Most people’s opinions will be based primarily if not entirely on how these universities stack up in the various rankings of math programs (USNWR, NRC, AWRU, etc.). While such rankings can certainly provide useful information if used in moderation, you should do your own research as well.</p>
<p>Likewise, the PhD production data should also be used with tremendous caution. Career plans can play a key role in how well schools fare. As TK briefly implied above, finance/ibanking/consulting/etc. in particular recruit top math students pretty heavily. As target schools, I suspect Duke and Northwestern’s numbers are noticeably lower than they would/should be due to losing students to these more lucrative fields. That is less the case at semi-target or non-targets (i.e. most of the rest of the list). </p>
<p>If you’re interested in the math programs at these schools, see where their students wind up. The vast majority of students at all of these universities do not get a PhD. Where are they, and what are they doing? For the students who did pursue a PhD, where did they go? Anecdotally, the math students I knew at Duke were insanely bright (e.g. AB Duke scholars) and had no problems getting into PhD programs at Berkeley, Princeton, etc. </p>
<p>The same advice for caution goes for LACs – in fact, more so. Do your own research carefully. Anecdotal evidence like the post below generally indicates that the best math programs are highly finicky and draw from top math programs. </p>
<p>So how do we compare math programs, systematically, for outcomes other than earned PhDs?
What data sources, comparable to the NSF webcaspar site, expose that information?
What other single, well-documented outcome (preferably one that depends on math skills) captures as many as 18% of all math majors?</p>
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<p>That ought to be all the more true of Harvard and Princeton (which nevertheless seem to generate many math PhDs). And it may be true of Williams, too. I think it’s fairly unlikely that strong math students at schools like Rice, Mudd, or Williams are being forced to settle for weak PhD programs (or being shut out of good career opportunities in finance, consulting, and IT). Maybe. I’d want to see some numbers. Meanwhile, anecdotes notwithstanding, the available data seems to suggest that math departments at those schools do have pretty good academic outcomes.</p>
<p>A key benefit of these is that you get an idea of where students are going. If the senior surveys are not publicly available, it’s usually quite easy to get ahold of them from a college’s OIR or career center. </p>
<p>Department newsletters (produced every semester or year) can be another goldmine of information. Newsletters for smallish departments often contain information about the awards undergraduates have won and where they’re going to graduate school. </p>
<p>You can also simply go directly to the source and request information from the math departments at schools of interest. These are not big departments and will track their most recent graduates. </p>
<p>
Certainly. Heck, twice as many seniors at MIT got jobs in consulting as in engineering last year. That said, Harvard and Princeton draw serious, dedicated math talent in a way that most other schools don’t – few schools have enough high performing (and/or masochistic) math students to offer classes like Math 55. Such students are not easily swayed from a career in math.</p>
<p>Yes, many alternate sources exist. However, examples like the one for Penn, above, presume one already has identified Penn as an interesting candidate and is ready to dig deep in one-off investigations into that school’s career data. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a Common Data Set for outcomes. So it can be challenging to do an apples-to-apples comparison of various academic outcomes in order to build that intitial list of candidate schools in the first place. </p>
<p>The second link in wr’s post above has a list of grad schools attended by UPenn math majors. It would be nice if something like this were available in a consistent format and made easily discoverable for college-to-college comparison. Unfortunately, it’s not perfectly clear what population of former math majors Penn is describing (how many of them, for which year(s), with what results.) But I would agree, once you’ve narrowed your list down, if you are serious about possibly pursuing a graduate degree in math, you’d probably want to see a list like this (to verify that graduates are being admitted to strong programs.)</p>
<p>The OP is already advanced beyond the 200 level, since the OP has taken real analysis (which is Williams’ 350 or 351). So the OP needs to evaluate Williams’, or any other, math department in the context of what courses s/he has already taken.</p>
<p>It would be nice if more schools made publicly available the post-graduation survey data, including graduate program and employment destinations.</p>
<p>@warblersrule
I agree with many of your points, and you do mention some very helpful ways of comparing schools, but that data seems pretty difficult to obtain. Except for a few select cases, information on where students attend after graduation and where graduate students come from is not very easily obtained - unless I’m mistaken. Anything you have regarding these topics would be much appreciated.</p>
<p>@momrath @marvin100
Williams and Harvey Mudd are at the top of my list of LACs, but I’ve left them out of this discussion mostly because LACs and Universities seemed different enough to warrant different methods of comparison. Thanks for the input, though; I’ll definitely highly consider both schools.</p>
<p>Interesting find, in the department web site instead of the career center web site.</p>
<p>But it looks like only one is going to a math PhD program (Minnesota). Seven are going to other PhD programs (operations research at Princeton, applied physics at Michigan, computer science at Princeton, chemistry at Cornell, organizational behavior, computer science at Berkeley, medical physics at Chicago), plus two master’s degree students and two other graduate students who did not list degree goal, none in math.</p>
<p>It does look like Wall Street and consulting companies do recruit at Williams (at least for math majors).</p>
<p>Where graduate students come from can be laboriously looked at by going to the graduate student roster on a school’s web site and seeing their CVs, if they choose to post them and include their undergraduate schools on them. Not all do, so you may only be able to look at a subset of graduate students at each school.</p>
Difficult, perhaps. Worth it to find a good fit, yes. Making a good college list can take a significant amount of time and research – both on and off CC. </p>
<p>Many fields (including my own) do not have rankings or PhD production data, yet students manage to create appropriate college lists anyway. Definitely use any data that’s available, especially to create broad list that can be narrowed down; several knowledgeable posters have already given you helpful info. You can never have too much information, however, and statistical information should always be supplemented with your own investigations. Here’s just a few suggestions of things to look into:
[ul][<em>]How big are math classes?
