These are amazing tables!!! Thank you so much!!! JUst curious… what was your motivation in doing this hard work???
@liska21 The two Wesleyan listings look odd to me in the chart with this header.
Adm.Rate___SizePhD.Prod_PhD/1000%Need__%MeritAve.MeritSchool
20.92928237_81100__147200Wesleyan
75.417341196979__0____0Ohio Wesleyan
Pretty sure Ohio Wesleyan does better than zero on average merit, and if the other Wesleyan is the one in Middletown CT, I don’t think they do merit at all. If it’s a different Wesleyan, that needs spelling out for clarity.
Merit at Ohio Wesleyan
https://www.owu.edu/admission/financial-aid-scholarships-tuition/types-of-aid/merit-scholarships-awards/
Can’t find anything on merit at Wesleyan
@porcupine98 The data for Wesleyan (CT) seems to be accurate. The school has a program started in the mid 90’s called the Freeman Asian Scholars where 11 students (one from each of 11 Asian countries) get a full ride, and the criteria is indeed merit based. http://www.wesleyan.edu/admission/freeman/
This is the only merit aid given by Wesleyan (hence only the 1%), and otherwise the school is identical to its peers in only giving need-based aid and meeting 100% of that need.
Hm. OK, I guess that explains the Wesleyan in CT part, though that data is irrelevant to the average US applicant. Ohio Wesleyan though? They definitely offer merit, so why the zeroes?
Try accounting for the effects of admission selectivity.
How many STEM PhDs does a college turn out per N students who enter with SAT-M scores >= 700?
That might get you a little closer to identifying colleges that prepare/motivate students well for advanced study, even if they aren’t cherry-picking the strongest students at admission.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17572046#Comment_17572046
see post #7 from Sept 2014
(But again, note the caveats in #38 above. )
@porcupine98 The Ohio Wesleyan 0s was an error in my data. That should have been 27.7% of freshmen get merit aid and average award size of $21788. All the merit aid data and need-based aid data in these tables are from collegedata.com.
@tk21769 Yes, I’m doing that in my next analyses. I’m working on another STEM award data set at the moment.
Given the lousy job market for PHD’s of any stripe, I would be wary of any school that produced a great number of them.
@juillet I have been mulling over your comment #38 from January over the last 3 months.
I’ve been pondering the ‘there’s no answer to that’ part. Perhaps on the individual level, there is no answer. But statistically, we can certainly address this. If we look at the table of baccalaureate origins of African Americans from 2002-2011 from Fiegener and Proudfoot (2013), it is striking (shocking) that tiny Morehouse and Spelman Colleges appear 3rd and 4th on the list of PhD in the physical sciences.
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/#tab7
The overall top-producers (numerically) are in this table:
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/#tab3
Not a single one of those top producers appear on Table 7 for the Life or Physical Science; some do show up in Social Sciences. Ca 7% of students at Harvard are African American, 6% @ MIT, 5% @ U Mich, 6% @ U of Illinois. Multiply those percentages by the #s in Table 3, and you see that those universities ought to be on Table 3. You can’t explain this by differences in the strengths of the students. Morehouse’s upper 75% SAT Math is 550.