Most Alum Nobel Winners Per Capita

College Search & Selection
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<p>A list of schools whose alums have won the most Nobel prizes per capita. Based on number of alums who've won Nobel prizes adjusted for size of living alumni population.
(This approximates the number of Nobel winners a school has per capita among its total alum base since the award was first given.)</p>

<p>School / # Alum Nobels / # Living Alums / Proportion</p>

<p>1) Caltech /17/ 20,000/ 1 in 1,176
2) MIT / 30/ 120,000/ 1 in 4,000
3) Cambridge /65/ 263,400/ 1 in 4,052
4) UChicago /30/ 145,000/ 1 in 4,833
5) Princeton /14/ 80,000/ 1 in 5,714
6) Harvard /60/ 345,000/ 1 in 5,750
7) Yale /19/ 127,240/ 1 in 6,696
8) Columbia /40/ 300,000/ 1 in 7,500
9) Oxford /27/ 230,000/ 1 in 8,518
10) Berkeley /29/ 458,000/ 1 in 15,793
11) Stanford /9/ 194,626/ 1 in 21,625</p>

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<p>This reflects the selectivity and quality of education at these institutions 40 or 50 years ago.</p>

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<p>@momsquad Actually you’re wrong. UChicago and Cambridge continue to churn out the Nobel Prizes as fast ever. Their has been no change in the relative rankings for the past several decades.</p>

<p>What is does show is which schools are the most focused on academics. Caltech and MIT do well because they specialize in science and most of the Nobels are in science. But UChicago and Cambridge lead among the broad-based universities (as opposed to the tech institutes).</p>

<p>In fact, as UChicago’s selectivity increases, UChicago will no doubt pile up Nobels even faster.</p>

<p>Stanford is too focused on business and pre-professionalism to ever make a dent in Nobels.</p>

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<p>Truth123:</p>

<p>On this thread and many others, your UChicago glorification has to stop. I’m a very happy UChicago alum, and this is over the top. It’s a wonderful school. There are other wonderful schools out there too. Relax.</p>

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<p>Truth123 has done this before and was told that he was wrong. He’s on the slow side!</p>

<p>Swarthmore 5, Amherst 4, Haverford 4, </p>

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<p>if # Alum Nobels includes dead Alum Nobel Winners and living Alum Nobel Winners, wouldn’t the proportion make more sense if it included # Total Alums (living and dead), rather than # Living Alums?</p>

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<p>Great post. </p>

<p>Berkeley too has had quite a few very recent Nobel Prize winners (alumni and profs)…especially in Physics and Economics.</p>

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<p>UCB, I was also impressed how this public school fares on that list, in particular in comparison to The Farm. Go bears!</p>

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<p>I think another figure worth looking at is the number of alums at the undergraduate level:</p>

<ol>
<li>Harvard University 22</li>
<li>Columbia University 18</li>
<li>University of Chicago 13</li>
<li>University of California-Berkeley 12</li>
<li>Massachusetts Institute of Technology 11</li>
<li>Yale University 11</li>
<li>California Institute of Technology 8</li>
<li>University of California-Los Angeles 5</li>
<li>Cornell University 5</li>
<li>Swarthmore College 5</li>
<li>University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign 5</li>
<li>University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 5</li>
<li>Amherst College 4</li>
<li>Haverford College 4</li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon University 3</li>
<li>Case Western Reserve University 3</li>
<li>Dartmouth College 3</li>
<li>Princeton University 3</li>
<li>Oberlin College 3</li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania 3</li>
<li>University of Rochester 3</li>
<li>University of Washington 3</li>
<li>University of Wisconsin-Madison 3</li>
</ol>

<p>I found that Brown (1), Duke (0), Michigan (5), Northwestern (2), Penn (3), Princeton (3) and Stanford (2) shockingly low. Swarthmore is a beast!</p>

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<p>We’re talking about between 0 and 22 people among 500,000+ total students that have graduated from a majority of these schools in the last century. Why is this meaningful at all?</p>

<p>Obviously Harvard and Yale are Harvard and Yale. Columbia and Chicago do well because they were considered top 5 American universities in the beginning of the century when most of their Nobel Prize winning alums graduated college. After that, state flagships will perform well since they graduate a lot more students period and until a few decades ago, most of the best academic talent in any American state just went to their flagship if Harvard wasn’t a viable option.</p>

<p>Alexandre, how is U of M producing 5 Nobel Prize winners “underachieving”? This is the metric where Michigan performs the best out of all others I’ve seen that try to measure the success of alumni and graduates. The school doesn’t fare nearly as well at the big fellowships, PhD production, and professional school placement per capita. Michigan looks good here though.</p>