[</em>]How many full-time (i.e. assistant/associate/full professors) faculty members does the department have? What’s the ratio of professors to math majors?
[<em>]How often are upper-level math courses offered? Is there a decent spread of options? Check recent course schedules, not the course catalogues, which are frequently very out of date.
[</em>]Does the college offer cross-enrollment with other institutions?
[<em>]What research grants are available, and how easy are they for students to get?
[</em>]Find teaching reviews – what are students saying about the math professors?
[<em>]Get in touch with current math students (e.g. through a school’s Kappa Mu Epsilon chapter). What do they say about the math program?
[</em>]Glance over the clubs and organizations at each college. Are there math organizations? Tournament teams? Do they seem popular?
[*]Is there an undergraduate math journal? What types of things are students working on? How does the quality of the work compare? If there’s not an undergraduate math journal, where have math majors published, if anywhere?[/ul]</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus “It does look like Wall Street and consulting companies do recruit at Williams (at least for math majors).”</p>
<p>Yes, heavily. And definitely not just math majors. Many, many Williams alums wind up on Wall Street and in consulting. Maybe the most common paths for new grads, even.</p>
<p>I don’t think percentages of math majors mean anything. At worst, it’s misleading to present them as some quality measure. At Northwestern, 1/3 of the student body are in specialty schools and only half the student body are in arts and sciences. Furthermore, Northwestern has the reputated MMSS program and a pretty good applied math department (under the engineering school) that compete with the math department for students. In fact, MMSS has more students and is highly competitive. Regardless, it is puzzling to me why some people put emphasis on the percentage.</p>
<p>I think ranking is more relevant as it tells you the strength of the faculty. The number of math major is also relevant because you can look up the faculty roaster and determine faculty to math majors ratios. I’d also suggest one to look at the course catalogs. </p>
<p>The number of undergraduate degrees conferred on graduating math/stat majors is shown in each school’s Common Data Set file, section J. For example, at Northwestern in 2011-12, 3.4% of undergraduate degrees were in mathematics/statistics. I would agree that this percentage, by itself, is not too meaningful. If it is unusually high or low compared to peer schools, that might suggest something about the drawing power of the math department, or about the kind of students the school is attracting. However, it may need to be interpreted in the context of other information.</p>
<p>Anyway, this isn’t the measurement we’ve been discussing. We’ve been discussing math/stat PhD production (how many alumni, or what percentage of alumni, or what percentage of math/stat majors, go on to earn PhDs in this field). If you don’t think these are meaningful/useful numbers, then ignore them.</p>
<p>Exactly. Like I said, Northwestern’s MMSS (Math Methods for Social Sciences) is a very popular program, with over 160 students and an average SAT of over 1540 (M+CR). It probably has more drawing power than math/stats department at just about any school, not just Northwestern. So that doesn’t mean Northwestern math/stats is weak. It’s highly ranked after all and less students may be a plus because it translates to a lower student to faculty ratio.</p>
<p>I suspect Rice probably has higher percentages of STEM majors, not just math alone, because that’s the perceived strength of the school, relative to its other departments. But that doesn’t mean its STEM is necessarily better than other schools with lower percentages. Rice’s STEM departments are no better than those at, say, Penn but the difference is Penn is more balanced.</p>
<p>Rice and Northwestern have very similar test scores according to the NCES published data (actually kind of weird how similar the 25%/75% numbers are), with Northwestern’s 25% CR number a bit higher 690 vs. 670 at Rice, but trivial differences otherwise).</p>
<p>To try to decide between schools like Rice and Northwestern without visiting them and seeing what subjective factors affect your decision, to find out what you like about each would be hard - the statistical differences aren’t going to mean much. Perhaps going through the faculty pages and comparing research that is being done to see if something sparks an interest could help, but even that is probably less useful.</p>
<p>I do have a vague impression that after reading this thread - <strong>any</strong> of about a dozen or two schools discussed above are “good enough” and will have nearly unlimited graduate school and career possibilities and worrying too much about differences statistically between Rice and Northwestern is not as useful as other factors (family, distance, campus feel, lack of frats, weather etc.).</p>