s data from a large highly ranked graduate program in the sciences would also indicate that LAC grads are overrepresented.</p>
<p>As for the feeder schools to her program…she may have the data to show how many feeder schools there are for the research univs, too. Those of you better trained in stats will know the comparison…but…if 4 schools send 2 or more students for a total population of 35…would we expect that about 5 times as many research univs (about 20) would send 2 or more for a total population of 167? </p>
<p>I’m interested in the stats (especially when they help prove a point I’m trying to make!) however, the emphasis of what I’ve been trying to state on this thread is that students that graduate from LAC’s, especially top LACs, are being admitted to, and finding success, at top doctoral programs in the sciences as well as other disciplines. The admissions committees at those graduate schools are not choosing research school grads over LAC grads (as indicated in post #21), but are actually choosing LAC grads at a rate higher than what would be expected based on their % of the population.</p>
<p>As for whether or not top national companies know about LAC’s, if you review the schools recruiting for undergrads in all disciplines (not just business grads) at a particular LAC, you’ll find that nationally ranked LAC’s have ample representation of major US companies recruiting on campus. Local LAC’s that may not be in the top 50 are known locally…just as research univs that are not highly ranked are also known locally.</p>
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<p>No. It just shows that graduates from top LACs get admitted to top universities. Not that graduates from LACs “get admitted to top doctoral programs in the sciences as well as other disciplines.”</p>
<p>There is a huge variation among LACs in terms of quality and range of the offerings, resources, students. What Mollie’s stats show is that only a very very few (top) LACs send more than one students to Harvard over the course of FOUR years. These top LACS are well-known to people in higher education both in terms of their selectivity and the excellence of their faculty and the resources available to the students.</p>
<p>Which top LACs successfully send students to which top Ph.D. programs depends on the discipline. Some top LACs are known for their strengths in specific fields.</p>
<p>There’s also a point I didn’t make in presenting the numbers the way I did – that private research universities do a much better job than public research universities in getting students admitted to our program per capita. So overall, the most true thing that can be said is that large public universities are sending very few students our way relative to the size of their graduating classes, so everybody else gets a bigger share of the pie by comparison.</p>
<p>I also presume that, by the time I graduate, I will have at least two or three years’ worth more numbers to add to my analysis. However, it is my fervent hope that I will not have more than about six years’ worth of data in total. :)</p>
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<p>O.K., but I just found 8 articles from one LAC in the journal Nature over a period of about 23 years. I estimate that in that time, Nature has published about 3600 articles (23 years at ca. 3 articles per week). That is about equal to the number of institutions of higher learning in the USA. So if the authorship of Nature articles were evenly distributed among all of them, we’d expect about 1 article per institution every 23 years. Right? So Haverford is performing at about 8x expectations. Right?</p>
<p>Of course, the great majority of these 3000+ institutions probably will never publish anything in Nature. So how big is the peer group? 100 top schools? So, if evenly distributed just among those, maybe we’d expect 36 Nature articles per school? But how large is the average school? Haverford has all of about 1100 students. Harvard has more than 5x as many undergraduates, Berkeley more than 10x. Let’s take 5000 as the representative undergraduate size (which I think must be a little low). 3600 articles distributed among 500,000 fesbu’s (fixed elite student body units, pronounced “fezboos”) works out to 7.2 Nature articles per 1000 fesbu’s over our 23 year period. Therefore, the expectation for a school of 1100 students would be 8.64 Nature articles. Oh! Haverford is performing almost exactly to expectations for a top 100 school, even though cutting edge research might not be part of its core mission, and even though it has no graduate students to help perform the work.</p>
<p>So I’m thinking maybe Coureur’s sample was too small, or maybe his counting method made it too easy to overlook some authors. Or, please tell me (nicely) if I’m just way off in my estimates.</p>
<p>Nature only publishes 3 articles per week? Are you only looking at their full-length research articles? What about Letters to Nature? Were those 8 articles full-length research articles? That would be impressive indeed. Were they from 8 different authors at Haverford or is there just one faculty member who published most of those papers?</p>
<p>8 articles in 23 years is equal to one article every 3 years. That may be a more meaningful metric than the number of students.</p>
<p>Tied into post #314, it appears that Mollie’s research also shows that there is a huge variation among research universities in terms of quality and range of the offerings, resources, students.</p>
<p>No surprise…and no argument from me…that the quality of education and undergrad research preparation varies between well endowed/well connected LACs and research universities vs less well endowed/connected schools if either variety. So…now we can add this thread to the long list of “is it worth it” threads!</p>
<p>Just curious how many research universities are considered “feeders” for the 167 students from research univs at the grad bio program at Harvard (there have to be a few that are 10 or 20 students per undergrad univ…) Based on the info. in post #315, I would assume most of these “feeders” are private…but a little surprised if at least Berkeley or Michigan wouldn’t be in the top feeders. But…another digression from the main point of this thread.</p>
<p>I don’t know what the average weekly number of articles has been over 23 years. I just picked 3 because that’s about the recent number of full-length articles per week, it appears. </p>
<p>I’m only trying to estimate full-length research articles. That’s what the Haverford online bibliography seems to include (not letters etc). In some cases there are multiple cites for a single Haverford professor. But that’s going to be the case for non-Haverford people in Nature, too.</p>
<p>I posted the link to the Haverford online bibliography, anyone can query it. I’m only citing Haverford because that school makes it so convenient.</p>