<p>Which type of schools can be the better environment for bio-major undergrad student's research and preparation for PhD program admission? </p>
<p>e.g. How about the comparison between Reed/Grinnell/Swarthmore vs. Duke/Cornell/Brown?</p>
<p>Are those your admissions?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>FWIW two people [that I know about, personally] from my freshman dorm at Cornell became biology professors at [HYP]. The biology resources there are huge, when you consider CAS, plus the ag school (which is essentially an entire college of "applied Biology"majors), then the Boyce Thompson Institute, and the Vet school. Some of the progams in Hum Ec are also Biology related. But it is a big department, I don’t know how “personal” it ever gets, you’d have to inquire if that’s a concern. And there could be relatively less medical-related research going on there
than at,say, Duke, since the med school is in NYC. </p>
<p>Regarding “high phd productivity”, please be aware that most of the tables use a denominator that can be misleading.
The denominator should be students there who want a Phd in [whatever] and seem intellectually capable of achieving it in the first place, coming in. Instead the denominator they use is all the students in the whole place. This approach inappropriately rewards homogeniety of the student body.So for example, at Grinnell every student is enrolled in its Arts & sciences college, that 's all it has. Whereas, only 30% of the students at Cornell are enrolled in its Arts & sciences college. The presence of other students there who are studying: in its colleges of: Architecture, Industrial & Labor Relations, Hotel Administration, Engineering, have no bearing on the achievements of students who are studying biology there. Yet all these irrrelevant students are shoved into its denominator for these “productivity” measures.</p>
<p>Even within the LAC ranks, there can be material differences in department enrollment numbers which influence the % figures. Carlton College,e g, actually has more physics majors than many universities do. Imagine how misleading those % numbers are, in many cases.</p>
<p>Anyway here’s some charts.
<a href=“HHMI Beyond Biology 101: The Baccalaureate Origins of Ph.D. Biologists”>https://web.archive.org/web/20110423043935/http://www.hhmi.org/BeyondBio101/phdorig.htm</a></p>
<p>This is not specific to biology. But please look at Table 2, not just Table 1, keeping in mind what I just wrote about.
<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/”>http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/</a></p>
<p>One difference that may be relevant is that at Reed there is a thesis requirement. At Swarthmore it is not a requirement but IIRC a lot of the students choose to do it. This can be a “pre-phd” entry path, if done well. Whereas at most other places, including Cornell, the thesis route is an option, and a far smaller percentage of students choose to do one. Because they don’t expect to be getting a phd, and prefer to take other courses instead. If you are one of those who choose to go the thesis route, I don’t see why the presence of others who don’t should have any impact on you. You will hardly be an outlier, particularly given the numbers of students who do go on from there to get phds (table 2), </p>
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<p>Either. There’s no right or wrong answer here. Great students go to get biology PhDs from Reed, Grinnell, and Swarthmore and great students go on to get biology PhDs from Duke, Cornell, and Brown. At the small LACs, you have personal attention from professors, advanced research experiences (no grad students to compete with) and small, intimate classes that are more akin to what you’d see in grad school. At research universities there are more opportunities for research with professors, a wider number of classes in different subfields of biology that might pique your interest, and more research on the cutting edge of the field.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is a relevant question for a student who already knows they want a PhD. I think, in some cases, students who came in not knowing what they wanted or not really sure might be more likely to want a PhD after going to a SLAC, because they come to be close to their professors and admire their lifestyles. But if you already know what you want, you’re going to seek out the kinds of experiences and skills you need to get there, so it’s a moot point.</p>
<p>FWIW I found an updated report, it actually breaks out life sciences on one of the tables:
