<p>These are the schools I got into. Now, without any regard to financial considerations, which one would you choose?</p>
<p>Carleton
Colorado College
Grinnell
Macalester
Oberlin
Pomona
Reed
Whitman</p>
<p>Tough choice. They each have something great to offer. Have you visited them?</p>
<p>Colorado College</p>
<p>There’s no way to advise without knowing all about you. I guess we could research your past posts…</p>
<p>Without financial considerations, none of the above. I would think finances an important part of the decisionmaking.</p>
<p>Personally, I like Macalester and Whitman. But without knowing anything about you, I can’t really say what would be right for you.</p>
<p>academic; carleton=grinnell=oberlin=pomona=reed>macalester>whitman=cc
overall prestige; pomona>carleton>grinnell=oberlin>reed=macalester>whitman=cc</p>
<p>Pomona. …</p>
<p>Now I remember; you want to study neuroscience; you’ll obviously get a PhD. Here are 25 good PhD prep schools in biology (yours in bold); there are many more. First posted by interesteddad. This is a narrow statistical measure; don’t read more into it than it says, but it’s one of few available hard statistical measures. It favors schools where bio is a popular major, and probably where there are relatively few majors available.</p>
<p>Percent of PhDs per grad
Academic field: Bio and Health Sciences</p>
<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees:
ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database</p>
<p>Number of Undergraduates:
ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database</p>
<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period </p>
<p>1 California Institute of Technology 5.4%
2 Reed College 4.8%
3 Swarthmore College 4.4%
4 University of Chicago 3.3%
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3.1%
6 University of California-San Francisco 3.1%
7 Harvard University 3.0%
8 Kalamazoo College 3.0%
9 Harvey Mudd College 2.9%
10 Earlham College 2.8%
11 Johns Hopkins University 2.7%
12 Princeton University 2.6%
13 Haverford College 2.6%
14 Mount Holyoke College 2.6%
15 Yale University 2.5%
16 Rice University 2.5%
17 Lawrence University 2.5%
18 Carleton College 2.5%
19 Stanford University 2.5%
20 Oberlin College 2.4%
21 Cornell University, All Campuses 2.4%
22 Grinnell College 2.3%
23 Hendrix College 2.3%
24 Bryn Mawr College 2.1%
25 Bowdoin College 2.1%
26 Wellesley College 2.1%
27 Amherst College 2.1%</p>
<p>I haven’t visited any of them, though I will be visiting Oberlin and Grinnell this week.</p>
<p>I would like enough prestige so that employers and grad schools will recognize my diploma as a good one. I don’t really care about name recognition on the street. Academics are definitely the #1 factor. #2 is probably the social environment, which I will obviously need to experience for myself at each school.</p>
<p>I’m still interested in neuroscience, though I’m also considering pre-med or some sort of MD/PhD program. I know that liberal arts colleges aren’t really pre-professional, and I’m not looking for that, but which of those schools has the best pre-med classes or pre-med advisory committee?</p>
<p>I asked without regard to finances because I want to know your guys’ opinions based solely on the schools themselves. I do have schools that have offered me more than others.</p>
<p>Midwest versus Cali? I’d go Pomona.</p>
<p>“I would like enough prestige so that employers and grad schools will recognize my diploma as a good one.”</p>
<p>I would have said that grad schools ignore uninformed prestige and look instead at performance and recommendations, and that employers discount undergrad if you went to grad school.</p>
<p>Anyone else?</p>
<p>I agree with vossron on prestige.</p>
<p>I don’t know about Carleton’s pre-med advising (other than that it exists and many of my friends went to med school). They do have a neuroscience concentration which you couple with a bio or psych major.</p>