<p>So... there's lots of schools that are known for excellence in technical stuff like math and science but I was wondering what are considered the best colleges to obtain an English major. Basically, I would like to know which colleges have renown for their English curriculum. In additional to hearsay, a source or some sort of established ranking of colleges would be appreciated greatly. Thanks!</p>
<p>Following is a list of USNWR Top 50 national universities where 5% or more of the declared majors are in English. I can't attest to the strength of any of these, but it is logical to assume that the top programs would fall into this group of colleges. The data is drawn from collegeboard.com.</p>
<p>9% Yale
9% Columbia
9% Boston College
8% Georgetown
7% Harvard
7% UCLA
7% Tufts
7% W & M
7% U Illinois UC
6% U Chicago
6% Dartmouth
6% Rice
6% Vanderbilt
6% UC Berkeley
6% U Michigan
6% U Virginia
5% Stanford
5% Duke
5% Wash U StL
5% Brown
5% Emory
5% Notre Dame
5% U North Carolina
5% Wake Forest
5% Brandeis
5% U Rochester
5% U Washington</p>
<p>For what it's worth, these are the top 30 English departments in the latest (1995) National Research Council ranking of doctoral programs:</p>
<p>1 Yale 4.77
2 Harvard 4.77
3 Cal Berkeley 4.77
4 Virginia 4.58
5 Stanford 4.55
6 Duke 4.55
7 Cornell 4.49
8 Penn 4.47
9 Columbia 4.47
10 Chicago 4.41
11 Johns Hopkins 4.33
12 UCLA 4.10
13 Princeton 4.05
14 Brown 3.99
15 Cal Irvine 3.95
16 Michigan 3.93
17 Rutgers 3.92
18 Indiana 3.78
19 CUNY 3.78
20 NYU 3.77
21 Texas 3.54
22 Wisconsin 3.53
23 Washington 3.48
24 North Carolina 3.43
25 Southern Cal 3.41
26 SUNY Buffalo 3.40
27 Pittsburgh 3.40
28 Illinois 3.38
29 Northwestern 3.37
30 Vanderbilt 3.33</p>
<p>brown, wesleyan, vassar, connecticut college, oberlin, skidmore, bard, sarah lawrence, kenyon</p>
<p>huskem55 prompted my question: is there a list or ranking of top LACs in English? </p>
<p>In general, What schools produce the most English Phd's after normalizing for size of student population?</p>
<p>Anecdotally, when I think of English, I think of Kenyon ("Kenyon Review"?). I notice that 18 pct of its students choose English as an major. This stat suggests, presumably, they chose KEnyon for its English dept.</p>
<p>Hopkins has the #2 writing program in the country.</p>
<p>wellesley is like 3rd</p>
<p>Barnard/Columbia have excellent writing programs and have produced many writers and scholars.</p>
<p>English is the most popular major at Oberlin; they also have a high percentage of students going on to graduate school.</p>
<p>
[quote]
In general, What schools produce the most English Phd's after normalizing for size of student population?
[/quote]
Ask and ye shall receive...
