LAC vs. State School

@PurpleTitan You said: “PSU (which isn’t UMich or Cal) had 6 times the number of undergrads who went on to get science/tech PhDs compared to Amherst, for instance.”

I’m not sure how that is meaningful here. Penn State is literally 25 times bigger than Amherst. The chance that any particular student at Amherst will get a science/tech PhD is 400% higher than for a student at Penn State. That percentage is even more true for medical school. 90 percent of Amherst students who apply to med school get in (and there is no Amherst committee deciding what students to support for med school the way there is at large schools).

https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/HP%2520Guide%2520Part%2520II%2520Nov%252021%25202017.pdf (starting at page 9) indicates that Amherst does have a Health Professions Committee that issues letters of recommendation to medical school applicants.

…but the committee recommends every student who asks, @ucbalumnus . Even if they aren’t “well qualified”.

So @ThankYouforHelp is correct that “there is no Amherst committee deciding what students to support for med school the way there is at large schools”.

The committee supports all the students who meet the deadlines and submit the required materials.

@ThankYouforHelp, yes, that’s why I noted that LACs dominate the percapita_ PhD feeder lists.

But someone on here was giving the misleading impression that they lead state schools even in total numbers, which just isn’t the case.

In any case, you have to take both inputs and majors in to account. All else being equal, I would expect Amherst to send more kids to PhD programs or elite professional schools than PSU on a per capita basis even if the education is exactly the same and the majors are exactly the same simply because the average quality of the entering students at Amherst is much higher than the average quality of students entering PSU. Plus, the majors aren’t exactly the same. State schools have a bunch more pre-professional majors where the goal generally isn’t to prepare kids for PhD programs (like Accounting or Industrial Design, etc.)

What would be much more interesting to look at is the per capita PhD and top professional program degree rates of the honors college kids at state schools (the kids who could have gotten in to elite LACs or at least had a shot) compared to elite LACs.

I think that you’ll find Shreyer’s per capita PhD/elite professional degree rates to be much closer to (or possibly even surpassing) Amherst’s than they are to PSU’s overall per capita rates.

So we could look at Marshall Scholarship winners:
http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2014/12/06/marshall-scholars-2015-eleven-public-university-winners/

In 2015, out of 31, there were 11 from publics (6 from honors programs). 4 from LACs (not all of them elite). (Also 2 from Catholics, 10 from Ivy/equivalent RU’s; the rest from Olin, Naval Academy, and NEU; and that’s only 30 but I’m not going to hunt down where the miscounting is).

In 2014, out of 34, 11 were from publics (8 from honors programs) vs.
1 from a LAC (not elite). Also 2 from Catholics, 17 from Ivy/equivalent RU’s.
http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2013/12/10/marshall-scholars-2014-public-university-honors-students-win-8-awards/

Truman State is a very good undergrad school, very LAC-like, and attracts very good students across Missouri. It is, however, in Kirksville, a small, boring town in middle of nowhere whereas Columbia (Mizzou) is a decent college town also near the state capital. Both Mizzou and Truman have strong Greek systems. Mizzou has many, many more majors than Truman, so it enrolls some top kids that are in majors that Truman doesn’t offer. Missouri as a state is weird also in that the best engineering program is at Missouri S & T, not Mizzou, which pulls kids in yet a third direction; AND Missouri State has had more political clout for the last decade, so a lot of resources that should have gone to Mizzou were pulled down to Missouri State in Springfield (but it still lags far behind Mizzou or Truman for top students). Most top students at least consider Truman, so there really isn’t an inferiority complex issue, just different tastes. Oh, and Truman is cheaper than Mizzou by a few thousand a year.

Actually Amherst doesn’t generate as many PhDs as it would like to, more professional degrees.

It just won a grant to increase the # of humanities Phds:

https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2018/2-2018/amherst-college-wins-prestigious-500-000-andrew-w.-mellon-foundation-grant

@OHMomof2, more professional degrees than PhDs is probably true of almost all schools (possible exceptions being Caltech and Mudd).

Some other states also have a small engineering-focused school amongst their public universities (CO, NM, SD as well as MO). Still others have an “engineering flagship” that is rather large (with additional academic majors and programs) and is a different school from what is ordinarily seen as the flagship (GA, IN, NC, OR, SC, VA).

University of Virginia has a very well established engineering school. It is smaller than Virginia Tech’s but is also well recruited and has many options of study. University of South Carolina also seems to have engineering , as does Clemson . University of North Carolina does not have engineering, but NC State does.

@ucbalumnus—yes, I know, but was pointing out Missouri has it to someone who was asking about it. People on these forums consistently forget about Missouri-Rolla/S&T as the state’s engineering school. Thank you for correcting my not-incorrect statement.

Yep. MO is one of the few if only states where two publics that are definitely not the public flagship or anything like it actually have student bodies with higher average test scores than the flagship.

UVA and William and Mary average test scores usually are pretty similar (William and Mary is much smaller). Virginia Tech is lower but the engineers bring up their average somewhat. But, Virginia Tech is only about 23% engineering grads (people outside of Virginia tend to assume that number would be higher), whereas Missouri- Rolla is more like 64% engineering grads, per Common Data Sets.