<a href=“https://web.archive.org/web/20140219101116/http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/nsf13323.pdf”>https://web.archive.org/web/20140219101116/http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/nsf13323.pdf</a></p>
<p>This table has some interesting data- It certainly shows that a large % of students at the top Lac’s are accepted into Phd programs. </p>
<p>TABLE 4. Top 50 U.S. baccalaureate-origin institutions of 2002–11 S&E doctorate recipients, by institutional-yield ratio,
institutional control, and 2010 Carnegie classification</p>
<p>Rank Academic institution
Institutional
control
2010 Carnegie
classification Number
Institutionalyield
ratio
1 CA Institute of Technology Private Research-very high 739 34.9
2 Harvey Mudd C. Private Baccalaureate 359 24.4
3 MA Institute of Technology Private Research-very high 1,880 16.0
4 Reed C. Private Baccalaureate 374 14.2
5 Swarthmore C. Private Baccalaureate 472 13.1
6 Carleton C. Private Baccalaureate 555 12.3
7 Grinnell C. Private Baccalaureate 366 11.1
8 Rice U. Private Research-very high 728 10.8
9 U. of Chicago Private Research-very high 940 10.7
10 Princeton U. Private Research-very high 1,131 10.1
11 Harvard U. Private Research-very high 1,794 10.0
12 Pomona C. Private Baccalaureate 345 9.5
13 Haverford C. Private Baccalaureate 269 9.5
14 NM Institute of Mining and Technology Public Master’s granting 142 9.1
15 Williams C. Private Baccalaureate 451 8.7
16 Case Western Reserve U. Private Research-very high 608 8.4
17 Bryn Mawr C. Private Baccalaureate 245 8.3</p>
<p>True, but as monydad pointed out above, SLACs have the advantage of having a smaller denominator. Some SLAC life & physical departments can have as few as 25 majors graduating; my SLAC had an average of 10 biology seniors, for example. If 3 of them went to a PhD, that’s 30%. Besides, if you’re comparing it to SFSU or even a state flagship like UCLA or Minnesota, the vast majority of students go there because…it’s their least expensive option, or the best combination of cost and reputation. If you have 200 biology majors, even if 40 of them go on to get a PhD in biology, that’s only 20%, and it appears lower than the SLAC that had 10 bio seniors and sent 3 to grad school.</p>
<p>Actually it’s even worse than that. Because the denominator isn’t even the number of majors in their relevant departments. It’s everyone who graduated from the darned school! No matter what their major was, what their innate capabilities were, or what they actually wanted to do with their lives.</p>
<p>Do you really thing Stanford grads are disadvantaged vs grads of Case Western or NM Instititute of Mining if they want to pursue science phds? So those latter two schools are “better” choices if you want that objective ? Because I don’t.</p>
<p>I see. Then, I will just regard PhD productivity as the indicator which shows how science-oriented the school is compared with the schools of the same level of academics. I don’t think Swarthmore and Reed give you more opportunities than Stanford. I believe LACs with high PhD productivity are schools where you go if you get rejected from all the Ivy league schools and you still want to experience the education whose quality is near (not the same as) the level of education given in Ivy league schools. </p>
<p>That assumption you made is just ignorant. Some people prefer the LAC to the larger schools and only apply to LACs. I also know quite a few very impressive ones who did get Ivy acceptances that were affordable and passed.</p>
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<p>I go to one of these colleges because I wanted to experience undergraduate education better than what my friends at UPenn, Cornell and Dartmouth were getting. I am pretty sure I have.</p>
<p>It’s not a matter of “better”, it’s “different”. LACs will have much smaller classes, and more intimate contact with faculty. Universities will generally offer a much larger choice of courses, often offered more frequently and in more sections. The larger offerings portfolio may be particularly significant with regard to advanced, upper level courses, once one finds out what subfield of a subject they are really, specifically interested in. Reasonable people may prefer either environment. In some ways I think the best strategy is to do the first two years at an LAC then transfer to a university. But transferring is disruptive socially, and academically the first two years may set you up for opportunities in the last two at the same school, which may not follow the same way if you are a transfer. So it isn’t necessarily that simple.</p>
