Curious to know which schools have the best biology programs, aside from the well-known ones like Stanford or MIT.
here’s a start.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124709
Note that the above rankings consider doctoral programs characteristics, which differ substantially from characteristics that would be relevant to a student seeking an undergraduate college, and therefore would be likely to be counterproductive in your search.
What part of Bio? Human? Animal? Plant? Medical? Biology is a large field and research can get very specific. Some schools are better than others within sections of “Biology.” Larger schools like Cornell will have more options and can be good across all of them, but most specialize a bit.
Then be sure the school lets undergrads participate in the research at meaningful levels. At some schools the best “parts” are reserved for graduate students. I was recently talking with some students from Eckerd who are working alongside grad students now on the same summer project (Chemistry/Bio/Ocean project) and they’re amazed that the grad students have no experience with certain machines and tests that they got to use in “average” (lab) classes at Eckerd. The grad students (already had their undergrad degree) had to be taught how to run the machines to do the tests. The undergrad Eckerd students already knew how to do it. The difference? What undergrads get to do. Eckerd specializes in Marine Science as one of their majors. The other schools had it as a major, but grad students get to do the “fun stuff.”
This can support what the pp wrote. A school terrific for graduates is not necessarily a good one for undergrads. The University of Rochester is well known for purposely having undergrads involved in research (voluntary, but around 75+% do last I saw and getting involved is relatively easy), but not all schools with graduate degrees do. When we visited other schools looking specifically at Marine Science we asked some graduates working at the lab if they ever had undergrads helping them out and they looked at us surprised, saying, “Well, I know they come and take a class or two here, but no, I haven’t seen any doing what we’re doing.” Compare that to Eckerd where there are no graduate students and undergrads do all of their research from specimen and data collection to interpretation of results.
If you would like faculty-mentored support for research across the sciences in general as well as access to top facilities and instrumentation as an undergraduate, then schools such as Swarthmore, Haverford, Amherst, Hamilton, Reed and Carleton would offer you a few top-level options to consider. Though these colleges would be reaches for most applicants, they nonetheless may offer acceptance rates somewhat higher than their university equivalents.
Here are the schools with the highest percentage of undergrads later earning a PhD in life sciences: