<br>
<br>
<p>When we refer to “Ph.D. Production” or “Ph.D. Productivity” in the context of discussions like this, we usually are referring to the number of undergraduates who go on to earn Ph.D.s I assume IB was citing such data from a source such as the HEDS Consortium. If so, he’s saying that Harvard College produced the Nth highest number of graduates who went on to earn Ph.D.s in each of these science fields (for whatever window of time these numbers represent; however adjusted, if at all, for school population size). </p>
<p>That is, “Ph.D. Productivity” typically is cited as an indicator of undergraduate program quality. Appropriately, in my opinion. Though Harvard College is larger than CalTech and virtually all LACs, and the numbers on the right in IB’s list appear to be absolute numbers (unadjusted for populations), aggregated over a period of several years. If you adjust for school size, I’d expect Harvard to be somewhere in the #10-#20 range for some of these fields (bested by quite a few little LACs). But then, that would not account for the relative number of top science grads who go on to med school etc., not Ph.D. programs. Perhaps Harvard science students drop out, in disproportionate numbers, to found wildly successful software companies, or some such.</p>