<p>Hey guys. I did a bunch of research to put together my college list, and it just hit me that I'm considering majoring in math (if not sociology), and I should make sure the school I wind up attending has a good math program. I know math is probably best at a tech school, but that's really not the experience I'm looking for. Here are the schools I was considering:</p>
<p>I'm convinced math would be good at Reed, Carleton, and Pomona. Anyone else know which of these schools have better math departments and which don't? I read somewhere that the math at Wesleyan isn't great. Is this true?</p>
<p>Rugg's Recommendations lists the following LACs for math:
Bates
Bowdoin
Bucknell
Carleton
Colgate
Dickinson
Harvey Mudd
Holy Cross
Kenyon
Occidental
Pomona
St Olaf
Trinity (CT)
Union
Wabash
Barnard
Mt Holyoke
Wesleyan
Wellesley
Wheaton
Whitman
Willamette</p>
<p>I think Reed should be in this list too. I am sur you can get a good math education at each of the colleges in your list. You can check the number of math bachelors granted on the IPEDS COOL site. I see that Carleton had only 8 math grads (2%) while Harvey Mudd had 16 (9%) and Reed had 16 (5%).</p>
<p>Math at Williams is supposed to be great. Be careful about math though - being good at math in high school can mean almost nothing when you get to the college level.</p>
<p>Yes, math at Williams is great, and yes, even if won the math prize in HS and got 800s on all your SATs you are in for a whole new level of challenge.</p>
<p>A small number of math majors isn't necessarily a bad thing--I mean, it doesn't necessarily indicate a tiny department with few resources. Math faculty teach a lot of courses to non-majors. Science majors need math, as do students planning to go on to graduate and professional school. </p>
<p>At my liberal arts college, math wasn't a common major, but the math majors were a happy lot. The few seniors who graduated with a math major in my senior year had something like a 1:1 faculty:student ratio for their senior seminar. They tackled some really neat projects. I was envious, frankly.</p>
<p>Here are the colleges and universities more than 2.5 PhDs in math per 1000 undergrad graduates over the most recent 10 year period:</p>
<p>PhDs per 1000 grads </p>
<p>Academic field: Math </p>
<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees: ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database<br>
Number of Undergraduates: ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database<br>
Formula: Total PhDs divided by Total Grads, multiplied by 1000 </p>
<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period </p>
<p>1 California Institute of Technology 27.2
2 Harvey Mudd College 18.7
3 Reed College 13.5
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 9.3
5 University of Chicago 7.6
6 Harvard University 7.5
7 Pomona College 6.7
8 St Olaf College 6.5
9 Rice University 6.1
10 Princeton University 5.9
11 Grinnell College 5.9
12 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology 5.4
13 Swarthmore College 4.4
14 Bryn Mawr College 4.2
15 Brown University 4.1
16 Yale University 3.9
17 Carleton College 3.7
18 New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology 3.7
19 St John's College (both campus) 3.7
20 Haverford College 3.6
21 Concordia Teachers College 3.4
22 Williams College 3.3
23 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 3.3
24 Albertson College 3.2
25 Knox College 3.2
26 Whitman College 3.1
27 Kalamazoo College 3.1
28 Carnegie Mellon University 3.1
29 Stevens Institute of Technology 3.0
30 Hendrix College 2.9
31 Stanford University 2.9
32 Amherst College 2.9
33 College of Wooster 2.9
34 Oberlin College 2.7
35 Agnes Scott College 2.6
36 Cooper Union 2.6</p>
<p>The three advanced math courses D has taken at Oberlin have been quite challenging, with excellent professors.</p>
<p>Sociology is supposed to be very strong there.</p>
<p>% Phd list by subject possibly pushes Oberlin lower than it should be, when comparing OP's particular group of schools, because it has a large music conservatory that bloats the denominator, and the other schools don't. Best to look at total PhDs IMO. After you do this, I'd bet you will still conclude that any of them would be "good enough" from a department standpoint to let the overall school choice dictate.</p>
<p>I'm pretty sure Math is listed for Oberlin in my (recent) addition of Rugg's. If it isn't it should be.</p>
<p>"% Phd list by subject possibly pushes Oberlin lower than it should be, when comparing OP's particular group of schools, because it has a large music conservatory that bloats the denominator, and the other schools don't."</p>
<p>Same thing happens at St. Olaf's with Social Work/Services, Education, and Music majors for whom a Ph.D. is not the terminal working degree. Makes up approximately 20% of their student body.</p>
<p>This was adjusted for on another one of these endless posts, and in that case the place on the list was changed quite significantly IMO. </p>
<p>No idea what it would look like here. Except that not many of those conservatory students are getting math PhDs, and that does not make the school any worse a place for a math major to attend. In fact the school is richer for their presence.</p>
<p>Why would an adjustment be necessary when Oberlin and St. Olaf's are already among the very top math PhD producers per graduate in the United States? Both schools clearly have strong and popular math departments. Every school on the short list I posted produces more per capita math PhDs than about 3000 other colleges and universities.</p>
<p>The more pertinent question is how reliable is this Ruggs fellow when his list of LAC math programs fails to include Reed, which is the third highest per capita producers of math PhDs in the country, ahead of MIT? Are we to assume that Reed's math department is chopped liver? </p>
