Since your son is interested in pursuing a research-oriented grad degree, I would suggest considering the undergraduate origins of earned PhDs published by Swarthmore (itself a fantastic school!) for the areas of interest.
The tables in the link are adjusted by school size.
If Bio and CS/Math are of interest, one could ask “What colleges that are in the top 10 for rate of PhD production for Bio and CS/Math?” (Top 10 is an arbitrary cut-off, but you get the idea.)
Of the schools you listed, Carleton appears in the top 10 in both lists. But if your son is open to other LACs, Harvey Mudd and Swarthmore also appear. If open to universities, schools like MIT, Caltech, and UChicago also place extremely well.
If you are interested in more granularity, the NSF site can be queried for actual counts in specific subjects.
Hehe both sound scary to me :-). My son claims that the program and education is the only thing that matters to him. Hope he continues to think that after enrollment!
In terms of strategy, the other good point raised by @merc81 to make sure you don’t gloss over is to factor in how many student athletes are admitted to a given school. The NESCAC schools recruit athletes because they’re serious and competitive in athletics. I don’t know the % by school, but it’s safe to say that athletes at those schools eat up a big % of the ED slots.
So, for example, if it’s true as @merc81 mentioned that Grinnell may admit fewer athletes (I have no independent knowledge of that myself), then in theory there would be more ED capacity to which your son would apply.
I think a ranking of total R&D expenditures by institution is certainly interesting, but less immediately relevant for guiding undergraduate college choice than looking at actual rates of college students who go on to earn PhDs if the goal being considered is eventually earning a PhD. For starters, the larger an undergraduate population, the more students who go on to do something, all else being equal. To get a rate, one needs to divide the number earning PhDs by total students graduating from the college over some period. Second, on a per capita basis, R&D funding is disproportionately spent on grad student activities at institutions having both grad and undergrad populations. So it’s not only true that a larger school would have more funding than a smaller one when all else is equal, but it’s also true that within that school there’s going to be uneven resource allocation that heavily favors graduate students, should they be present.
If a student were going only off total R&D spending and had their choice of any school, they would ostensibly select Johns Hopkins for college. If they were going only off PhD undergraduate origin production rate, they would pick Caltech. Both incredible schools, but if one’s overriding interest were in fact going on to a STEM PhD program, a randomly chosen Caltech student is about 5 times more likely, even though Johns Hopkins has about 7.5 times total R&D spending.
Ample undergraduate access to research (not a given just because there’s graduate research) is absolutely part of what helps an institution prepare students for graduate research programs. But there are other things too, including the structure of the curriculum, reputation for rigor, instruction quality, student quality, culture/history, and so forth.
Some caveats… obviously one should not base their college decision on a single metric or ranking. I’m all learning as much as possible about every school, even the “softer” stuff like school personality and what students do for fun, for determining fit. Also the links I have shared are for earned PhDs. OP indicated an MS might be of interest. I haven’t seen rates comparing undergrad schools for eventually earned MS degrees, but I think there’s probably good correlation between MS and PhD placement success.
The link I previously posted was to Swarthmore’s PhD rates by college sorted into different broad academic areas. If interested, here’s what their consolidated list looks like:
This is interesting. Will see if I can correlate it with lower number of graduate students and normalize with the undergraduate students and see how they rank!
Grinnell in all respect seems to be an excellent college for research. Good overall rank, Large endowment per student, Good number of PhDs in Biology. Seems to be providing a large jump in terms of acceptance rate from RD to ED.
From the college website:
Admission Rate (4-year averages)
Early Decision I & II (combined): 58%
Regular Decision: 14%
Overall admit rate: 16%
If this is coupled with less emphasis on athletes for ED then seems worthwhile to consider it.
It may be more reliable to do your own research on this. For example, Grinnell fields 18 varsity teams, while the somewhat larger Hamilton fields 29. Nonetheless, whatever the implications of this may be to admission, the classroom experience at these schools seems similarly excellent:
Yes will do targeted research on Grinnell with regards to athlete offers. Classroom experience list is interesting. University of Richmond where we are applying for early action seems to be quite high in the rank.
With all the discussions on this group: University of Richmond (EA), Colorado College (EA), Bowdoin, Grinnell, Reed (EA) seem very worthwhile. If we decide to go for ED then either Bowdoin or Grinnell
I am thinking of applying to Oberlin as a safety. Oberlin seems to be producing good % of PhDs in Life Sciences.
A couple of colleges from California would be good to add to the list. However, good colleges from California seem to be too much of Reach.
My only caveat with using the NCES Survey results for baccalaureate granting institutions (LACs) as a benchmark is how to account for all the biology majors who might just want to be medical doctors?
@circuitrider true that. Hopefully that % remains constant across and ranking won’t change… However considering the absolute number of PhDs may not be too high it can move around.
As an opinion, some of the inclusions/exclusions of the ranking seem fairly arbitrary, as does its order. Nonetheless, many schools that I’d regard as high in the types of research opportunities that would be meaningful to an undergraduate, such as Grinnell, appear in the list.
IMHO, these variables are not necessarily reflections of academic strength. Anecdotally speaking, eastern seaboard LACs tend to have a larger number of preprofessional students who favor business and medicine as career paths over academia. Notably, of the top 10 colleges surveyed in the Baccalaureate Origins study (cited by @dad9000 ), only Swarthmore, Haverford and MIT are located on the east coast.
**From CDS. Note as well that Bowdoin’s range reflects its policy of requiring all students to submit scores as a condition for enrollment, when available. This deflates its apparent scores in comparison to those of schools without this policy.
