<p>Hi all! Hoping for some wisdom from the parents of CC. While I'm almost done with the college process for my kiddos, I find myself now giving advice to those coming up behind me. One of the questions I'm getting is "S is looking for a good program in x, how do you find that out?"</p>
<p>So first I share that they need to remember that the average college student changes majors 2-3 times, so major x should just be part of their equation. And I know that Rugg's publishes lists of schools good in particular majors, but I've also seen eyerolling on CC about Rugg's. For d2, we went with the "who cares about this?' mindset to find the Association of Writers & Writing Program lists of undergraduate writing programs, so I know that associations in a particular discipline will often have some lists of undergrad programs in their field.</p>
<p>Any other advice? This is for students at a solid HS where 90% go to a 4 year college but most stay in state. These kiddos are looking to spread their wings, so the HS GC's probably won't know many specifics about far off schools.
Thanks in advance!</p>
<p>well, we found Ruggs to be very helpful when looking for DS, but he was interested in majoring and minoring in 2 entirely different areas and had the chops to get accepted at top colleges as well. So it helped him find and also eliminate quite a few colleges based on their relatively strong or weak program strength.</p>
The National Science Foundation has some info on the relative quantity of PhD students from various undergrad institutions. So if your kid is interested in a science PhD career, that is helpful, although the data is not quite as recent as we would like.
Other PhD topics besides science – Reed College has a list of several different types of PhD on their website with the top 10 PhD producers in each area (Reed is on all the top 10 lists… that is why they have this).
Although I find the description of their methodology somewhat murky, Fiske lists the top majors for each college in the Fiske book.</p>
<p>Another thing I have looked at is how many faculty a college has in a given area (sometimes the numbers are just tiny… D2 is interested in Physics, and we realized this week that one college on her list has only three teachers in that subject area – good to know now vs. later).</p>
<p>I think another way is to come up with a list of questions for the departments at the college about where their grads are moving on to, what types of internships they are getting, any info on school’s average score on the MCAT, stuff like that. And talking with the career placement office might be enlightening. But I sure wish there were better info on outcomes by college that were easy to get at – sort of like the Common Data set, but with outcome info (grad school test admission scores, grad school placement, employment placement statistics, salary statistics, etc.).</p>
<p>We struggled with this issue as well. My daughter had a wide range of interests including physics and three languages when she was going through the process. </p>
<p>My original thought was to contact top grad programs and ask where their good candidates were doing their undergraduate work. That did not work very well. Then I ( and my daughter could have done this too had she ever been home) e-mailed professors at a couple of schools with good programs and asked them about other schools with good programs. It was done very tactfully and I had pretty good luck. The best answer I got was from a professor from Stanford. DD did not want to go to California and we would have been full pay, but the guy was a gem. He told me three different schools that were moderately priced with great programs, but then added, “If there is any way you could swing it, she should come here because we really are the best.” </p>
<p>So, my feeling is that professors, though often biased, do have an idea of who has good programs in their fields. If it is a less popular field, the profs are particularly helpful.</p>
<p>As always, thanks to all! I think I will stick with recommending Rugg’s and add the Fiske book as well. I’ve sent one mom a link to the CAPTE site for PT programs and I’ll recommend that the others look at professional organizations as well.</p>
<p>These are all great families but they’re not going to spend dozens of hours sifting through schools; they’d just like a list of good schools to look at in a particular area.</p>