<p>My point was not that one route was “better”. Rather, it was that, like many statistics, these “productivity” tables should be looked at in context, with the insight as to how they are constructed and their consequent limitations. Multiple paths can successfully lead to a phd, in a way that the tables don’t absolutely dictate. That’'s all.</p>
<p>I went to one of the LACs mentioned in this discussion…Carleton. I went back to school after working for years and got a PhD. monydad made some interesting points about these PhD tables. I agree they don’t absolutely dictate anything and, like anything, should be taken with a grain of salt. Calling them misleading seems harsh though.</p>
<p>By the way, I’m open to discussion. Sometimes I post something on the College Confidential Carleton forum that is ever so slightly critical and am jumped on by people (likely including Carleton staff paid to monitor the forum).</p>
<p>In defense of the PhD productivity tables (from a Carls point of view)</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It is not like Carleton students have no choice but to get a PhD. It is a common criticism of LACs but it is not entirely fair. Carleton has been making a huge drive to help students find jobs with alumni connections and Carleton has major connections in the Twin Cities and Chicago area. Finding jobs straight out of Carleton has been a major focus. They have a dedicated career center. Companies recruit on campus. Many majors do lend themselves to finding a job like computer science, economics, mathematics. Carleton likes to brag about their econ majors getting jobs and internships at Goldman Sachs for example. Small LACs also open up opportunities like the Peace Corps that larger schools would not.</p></li>
<li><p>Part of the reason for the high PhD productivity is the culture of the school. When I decided to go back and get a PhD, I knew so many former classmates that received PhDs that I could talk to. I did speak with some of them and got useful advice about the pitfalls and advantages of going back. It made the decision to go back to school a lot easier and helped me feel more confident.</p></li>
<li><p>Just like other larger (non LAC) schools, a number of Carleton students get MDs, JDs, MBA, and Masters in engineering. Monydad mentioned Carleton Physics as being so huge. Part of the reason Carleton physics is has so many students is that they’ve made an effort to make it a flexible major that prepares people to get MDs or a masters degree in some type of engineering. I’ve even know Carleton physics majors to go on and become patent lawyers. It is not like every Carleton Physics major gets a PhD in Physics.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I daresay that Stanford physics majors also can, and do,all those other things.
And if someone cares to compare the level of on-campus recruiting opportunities at Stanford, vs Carleton, they may draw some conclusions about how comparable those opportunities really are.Including actual access to investment banking , consulting, and hot startup IT type firms. Sadly there is no data on entry to professional schools, to compare. But my guess is higher SAT scores coming in probably correlate to higher LSAT and MCAT scores, at least loosely. wouldn’t
you think?</p>
<p>When D1 was applying to schools,I looked at some LAC recruiting center pages. where it seemed like few recruiters came there and the biggest recruiter on campus was the peace corps. Obviously all LACs are not the same in this regard, nor are all universities. But I suggest interested parties look into it. Compare the number of recruiters who come to the respective campuses.</p>
<p>And if a Stanford grad considers going back to get a science phd, he too can talk to his fellow
alums- in his case, the 1,359 fellow alums who got them (table 2) .vs. the 555 Carlton grads.</p>
<p>I am not ragging on Carleton, or LACs, I’m just saying that the “productivity” table may not paint a completely accurate picture.</p>
<p>It’s hard to compare Stanford to Carleton. Stanford would be very difficult to turn down under any circumstances.</p>
<p>The discussion becomes more meaningful when you compare top LACs to schools like Brown, Duke, Cornell, Dartmouth, and UPenn. </p>
<p>Not really. How many Wharton students go on to get biology phds? Does it seem reasonable that all those Wharton students should be in the denominator when comparing % that go on to get biology phds? Does the mere presence of these Wharton students on the Penn campus,studying something completely different, really impact the ability of a Penn biology major to get proper preparation for a biology Phd, as compared to an LAC that does not have any business students?
