<p>I've searched a lot of old CC threads and have found conflicting opinions whether going to a research university is better than going to an LAC if you wish to go to a top grad school. Specifically for Math (the subject I'm interested in), I've seen threads claiming that getting into a Ph.D. program is significantly more difficult if an applicant has gone to an LAC. To what extent is this true? Should a student not apply to an LAC at all if they wish to get into a good Ph.D. program?</p>
<p>No, whoever claims that is completely misinformed. LACs are actually bigger PhD feeders than all but the very top research universities.</p>
<p>[REED</a> COLLEGE PHD PRODUCTIVITY](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html]REED”>Doctoral Degree Productivity - Institutional Research - Reed College)</p>
<p>I can’t speak for math, esp math unconnected to the sciences (e.g. pure mathematics), but for now I’m going to assume that math is comparable to the sciences in terms of how graduate school admissions work.</p>
<p>As someone who attended a (not especially prestigious) LAC and just got accepted to grad school at U-Toronto for psych/neuroscience, I can assure you that LAC students are at no disadvantage. In general, LAC students (1) get more attention from professors, (2) develop better (read: actual) relationships with their professors, and (3) honestly tend to be better educated in the end, because (a) they have more opportunities to learn than just the “information-transmittance” approach of lectures, and (b) they are taught by professors who are devoted to teaching instead of professors or TAs who are mostly devoted to research. All these things add up in the end to make you a much more appealing candidate for graduate school – you’re better informed, you tend to have better exposure to interdisciplinary work, you’re more comfortable around professors, and your resume/CV sticks out in the large pile of applications which all look the same.</p>
<p>However, and this is key, research universities almost always offer more opportunities for undergraduates to get research done than do LACs. Yes, these internal research opportunities can often be uninvolved or not actually very helpful (I’ve heard some of them are just equivalent to being a lab assistant, i.e. clerical work), but just being able to put them on your application is very important. Graduate schools in general love to see that you have some research experience before you apply, so research universities do have this advantage. But (good) LAC students simply need to look for external research opportunities if their own school doesn’t offer any (my school didn’t, and I ended up getting into Duke University’s Mechanisms of Behavior program), and these external opportunities are usually high quality (in the sense of informing you and in giving you much-needed connections) and occasionally even have a prestige factor to boot.</p>
<p>I went to an LAC and I now go to a top 10 Ivy League PhD in my field.</p>
<p>I can’t speak to math, but professors at most LACs - and especially ones in the top 50-100 - are expected to do research to get tenure. At a lot of the very top LACs, professors have lighter teaching loads (sometimes 3-2 or 3-3 - which means three classes one semester and either 2 or 3 the other) so that they can do some research. At most top LACs professors also get start-up costs to start a research lab and produce. Not only that, but LAC professors are recruited with the explicit goal of getting professors who want to include undergrads in their research and have already thought about ways to do that.</p>
<p>As an undergrad at an LAC, I did an independent study, presented my findings at conferences, helped with the analysis of data and helped run pilot projects. I wasn’t just doing literature reviews or cleaning pipettes, like RAs tend to do at large research universities. LAC professors don’t have grad students, so the stuff the grads may do at large research universities the undergrads do there.</p>
<p>Also, because LAC professors have smaller classes and are expected to devote more time to their students, often they engage you in more meaningful experiences that feed directly into grad school. For example, in my basic psychology classes at my LAC, I was expected to write research papers in each class. By the time I graduated I wager that I had written at least 10 research papers in psychology. Well, guess what I do all the time in graduate school? I’ve been complimented on my writing skills, and I know that I developed them in undergrad. Here at my large Ivy, the intro psych class is 180 students. You think they’re writing research papers?</p>
<p>Any school that requires a senior thesis of all undergrads can provide a PhD admission advantage, since you’re forced to learn how to do serious research. At thesis-optional schools it’s too easy to neglect it when the going gets tough.</p>
<p>Top PhD feeder schools list that includes math: [The</a> Colleges Where PhD’s Get Their Start | The College Solution](<a href=“http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/]The”>The Colleges Where PhD's Get Their Start)</p>
<p>Looks like 5 of 10 are LACs (depending on how you count Rice). For some completely unscientific anecdotal evidence, of the 25 people in my LAC graduating class majoring in geology (including me), at least 20 went on to grad school (mostly PhD, with a smattering of master’s and law school).</p>
<p>I taught plenty of labs at my big PhD research university, so I’ve seen how undergrads fare in the big university setting. That department sure didn’t send anything like 80% of their students to graduate school. Sure there was lots of great research going on, but I never ran across more than a handful of undergrads who got to see any of it.</p>
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<p>Do you feel this was a lack of opportunities for undergrads or more self-selection of students that wanted to be part of it?</p>
<p>I know at my moderate sized (~5500 undergrads) research university everyone that was interested in doing research was involved in it. Those that weren’t usually had something else to keep themselves busy, and spent the summers with internships instead of REUs.</p>
<p>Obviously the size of the undergraduate pool matters when one wants to do undergraduate research, or indeed when one takes statistics for PhD productivity.</p>
<p>There are two caveats re LACs, at least in my view:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>They’re smaller, so there may be less competition for undergrad research positions, and you get more professor attention, which generally puts an upward pressure on your grades</p></li>
<li><p>The undergrad recruitment is much worse than at universities, so, if you’re a senior without obvious job prospects but with good grades, grad school suddenly becomes much more attractive.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>As with anything, selectivity matters - but at the best-endowed schools, the research facilities available to undergrads in STEM are on par with graduate school equipment, and the professors are minor stars or at least well-connected in their field. I would personally say that you are in a better position for grad school recruitment coming from an LAC than from Big U because you get so much exposure to professors working in your field so early on.</p>
