<p>Question in title. Williams has a disproportionately high grad school admission rate. I know part of it is because it's a great school (duh) but the numbers are waay higher than other LAC's like Amherst and Swarthmore, and even universities like Columbia, Chicago, Brown, and MIT. It's gotta be more than just that.</p>
<p>Great career counseling office, better requirements, special semester system...?</p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>I don't think your premise is correct. There was a Wall Street Journal study last year that ranked Williams fifth (behind HYP, and one other) in <em>professional</em> school placement (business, law, medicine), not grad schools in general. And even diehard Williams lovers saw the apparent flaws in the study, which was based on which graduates attended one of a rather subjectively assembled set of "the best" professional schools. There were some very glaring omissions from "the best" in each category, which if I recall correctly were limited to only five (in each category) for some reason. Again, going from memory, Stanford Law and UPenn Medical were not considered among "the best" in their category, which is plainly silly. But the larger point is, the study said nothing at all of the many graduate students in the liberal arts.</p>
<p>In my graduating class, there WERE a ridiculously large number of students who went to very top medical schools. Several of my friends had absurdly high MCAT scores (> 40), and this undoubtedly helped. I get the impression that my year was an anamolously good year as far as med school acceptances go.</p>
<p>I disagree that Williams is way ahead of other peer institutions. I would like to think that Williams is better than them, but the differences in "percentage" going to the chosen graduate schools was quite small, so technically there probably should have been a bunch of schools tied.</p>
<p>I'm sleepy. Sorry if this isn't making any sense.</p>
<p>Driver,</p>
<p>Are you sure Stanford Law wasn't included??? That's really surprising to me, as is the exclusion of UPENN med.</p>
<p><a href="http://web.reed.edu/ir/phd.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.reed.edu/ir/phd.html</a></p>
<p>why do you think Williams student do so well on the MCAT?</p>
<p>MikeyD: From the WSJ article:</p>
<p>"We focused on 15 elite schools, five each from medicine, law and business, to serve as our benchmark for profiling where the students came from. Opinions vary, of course, but our list reflects a consensus of grad-school deans we interviewed, top recruiters and published grad-school rankings (including the Journal's own MBA rankings). So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth's Tuck School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Penn's Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.legaled.com/feeder.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.legaled.com/feeder.htm</a></p>
<p>I'm always happy to see positive news about Williams, but I thought this study was as useless as that business publication that rates high schools based on the percentage of their graduating classes who go to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. As if all the others are chopped liver. And Mini's link makes the other point, about all the great graduate work going on outside of the professional schools.</p>
<p>weird??? No NYU law? No Stanford law?</p>
<p>"No Stanford law?"</p>
<p>With the exception of UCSF Medical, nothing west of Chicago!</p>
<p>I think that all of the top LACs have very high placement rates into PhD programs, med schools, law schools, and biz schools. Each LAC tends to do slightly better (a few percentage points) in one area or another, based on the type of students they attract more than anything else. </p>
<p>For example, Williams has ALWAYS been known as a med/law/biz school factory. Swarthmore has ALWAYS been known as a PhD factory. Doesn't mean that Williams doesn't do very well at PhD placement or that Swarthmore doesn't do very well at Med school placements. I'm sure that Amherst and Pomona are right there, too.</p>
<p>To be honest, this wouldn't be high on my list of reasons to choose one school from this group over another. I just don't think there's enough difference to really matter. More important would be other issues like location, campus culture, specific programs and policies, the offerings in a "specialty" major like art history or linguistics, etc.</p>
<p>And in another irony, despite being the #4 "top feeder school" to the supposedly top professional schools, none of Stanford's professional schools were considered top targets. And ID is also right--you can't swing a dead cat around here (Philly) without hitting a top doc who went to Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Top Twenty Baccalaureate-Liberal Arts Insitutions by
Number of Doctorates Earned in ten-year increments</p>
<p>Institution Name 1991-2000 1981-1990 1971-1980
1 Oberlin College 1086 946 1120
2 Swarthmore College 755 532 599
3 Carleton College 752 538 559
4 Wesleyan University 695 473 415
5 St. Olaf College 591 400 376
6 Smith College 590 562 581
7 Wellesley College 570 573 615
8 Williams College 541 338 393
9 Reed College 495 401 411
10 Barnard College 476 571 716
11 Amherst College 460 334 499
12 Vassar College 456 446 443
13 Pomona College 455 438 560