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<p>Haverford 4, Oberlin 3 should be in post #9</p>

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<p>Alexandre, UCLA has 6 undergrad alums, not 5.</p>

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<p>goldenboy, I agree that the nobel count is not an important metric. Then again, neither is the Rhodes count or CEO count etc… Whenever you have a ridiculous ratio (1:500 or worse), it is not really worth boasting about.</p>

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<p>I think Alexandre has higher expectations for Michigan than everyone else lol. TBH though This looks like the distribution of undergrads that I find doing science PhDs at top US universities.</p>

<p>Props for Ecole Normale , I have quite a few of them and in terms of science competence they mop Ivy league and Oxbridge students.</p>

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<p>Keep in mind that Princeton is a smaller school, so comparing by hard numbers is sure to be problematic. A better metric would include measurements of all the students who’ve been processed by the school in the last hundred years or so.</p>

<p>Oh! It looks like the OP does this! Hmmm. And Princeton tops all the other ivies per capita. Isn’t that nice?</p>

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<p>

</p>

<p>Below are the 13 Nobel laureates with undergraduate degrees from UChicago. Most of them did not graduate from college in the beginning of the [20th] century, unless you consider the whole first half the “beginning”. Only one graduated in the 1st decade of the 20th c.</p>

<p>Clinton Davisson (S.B. 1909) - Physics, 1937.
Luis Alvarez (A.B. 1932, S.M. 1934, Ph.D. 1936) - Physics, 1968.
Paul Samuelson (A.B. 1935) - Economics, 1970.
Herbert A. Simon (A.B. 1936, Ph.D. 1943) - Economics, 1978.
Herbert Brown (S.B. 1936, Ph.D. 1938) - Chemistry, 1979.
Jack Steinberger (S.B. 1942; Ph.D. 1949) - Physics, 1988.
George Stigler (S.B. 1942, Ph.D. 1949) - Economics, 1982.
Harry Markowitz (A.B. 1947, A.M. 1950, Ph.D. 1955) - Economics, 1990.
James Dewey Watson (S.B. 1947) - Medicine, 1962.
Irwin Rose (S.B. 1948, Ph.D. 1952) - Chemistry, 2004.
Jerome Friedman (A.B. 1950, S.M. 1953, Ph.D. 1956) - Physics, 1990.
Robert Lucas, Jr. (A.B. 1959, Ph.D. 1964) - Economics, 1995.
Frank Wilczek (A.B. 1970) - Physics, 2004.</p>

<p>For comparison, below are the 19 Nobel laureates with undergraduate degrees from Harvard. 4 of them graduated in the first decade of the 20th century. Only one graduated in the 1970s or later (same as Chicago). </p>

<p>Percy W. Bridgman<em>(1882–1961) College 1904; A.M. 1905; Ph.D. 1908; Professor
T. S. Eliot</em>(1888–1965) College 1909; A.M. 1910; Ph.D. (not conferred) 1914
George Minot<em>(1885–1950) College 1908; Medical 1912
James B. Sumner</em>(1887–1955) College 1910; Ph.D. 1914
William Howard Stein<em>(1911–1980) College 1933
William S. Knowles</em>(born 1917) College 1939
James Tobin<em>(1918–2002) College 1939; A.M. 1940
E. Donnall Thomas</em>(born 1920) College 1941; A.M. 1943; Ph.D. 1946
Philip W. Anderson<em>(born 1923) College 1943; Ph.D. 1949
Merton Miller</em>(1923–2000) College 1944
Roy J. Glauber<em>(born 1925) College 1946; Ph.D. 1949; Professor
Robert M. Solow</em>(born 1924) College 1947; A.M. 1949; Ph.D. 1951
Lloyd Shapley<em>(born 1923) College 1948
David Morris Lee</em>(born 1931) College 1952
Walter Gilbert<em>(born 1932) College 1953; professor
Kenneth G. Wilson</em>(born 1936) College 1956
Roger D. Kornberg<em>(born 1947) College 1967
Al Gore</em>(born 1948) College 1969
Eric Maskin*(born 1950) College 1972; A.M. 1974; Ph.D. 1976</p>

<p>The Nobel count isn’t a good indicator of current academic quality, for 2 reasons. First, it’s never more than a minute fraction of all alumni. These are highly unusual people. Second, it’s not an award that recent graduates win. We’re looking at the light from distant stars.</p>