<p>"if you need teachers hand-holding you for another four years"</p>
<p>You can make fun of it, but you're arguing that mentors' personal attention is worse than none. Undergrads benefit from the best possible grounding in basics.</p>
<p>^ I'm not saying it is worse because it's not like there is NO personal attention at big research schools. I'm just saying that there is a difference between how "adult-like" you are treated in bigger research schools and tiny schools.</p>
<p>^ Call it whatever names you want; the mentorship works. BTW, be happy: Rice's grad school stats are up there with those of LACs:</p>
<p>Percentage of graduates getting a PhD
PhDs and Doctoral Degrees:
ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database</p>
<p>Number of Undergraduates:
ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database</p>
<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period. Includes all NSF doctoral degrees inc. PhD, Divinity, etc., but not M.D. or Law. </p>
<p>1 35.8% California Institute of Technology<br>
2 24.7% Harvey Mudd College **
3 21.1% **Swarthmore College<br>
4 19.9% Reed College
5 18.3% Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br>
6 16.8% Carleton College
7 15.8% Bryn Mawr College<br>
8 15.7% Oberlin College<br>
9 15.3% University of Chicago<br>
10 14.5% Yale University
11 14.3% Princeton University<br>
12 14.3% Harvard University<br>
13 14.1% Grinnell College
14 13.8% Haverford College<br>
15 13.8% Pomona College<br>
16 13.1% Rice University
17 12.7% Williams College
18 12.4% Amherst College<br>
19 11.4% Stanford University
20 11.3% Kalamazoo College<br>
21 11.0% Wesleyan University<br>
22 10.6% St John's College (both campi)<br>
23 10.6% Brown University<br>
24 10.4% Wellesley College<br>
25 10.0% Earlham College</p>
<p>vossron, PhD productivity is more a function of nature than nurture. LACs attract students that are more likely to end up in academe than research universities.</p>
<p>Or LACs attract students that are more likely to end up in academe and research universities than in jobs! Actually, all LAC students and big U undergrads who earn PhDs end up in research universities where they earn those PhDs.</p>
<p>The competitive factor was what I recollect. I recall hoping the bell curve for an exam be reasonable or turning in an essay for a class size of 500 students and hoping it was graded first or last. My professors freely admitted the essays started to look the same after the first 50 graded, T.A.'s felt the same way. Speaking of T.A.'s, I resented having to learn multi-variable calculus from foreign exchange grad. students who barely spoke English. Every time they turned to work out a problem on the chalkboard you couldn't understand a word they said, much less the math problem they were trying to explain how to do but I digress.I remember coming from high school feeling like a"big fish" from a small pond entering college like a "small fish" in a big pond.</p>
<p>I suppose I was lucky. The only TA's I had were in my discussion or lab sections. In case you wonder, I went to Wisconsin and Michigan for Chemical Engineering. I guess I couldn't do that at an LAC.</p>