@tk21769 - interesting point, although in the nsf ranking, Penn isn’t even in the top 50 as a Ph.D. Feeder school. That seems doubtful - it’d certainly be in the top 50, right?
Either way, I’m curious to hear from others on this thread - what programs grad or college attract the highest percentage of really smart kids?
@stevensPR wrote:
There appears to be an app for that:
Why “certainly”?
Other highly-ranked schools that aren’t in that size-adjusted top 50 list include Northwestern, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, WUSTL, Emory, Georgetown, and USC.
What makes these schools different from, say, the other 7 Ivies?
It may have something to do with a stronger pre-professional orientation.
Note, though, that some schools with big/strong engineering (or other pre-professiona) programs are among the top 50. Examples: Stanford, Cornell, CMU, Duke, Berkeley.
@circuitrider as i mentioned previously, payscale is flawed. It does not normalize for location cost of living (major discrepancies from new york versus the midwest for instance). It also only looks at a college’s bachelor degree recipients for undergraduate alumni. If i wanted to find the earnings of chicago undergrads that went on to earn a ph.d or mba or jd or ms, good luck with that. Same goes for acceptance rate to grad schools of choice. It would be valuable to find out how many got into their graduate or professional school of choice similar to some top prep private schools that provide this data relative to college acceptances.
im interested–could u do this for the top 30?
I think it’s important to note – if indeed we are going to include post-grad salary averages and percent who went on to grad/PhD programs – that both are largely due to the prerogative of the student. The school can inspire, but it cannot coerce. I don’t think we should include those metrics because they are so dependent on student choice… but if we do, we should weight them equally to avoid, as well as possible, bias.
And i think certain schools gain reputations for either road: pre-professional or intellectual. Penn is known as pre-professional and Chicago is known as intellectual. Both are great; they just attract kids with differing priorities.
@guitar321 sure I ll post it here as soon as I get a chance to do it.
@stevensPR wrote
Yes, yes, yes. I understand that. We’d all like as much granularity as possible. Not sure who is going to pick up the tab for all of that research. USNews doesn’t seem so inclined; I can name at least half-a-dozen different ways in which colleges are penalized for being located in the northeast including the cost of borrowing, the cost of running auxiliary enterprises (the bookstore, the cafeteria, the infirmary), the cost of non-academic staff - all of which mitigates any advantage they may have in the all-important “spending per student” matrices. Admitting inner-city (and immigrant kids who tend to settle on the coasts) who have not been SAT-prepped doesn’t get much love either,
I have also mentioned the existence of another salary data base: the College Scorecard which has the scale that Payscale lacks, is NOT self-reported and includes anyone who has taken out a federal loan regardless of whether they went on to graduate school.
PhD production statistics generally don’t measure the percentage of graduates who go on to grad/PhD programs. They measure the percentage who actually complete them. Sure, to complete a PhD one first must choose to pursue a PhD. But that choice alone suggests that a student probably had a pretty good academic experience in college.
@prezbucky we should be looking at success of students getting into desired grad or professional programs not just placement percentage there to truly evalaute outcome success of colleges. This completely removes self selection. It is a simple question to ask students - did you get into one of your top 3 graduate or professional schools applied to? A Ph.D from podunk is not equivalent to one from Harvard after all.
This is obviously data harder to come by but could be done via surveying.
I’m using “self-selection” here to refer to student preferences like “intellectual vs. pre-professional mindset” and “post-grad employment vs. going to grad/pro/PhD program”.
I think what you are suggesting can be helpful to rate schools based on the kids who do try to get that grad or PhD degree: did the school prepare them for their top choices per se? Has the school developed the reputation to put marginal admits over the top? Obviously here the quality of the input – the student – carries weight, but this could be useful to compare relative peer schools. If you’re comparing Penn to Questionable State, the inputs are so disparate that we can’t validly or reliably compare their impact on the students’ ability to unlock doors.
@guitar321 As promised. I have taken the top 30 national universities according to USNews and averaged out their ranking position in 6 major US college rankings (USNews,WSJ/THE, CollegeFactual, Niche, UniversityBenchmarks, Forbes).
I have given USNews a 30% weight and 14% to each of the other 5 rankings.
(average position score in parentheses)
1.Harvard (2.98)
2.Yale (3.42)
3.Stanford (3.88)
4.Princeton (3.94)
5.MIT (5.46)
6.Penn (7.16)
7.Columbia (8.5)
8.Duke (9.68)
9.Caltech (12.14)
10.Chicago (12.24)
11.Dartmouth (12.96)
12.NU (13.28)
13.Brown (13.3)
14.Cornell (14.86)
15.WUSTL (16.06)
16.Notre Dame (16.4)
17.Rice (16.54)
18.Vanderbilt (16.82)
19.USC (21.6)
20.JHU (22.6)
21.Tufts (23.08)
22.CMU (24)
23.Umichigan (24.76)
24.Berkeley (25.04)
25.Georgetown (25.18)
26.UCLA (25.68)
27.Emory (27)
28.UVA (29.32)
29.UNC-Chapel Hill (32.52)
30.Wake Forest (38.62)
Some corrections of previous mistakes:
In my original two lists I neglected to consider Berkeley and Georgetown because I though the were not ranked top 20 by USNews when in fact they are and are actually tied with Emory for #20 on USNews. If I had considered them the 20th spot on my original two lists would be occupied by Berkeley instead of Emory.
Notre Dame has a score of 16.4 when using the 30-14-14-14-14-14 weight distribution. The 16.68 score is true for equal weights on all rankings, and i neglected to change it on my second list with the updated weights.
Comments:
Many universities that were not considered in my original two lists because they do not rank in the USNews top 20 actually end up having a better aggregate score than some that are in the USNews top 20.
It is easy to change the weight distribution so if anyone wants to see a different weighting let me know.
I’d remove any ranking that puts weight on post-grad salaries or grad/PhD completion, but not the other. If you’re going to include them at all, both should be weighted equally. This throws an immense amount of shade on the Forbes ranking, since it gives so much weight to ROI (salary) but gives none to post-grad work.
But-- thanks for doing the leg work on this. It’s interesting.
@Penn95 thank you, thank you, thank you!
interesting that the average moves schools in USNWR’s high twenties, like tufts and michigan, to the low twenties, switching with schools like emory
@stevensPR (#49)
The NSF tracks massive amounts of data on PhD completions, in many fields for many baccalaureate institutions. I don’t think they currently have any way to track the complete record of grad school applications and admission results behind each of those completions. Yes, they could start up a big survey effort, but then they’d probably be getting self-reported information from a limited number of respondents.
A PhD completion is a significant accomplishment. In my opinion it reflects undergraduate preparation better than an application result even if it’s a PhD completed at an above-average program versus an acceptance to a top program. IMO it also reflects undergraduate preparation, at least in most arts & science disciplines, better than salary outcomes.
Have a look at the colleges listed on this page:
https://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html
Then have a look at the colleges listed on this page:
https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors?page=65
There’s some overlap. However, many colleges on the PhD-production lists are very different from many colleges near the top of the salary list. Schools like Reed, Carleton, Grinnell, and St. John’s do not appeal to the same interests and needs as schools like SUNY-Maritime, Babson, Santa Clara, or the service academies. Assessing Babson by PhD completions makes no sense. Assessing any college by salary outcomes may be useful, but doesn’t necessarily tell you much about program quality at a school like St. John’s. So, averaging these two metrics won’t be equally appropriate or informative for all colleges or for all college applicants.
Forbes does consider PhD completions (weighted at 2.5%, as one of its “academic success” criteria).