<p>RacinReaver, little of column A, little of column B. As a whole, the undergrads at the big research university were less motivated (although the superstars were comparable to the LAC undergrads). On the other hand, there is no way that the department could have accommodated several hundred students all wanting research experience, nor was there any inclination to change the status quo. </p>
<p>On the LAC side, a senior thesis was required, so every single person in my department got involved in research of one sort or another, either through the school, or more commonly, through REU/Keck, which give grants designed to get undergrads involved in research.</p>
<p>Viennese, just wanted to point out that if you’re an undergrad in science, you should pretty much expect grad school as a basic requirement, with a few exceptions for things like teaching at the K-12 level (although plenty of people get master’s for that). Can’t really speak as much to the engineering/math side, but if you’re looking at science departments, more people going to grad school usually translates to more people actually making careers in science, rather than lacking options at graduation. Disagree on the upward grade pressure though - my GPA was well below what people commonly panic about on these boards; many of the LACs are known for grade deflation, more than anything. Despite that, the only grad school where I wasn’t accepted was the one with a half-completed application, due to already being accepted at schools further up my list. Why? Presumably, the extensive research experience I had in hand, courtesy of my LAC education.</p>
<p>For grad school, go to the biggest name you can wrangle where you can find a great advisor. But for undergrad, a lot of things would have to go right for a big university to put you in a better position than a LAC.</p>
<p>“if you’re a senior without obvious job prospects but with good grades, grad school suddenly becomes much more attractive”</p>
<p>Or perhaps it’s a vicious circle, LACs attracting those who plan on grad school, knowing LACs send around 2/3 to grad school, attracting …</p>
<p>Or perhaps the naturally smaller applicant pool a company will find at an LAC, coupled with the traveling costs of, often, driving through 100+ miles of cornfield from the nearest airport, really do disincentivize companies from doing on-campus recruitment?</p>
<p>And thank you, musicguru. I have relatively little to do with the sciences, so I was more commenting from observing my classmates in the social sciences and humanities go to grad school. And humanities grad school, as you know, is probably the only grad school that makes you more unemployable after you finish it.</p>
<p>Pick up some digital humanities and CRM skills along the way. It’ll make you slightly less unemployable.</p>
<p>“I have relatively little to do with the sciences, so I was more commenting from observing my classmates in the social sciences and humanities go to grad school. And humanities grad school, as you know, is probably the only grad school that makes you more unemployable after you finish it.”</p>
<p>^ This has to do with major at RU or LAC.</p>
<p>I am a PhD student in mathematics and I disagree with much of the advice above. Since math majors can’t do any meaningful research in college (unlike in most other fields), graduate applicants in math are judged primarily by the coursework that they have completed. You’ll be competing with students from research universities who have completed 2 years’ worth of graduate courses in college. As you may guess, you won’t find graduate-level courses at a liberal arts college…</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I attended a liberal arts college but took graduate classes at a nearby research university during my sophomore through senior years. I was told - explicitly - by a professor at MIT that they don’t usually admit liberal arts graduates and that my graduate coursework was the only reason that they were willing to make an exception for me.</p>
<p>If you’d like to hear from a more “credible” source that liberal arts students are at a disadvantage, read the advice that Swarthmore gives to its graduate school-bound math majors:</p>
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</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/academics/math/grad_GRE/MathGradSchool.pdf[/url]”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/academics/math/grad_GRE/MathGradSchool.pdf</a></p>
<p>Specifically for math, one problem with the earlier cited Reed link is that the underlying IPEDS PhD statistics group science and math together.</p>
<p>“Since math majors can’t do any meaningful research in college”</p>
<p>Why is this so?</p>
<p>I found this quote on the Reed site (would apply to any thesis-requiring undergrad school):
Perhaps “original” is not the same as “meaningful.”</p>
<p>
Couple of reasons. Math is different from the traditional sciences in that there isn’t any “busy work” that could be executed by an undergraduate who doesn’t fully grasp the underlying theory (e.g. executing lab experiments). It’s also different from the social sciences and humanities in that topics aren’t readily accessible to a non-expert. I can walk into a sociology talk and understand what the lecturer is talking about, but I can’t follow 95% of the math seminars that are happening in my own department. Graduate students in math often spend 2-3 years learning background material before they can even understand the questions that their advisers are working on, let alone make a contribution themselves. </p>
<p>
Yes, original is not the same as meaningful. I can count how many ways there are to park 437 cars in 32487289 parking spots. Probably nobody has thought about this particular question before, so my answer would be “original”, but the answer wouldn’t be particularly meaningful. Nobody needs the actual number and the technique to answer the question is well known.</p>
<p>
You can also get the numbers for math and sciences separately. The statistics fall short on two other aspects:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>It tells you how many students go on to earn PhDs, but it doesn’t say which PhD programs they earn them from. A PhD from Harvard is arguably much more valuable than one from Iowa State. </p></li>
<li><p>It gives no indication as to why students decide to pursue PhDs at high rates. My experience as a liberal arts college graduate was that many of my classmates (myself included) decided to pursue a PhD because we didn’t see ourselves as having much chances on the job market, and our college happened to emphasize academic research. A math major from MIT can get very lucrative consulting, finance or software engineering jobs straight out of college. A math major from Bryn Mawr can… sell coffee at Starbucks?</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I’d agree that my advice is most relevant to sciences. I’ve seen that Swarthmore letter passed around before, and am curious as to the disconnect between that and Swarthmore’s ranking in the top 10 for math PhD undergrads. Tier could be part of it - Swarthmore sends a lot of math folks to a PhD, but they want more in the top 5 grad programs, say, than they get now. Hard to say, but it’s an interesting mismatch.</p>