Should the Cornell Hotel, Architecture and Labor relations college students properly be in the denominator when assessing science phds? (they are…) Does their mere presence on the campus really dilute the ability of a biology student from getting proper training there for a Biology phd ? Vs. an LAC that has no students studying specialized subjects in separate colleges.</p>
<p>The data for the correct denominators does not exist.</p>
<p>The counter to your argument is that Carleton Econ majors compete for the same finance jobs and MBA spots that Wharton undergrads do. Not every Carleton Econ major goes to get an Econ PhD. I’ve also met former undergrad students from wharton that went on to pursue a PhD too…not in Biology of course.</p>
<p>Granted professional majors at universities may slightly decrease the percentage who want to get a PhD in certain cases. Even this is not so clear cut. Take for example engineering. Engineering PhD are popular enough. For starters you pay no tuition and get a stipend. Also, some top grad schools discourage (and sometimes don’t offer masters in engineering), engineering PhD are short (3-5 years average), and offer competitive advantages in industry (they are not just teaching degrees). I’m not convinced that an engineering student from MIT is any more or less likely to get a PhD than a Physics major from Carleton.</p>
<p>But Penn has a full College of Arts & sciences , which has basically the same group of majors that Carleton has , With its own economics majors, just like Carleton has. . But on top of that, Penn has Wharton, a college of nursing, a college of Engineering. All with majors for which the BS is often the terminal degree of choice, because those people expect to go to work. There is no data for Penn’s Arts & Sciences College alone. But even if there was, if Carleton happened to have an atypical distribution of science majors among Liberal arts colleges, the fact that it produced proportionally more science phds, as a percentage of its entire student body, would not be very illuminating in and of itself.</p>
<p>What you really want as the denominator is the number of people there who are smart enough to get PhDs in a particular area and actually want phds in that area. Or at least the number of people with like majors. Not everybody in the whole university.</p>
<p>If you plan on getting a biology phd, and there are people studying engineering at the same university,probably in an altogether separate college there, it doesn’t really matter whether the engineers go on to get phds a lot, or a little. Their destinations have basically no impact on you whatsoever. They are irrelevant.</p>
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<p>Bringing it back around to the OP’s question, I think this is pretty important to consider overall.</p>
<p>What your peers do in your field and related fields is kind of important. A little bit. For example, I don’t think some of the lower-middle-class students who attend Columbia would’ve ever considered finance or investment banking before they attended college here - I didn’t even know what those were before I went to college. Getting influence from a department full of students who want to do pharmaceutical careers after they finish their BA is quite different from getting influence from a department full of students who want to go into biology science careers, and so on and so forth. Social support is important.</p>
<p>But what I’m saying is that none of that matters for the schools you are comparing. If we were talking about Carleton vs. Southern Illinois - it’s not that some of the students at SIUC couldn’t get a PhD in biology, if they wanted one; it’s that they’re just far less likely to want one, and maybe fewer have the aptitude to get one. Therefore, the quality of the classes will be different - professors will know that their goal is to teach skills to students who probably won’t get grad degrees in the field. The advising will be different - professors know the majority of their students are going to work after college. And the atmosphere is just different - fewer kids in your classes will be interested in discussing the finer point of some cutting-edge research problem in biology. When you go to a place like Carleton - a place where a good percentage of students DO want to go to graduate school from jump - the whole ambiance is just completely different, and set up to support students like you,</p>
<p>But when you’re comparing Carleton to Stanford or Reed to Cornell, that difference just goes out of the window. Both of those kinds of places have lots of students who are interested in research and continuing on to be scientists, and from there it’s just personal preference and learning style. Some students will thrive in the small seminar-style classes and the close relationships with professors derived from working on science at Carleton. And some students will prefer being part of a large, well-oiled lab group - working with grad students and postdocs who will teach them the basics of research at a large university - and learning at the feet of a giant in the field, even if “at the feet” really means “about 10 feet away from in the first row of a giant lecture hall”, at Stanford. Sometimes it’s even a false dichotomy, because there are well-oiled lab groups at places like Carleton and there are small seminars, especially at the upper levels, at places like Stanford.</p>
<p>And if you are a student who already comes to college with a burning passion to get a PhD in biology and study science, you could go to either and get what you need. You could go to SIUC and get what you need, too, since you’re motivated to look for it. You’ll get MORE of what you need far more easily at Carleton or Stanford - the resources are kind of just laying there for you to take them. You have to work for them at a place like SIUC - ask, seek out, sometimes travel. But you can do it.</p>
<p>So the point is, a sufficiently motivated science-loving student can do really well from a small elite LAC or from an elite national university. It just really depends on their preference.</p>