14 Mount Holyoke College 444 442 403
15 Bryn Mawr College 440 318 359
16 Grinnell College 430 283 379
17 Bucknell University 422 430 431
18 Wheaton College 409 445 507
19 Haverford College 373 281 286
20 Colgate University 365 321 367</p>
<p>That list is not adjusted for the size of the undergrad population at each school. For example, Oberlin, Smith, and Wesleyan are all double the size of some of the smaller schools on the list.</p>
<p>One thing I've noticed is that, if you go back further in history (pre-1970), many of the women's colleges were at the very top of the list, presumably because there were so few top undergrad options for academically talented women.</p>
<p>
[quote]
And ID is also right--you can't swing a dead cat around here (Philly) without hitting a top doc who went to Swarthmore.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Or, Physics professors who went to Williams. Two of the female Physics professors at Swarthmore are Ephmen, one got her PhD from MIT, the other from Harvard.</p>
<p>Conversely, Neil Grabois, who was a long-time math professor, Dean, and Provost at Williams was a Swattie. He later did an 11-year stint as president of Colgate University and now serves on the Swarthmore Board of Managers.</p>
<p>"That list is not adjusted for the size of the undergrad population at each school. For example, Oberlin, Smith, and Wesleyan are all double the size of some of the smaller schools on the list.</p>
<p>One thing I've noticed is that, if you go back further in history (pre-1970), many of the women's colleges were at the very top of the list, presumably because there were so few top undergrad options for academically talented women."</p>
<p>Tis true, though there are other adjustments that could be made, equally important to size: the number of students who went to professional schools (taking them out of the Ph.D. schools); the wealth of the student population; the number of older students; and, which affects the women's school's most, the number of Ed.D.s (not counted here), or terminal degrees in social work, also not counted here. Size does matter, but it is neither the only adjustment that can be made, nor necessarily the most important. (I did find a list which made those adjustments, which I can't put my hands on now, but it found Bryn Mawr far and away the best school in the country based on post-grad placements.)</p>
<p>None of these schools are chopped liver, of course, and choosing between them on this basis is probably not a very sensible activity. One wonders (or at least I wonder), though, to what degree the schools are responsible for the students' successes in these realms, or whether those successes are more a result of the quality of the student body (and its wealth) upon entry. I have no doubt that any attempt to factor these out would result in a very different "value-added" list, with Kalamazoo, Hope, St. Olaf's (high on the lists in either case), Earlham, Beloit, Bryn Mawr, and Grinnell being the "best" schools in the country.</p>
<p>Here is the weighted Doctoral origins study that includes both LACs and Universities on the same ranked list. It provides data for each of the last three decades, for every field of study monitored by the NSF. Caution, it's an 84 page, 340k PDF file:</p>
<p>For the decade of the 1990s, the top twenty-five in overall doctorate production, per 100 undergrads were:</p>
<p>CalTech
Harvey Mudd
Swarthmore
Reed
MIT
Carleton
Bryn Mawr
U Chicago
Oberlin
Yale</p>
<p>Princeton
Grinnell
Haverford
Curtis Inst. of Music
St. John's
Pomona
Kalamazoo
Rice
Peabody/Johns Hopkins
Julliard</p>
<p>Amherst
Williams
New England Conservatory
Stanford
Harvard</p>
<p>Note that this does NOT include medical or law degrees.</p>
<p>Definitely a more informative list, Interestddad. It includes LACs and Universities and corrects for the different sizes of the classes. LACs really stand out as producers of PhDs.</p>
<p>It is a very good list. Now, if there were just one that combined PhDs with MDs and law degrees, you could get a real handle on what each school's graduates were doing after undergrad.</p>
<p>Wouldn't necessarily tell you much about the school, though (or at least it would be limited by the lack of information about "inputs").</p>
<p>I think a list like this is only useful for "broad brush' characterizations. For example, rating very high on this list obviously means, among other things, a very highly qualified student body academically AND a high percentage of the student body interested in an academic career. It also may say something about the degree of interaction between undergrads and professor/mentors.</p>
<p>I think the best use of this kind of list would be as one of many data points in comparing two colleges with similar overall admissions standards. For example, the difference between Swarthmore and Williams or between Yale and Harvard may indicate some real underlying difference in the "typical" student. I don't think that small differences in ranking on a chart like this indicate a "qualitative" difference -- although very large differences (#3 versus #300) surely would.</p>
<p>I agree with Driver that it would be nice to have a data set that include MD and Law degrees. I've seen no evidence that anyone collects that data. The PhD data is actually collected under a decades-old National Science Foundation grant.</p>