<p>Or the same for many other top LACs missing from Rugg's list. I have a hard time believing that Dickinson offers a stronger math education that Grinnell, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Williams, Swarthmore, or Amherst.</p>
<p>In my opinion, basing a college selection heavily on the math department would only be applicable for an extremely small percentage of college applicants. There are "math wizards" who are so advanced entering college that a detailed evaluation of the math departments and upper level offerings would be critical. However, for most applicants, other factors would tend to dwarf math department ranks in the decision-making process.</p>
<p>Why would an adjustment be necessary when Oberlin and St. Olaf's are already among the very top math PhD producers per graduate in the United States? Both schools clearly have strong and popular math departments. Every school on the short list I posted produces more per capita math PhDs than about 3000 other colleges and universities."</p>
<p>Why, simply because, especially in the case of St. Olaf's, it would indicate that a school with a distinctly lower admissions profile could measure up "in quality" (as measured in Ph.D. productivity) far, far in excess of Amherst, Swarthmore, and Williams (both in absolute and in relative terms), Princeton, or Yale (in relative terms), and likely above that of Harvard and the University of Chicago. So it would be a very, very big deal. Adjusted for the admissions profile as well (entering SAT scores), it would make all of these other schools look distinctly "second-tier" (and, on this measure, that's probably the truth - and that's a big story, or at least it is to me.)</p>
<p>Not making one of these lists does not make a program "chopped liver." I doubt the authors, whatever the quality of their credentials or methodology, would make that claim.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Adjusted for the admissions profile as well (entering SAT scores)...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>But, the adjustment you proposed had nothing to do with admissions profiles. It was an adjustment for majors in a non-math related department.</p>
<p>We already know, from the per capita PhD production that St. Olaf performs tremendously well in the math field, especially taking into account the admissions profile. Actually, I think identifying schools like St. Olaf is the number one benefit of bothering to look at PhD production. I mean, it doesn't take a PhD in rocket science to guess that CalTech, Harvey Mudd, and MIT produce a lot of math PhDs.</p>
<p>No, I'm suggesting that if you adjust for BOTH, St. Olaf's performance is off the charts. </p>
<p>And this is important in another way, as well. It is often argued that it might be true that SATs scores (at this high level, a surrogate for income) are less important at HYPS/AWS in softer areas of the curriculum, but that in math and the hard sciences, top-level SAT scores are absolutely critical for top-level performance. St. Olaf's gives the lie to this entire line of reasoning, (as well as to the idea that one needs to attend a university with strong technical resources rather than a LAC to be successful in the field.)</p>
<p>Maybe it's just me, but I assume that every half-way intelligent college applicant applies his own personalized filters to ANY list -- whether it is Ruggs, PhD production, or whatever. I mean, surely nobody actually picks a college from these lists, right? The only use for any ranking list is to simply identify schools for more "in-depth" filtering. As in, "oh, look St. Olafs must have a strong math department. I don't know much about it; let me check it out and see if it's somewhere I would be interested."</p>
<p>Some filters are obvious. For example, the student asking about math departments also mentioned a possible major in sociology. So that pretty much filters out the tech schools.</p>
<p>A white kid with 1850 new style SATs can pretty much filter out schools like Yale, Williams, and Duke.</p>
<p>A gay Jewish student looking for something other than a hard-core Christian/religious campus environment could probably filter out St. Olafs.</p>
<p>Conversely, Pat Buchanan's kid worried about associating with "lib'ral elites" could filter out Reed, Swarthmore, and Wesleyan without much thought.</p>
<p>Any guy could filter out Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley.</p>
<p>So none of these lists are worth the paper they are printed on without personalized "filters". They are simply lists of schools to look into.</p>
<p>Not a whole lot. I know that it is 92% white. I know that it is 41% Lutheran, 25% Protestant, 14% Catholic, and 0% Jewish.</p>
<p>I know, from its mission statement, that it is " a four-year college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, provides an education committed to the liberal arts, rooted in the Christian gospel..."</p>
<p>I know that chapel services are a daily part of college life:</p>
<p>"We arrange community time to signal the priorities of our lives. Because it's important, St. Olaf celebrates daily chapel in the middle of campus, in the middle of the morning, in academic prime time. At daily chapel, members of the faith community and their friends and colleagues gather to hear words of scripture, and words of reflection on those scriptures. The faithful come to share their voices in prayer and hymns and homilies. It's a place for paying attention to the spirit in the world. Chapel speakers include faculty and administrators, students and staff, connecting the words of the gospel with the worlds of their own experience and concern. We don't schedule classes or official meetings during chapel, so that the whole community is free to come together. The twenty minutes devoted to Chapel on weekday mornings are a way of telling time, even for students who never enter the Chapel. "I'll meet you after Chapel," they say, implicitly acknowledging the importance of Chapel as a time apart at the college. "</p>