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61091%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61091</a></p>
<p>Honestly, most of the top universities and LACs have great English programs (and bio and psych programs). Lawrence U and Franklin & Marshall haven't been mentioned yet, for example, but they both have fantastic English programs. Incidentally, the popularity of a major does NOT necessarily correspond to its quality. </p>
<p>You're going about it backwards...first figure out what you want in a college (size, location, extracurriculars, housing, cost, etc.). Once you have a tentative list of colleges that meet your criteria, THEN analyze their English programs. Carolyn has excellent advise for analyzing departments.</p>
<p>
<ul> <li>department accreditation by a professional association related to the subject</li> <li>faculty size compared to the number of graduating majors in the department </li> <li>where grads of the department go on to graduate school or employment</li> <li>any recent or pending changes in funding for the department (search the school's press releases, and the student newspaper archives), </li> <li>special facilities or capabilities of the department (department library, research facilities, special equipment, etc.)</li> <li>how many prof's in the department are tenured, how many are full-time, how many are just visiting or are not tenured. </li> <li>the philosophy or subject approach of the department. This can take some digging, and you may have to put some divergent pieces together to see if the department's goals/philosophies are a fit with yours. Two equally sized departments at different schools can have very different approaches.</li> </ul>
<p>I also like to get a hold of the actual course schedules (not the catalogue, which merely lists courses that may or may not be offered on a regular basis) for a few semesters and see how many classes the department typically offers, how large or small they are, and whether they fill up quickly or are over-subscribed. A department is only good if you can get into classes without too much trouble. </p>
<p>Another piece of advice that I also find helpful came from the Philosophical Gourmet site, which ranks Philosophy graduate programs but also has a section discussing how to evaluate undergrad programs, is to (1) find the rankings for top graduate level programs (these are usually more readily available) and then (2) look at the faculty bio's and see how many received their doctorates from the top grad programs. Of course, at large universities, you'll also need to find out how many of those faculty actually teach undergraduates.
</p>
<p>thanks, for the link and the search advice, warblers. I noticed that the two colleges you happened to mention as having great English (UG) pgms, LU and F and M, were not in the list. Two questions:</p>
<p>1) what made you say that they had great English programs?</p>
<p>2) why do you think they do not appear on that top 50 list? </p>
<p>Those two colleges, incidently, are on my sr daughter's radar. LU because of music opps - she is a violinist, as well as an English lover, and F and M from a friend's recommendation to explore it; my friend was responding to my D's desire for a well laid out, green kind of campus.</p>
<p>joecollegedad,
I don't know if you were referring to my post above about colleges in the USNWR Top 50, but that was for national universities only. I did a similar analysis for the USNWR Top 20 LACs and all but Harvey Mudd and Haverford had 5% or more of their declared majors in English. Here is the complete list and I apologize for not including F&M or Lawrence U, but you can find their information directly on collegeboard.com.</p>
<p>14% Davidson
13% Bryn Mawr
12% Wesleyan
11% Vassar
11% Grinnell
11% Colgate
10% Middlebury
10% Colby
9% Amherst
9% Carleton
9% Hamilton
8% Williams
8% Swarthmore
8% Wellesley
7% Bowdoin
7% W&L
6% Pomona
6% Smith
5% CMC</p>
<p>
[quote]
What made you say that they had great English programs?
[/quote]
My sister is seriously considering Lawrence for English/writing, and I've glanced over their department before. They have impressive course offerings for a LAC. I have a good friend studying Classics and English at F&M, and he's told me quite a bit about the programs there. The department has great offerings in both literature and writing, and the school has recently opened a building for writing. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Why do you think they do not appear on that top 50 list?
[/quote]
Pre-professional schools don't fare very well in PhD production lists, which can be a severe drawback to their usefulness. You'll note that Duke was ranked #6 by the NRC and has arguably the best literary criticism program in the country, but it doesn't appear on the English PhD list. F&M and Lawrence are much more pre-professional than nearby Swat and Beloit (both of which fare quite well in the list).</p>
<p>English majors at Duke, F&M, Lawrence, etc. may choose to go to law school rather than grad school. This doesn't mean the English programs at these schools are worse; it just means that they don't produce as many PhDs. In any case, the PhD production list doesn't account for <em>which</em> graduate schools students get into- something that's pretty important!</p>
<p>hawkette, I wonder why kenyon did not appear in your list. As you can see below, collegeboard says that 18 pct of its students choose to major in English. </p>
<p>And, As was hinted at previously by another poster, This stat is but one indicator of a good UG program. The phd list is more a longitudinal measure. It is a 'harder' measure since it measures how many 'people walked the English walk' (continued on in the field to the highest degree) - vs declaring a major possibly based on buzz or simply by default.</p>
<p>Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio
College Board code: 1370 </p>
<p>Most Popular Majors</p>
<p>For Bachelor's Degrees
Social Sciences: 21%
English: 18%
Visual and Performing Arts: 11%
Biology: 10%
Psychology: 10%
Interdisciplinary Studies: 9%
Foreign Languages and Literature: 7%
History: 5%
Philosophy and Religious Studies: 5%</p>
<p>My lists were drawn from smaller universes of colleges, ie, those ranked in the USNWR Top 50 national universities and the USNWR Top 20 LACs. Kenyon was not ranked in the top 20 LACs and thus not included in the work that I did.</p>
<p>warbler said--
Pre-professional schools don't fare very well in PhD production lists</p>
<p>warbler, what do mean my pre-professional school?</p>
<p>In my uninformed view I take a pre professional school as an UG school that is oriented to a specific profession such as business management, nursing, audiology, engineering, computer programming/science etc. I further think that preprofessional tends to contrast with a 'pure' liberal arts school...which,</p>
<p>as famously articulated by that Amherst Dean,</p>
<p>"Trains you for nothing, but prepares you for everything"</p>
<p>From my looksee into LAwrence U so far, it seems less a p professional school and more of the Amherst variety.</p>
<p>This almost sounds like another distinct thread,</p>
<p>... *What is a pre professional school? List please.</p>
<p>has anyone seen such a thread on cc ( Iam newer to this board)?</p>
<p>
[quote]
In my uninformed view I take a pre professional school as an UG school that is oriented to a specific profession such as business management, nursing, audiology, engineering, computer programming/science etc.
[/quote]
You bring up a good point, so I had better clarify. When I say "pre-professional," I simply mean that more students are aiming toward business/law/med school rather than graduate school after graduation. For example, I would consider my own school (Duke) to be very pre-professional, although it obviously lacks majors like business, nursing, sports medicine, etc. because most students want to become doctors or i-bankers. Chicago and Columbia, on the other hand, send ~80% of their students to graduate school.</p>
<p>In fact, I recalled seeing LU 'in the same class picture' as Beloit and Swat for Phd production ...somewhere on this forum.</p>
<p>1 California Institute of Technology 35.8%
2 Harvey Mudd College 24.7%
3 Swarthmore College 21.1%
4 Reed College 19.9%
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 18.3%
6 Carleton College 16.8%
7 Bryn Mawr College 15.8%
8 Oberlin College 15.7%
9 University of Chicago 15.3%
10 Yale University 14.5%
11 Princeton University 14.3%
12 Harvard University 14.3%
13 Grinnell College 14.1%
14 Haverford College 13.8%
15 Pomona College 13.8%
16 Rice University 13.1%
17 Williams College 12.7%
18 Amherst College 12.4%
19 Stanford University 11.4%
20 Kalamazoo College 11.3%
21 Wesleyan University 11.0%
22 St John's College (both campus) 10.6%
23 Brown University 10.6%
24 Wellesley College 10.4%
25 Earlham College 10.0%
26 Beloit College 9.6%
27 Lawrence University 9.5%
28 Macalester College 9.3%
29 Cornell University, All Campuses 9.0%
30 Bowdoin College 9.0%
31 Mount Holyoke College 8.9%
32 Smith College 8.9%
33 Vassar College 8.8%
34 Case Western Reserve University 8.7%
35 Johns Hopkins University 8.7%
36 St Olaf College 8.7%
37 Hendrix College 8.7%
38 Hampshire College 8.6%
39 Trinity University 8.5%
40 Knox College 8.5%
41 Duke University 8.5%
42 Occidental College 8.4%
43 University of Rochester 8.3%
44 College of Wooster 8.3%
45 Barnard College 8.3%
46 Bennington College 8.2%
47 Columbia University in the City of New York 8.1%
48 Whitman College 8.0%
49 University of California-Berkeley 7.9%
50 College of William and Mary 7.9%</p>