Open for Discussion: Does attending a liberal arts college really help a student get a PhD

Graduate School
1

So I’ve read lots of discussion about this over the years. The statistics are remarkable. From NSF

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/

Over half of the top 50 PhD producing schools are true liberal arts schools. Reed’s home page breaks it down further

http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html

Others have commented on the value of a liberal arts education (including a Nobel Laureate from Grinnell…Cech)

http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/

http://www.thecollegesolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cech_article2.pdf

So is it for real?, or are we looking at other factors? I’d like to believe there is some magic about going to a liberal arts school in how that leads you to get a PhD…I have a PhD and went to a liberal arts school. I’d like to hear counter arguments. The good counter arguments I’ve heard are below:

  1. Students at liberal arts schools don't have opportunities to find good jobs, so they go to grad school. There is some truth to this. My undergrad (Carleton) does a good job finding students jobs, but they can't get students the job opportunities that University of Michigan can.
  2. Students know they want to go to grad school, so they decide to go to liberal arts schools. There is self section going on.
  3. The issue is not necessarily the "liberal arts" helps, the issue is the smallness of school helps. Students need the faculty interaction to motivate them to get a PhD. For example, of the top 5 schools in the NSF list Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, and even Swarthmore (they have an engineering program) are not really liberal arts schools in the true sense. They are small and students have the chance to interact with faculty. This may be what is most important.

Any thoughts?

2

Harvey Mudd and Swarthmore aren’t LA college? Wtf?

If this stat you mention is actually true, it’s very surprising to me. Maybe it’s all the un/underemployed Ph.D.s out there? I can’t think of a single professor I’ve had any contact with who did his or her undergrad at a LA college.

3

:stuck_out_tongue: … that is part of the controversy…in my mind at least. I realize that Harvey Mudd and Swarthmore consider themselves liberal arts schools. They have engineering though. This is a profession. Students can get a job based on the skills they’ve learned. In most of the liberal arts schools on the NSF list, they don’t have professional programs.

Click the link. Realize that it is not ranking total quantity of Phds produced. It is ranking percentage of total graduates of that school who get PhDs.

4

Okay, then I’d guess that undergrads at research schools like Michigan are pretty successful at getting summer internships and then getting a decent job after graduation. People at LA schools sit around writing papers and stuff and probably aren’t prepared to get a job. So they go hide in grad school. Even if they try to get an internship, why would a software company in the bay area, for example, want someone even from a good school like Swarthmore when they can grab someone from Berkeley, Stanford, or even UCLA, where the CS/engineering programs are 1000x better?

The bottom line, if you want a Ph.D., you should go to as good of a research university as you can, get to know your professors, do well in classes, and get research experience. The only thing LA colleges have on research universities is small classes, but there are private research universities that are way better anyway. Plus the LORs you get aren’t going to be coming from someone famous, likely not even someone well-known.

5

You don’t really get LORs from well known (or famous) advisors as an undergrad at a major research University…after getting a PhD, the thought of this is kinda absurd. My PhD advisor was at least well known. I liked him, and he was a genuinely decent guy. However, he had a huge lab where grad students managed the undergrads, senior grad students or post-docs managed the junior grad students, research faculty managed the post-docs and senior grad students, and the well known advisor didn’t really manage anything. He literally did not know the names of the undergrads working for him sometimes. The post-docs and research faculty wrote the letters for the undergrads.

6

yeah I guess a sample size of n=1 proves your absurd claim

7

Put on your critical thinking cap, doc, or at least think back to AP Stats…think denominator.

hint: by definition, LAC’s don’t offer so-called vocational degrees (eng, business, nursing and allied health sciences, education, etc.) which are almost always terminal degrees. (Heck, I read somewhere on cc that undergrad biz was one one most popular majors nationwide.) Of course, they won’t get a PhD…

8

This is very much an over-generalization. My PhD advisor is an NAE member and very well known in his field. He had a number of undergraduate students working in his lab while I was a graduate student, nearly all of which he knew well enough to write a pretty fantastic (or damning, as the case may be) letter of reference for applying to other graduate schools. As it turned out, most of them loved his group so much that if they went to graduate school, they stayed with him anyway, but the few that left would have got a very nice letter from a very well-known professor.

Now we have n=1 for both sides of that story. I guess that means it’s 50/50 nationwide, right?

9

There is nothing wrong with a liberal arts school contrary to the current push of STEM. Not everyone can do math or engineering. Today’s med schools are admitting more humanities because they have a bedside manner. Every college will need future profs. I had a student athlete who got her B.A. in English, got her M.A. in African-American studies, & her masters of divinity. She is now a well-published professor.

10

I’d argue this is actually because they care more about GPA than undergraduate field of study, but otherwise I mostly agree with you.

11

For those of you attending major large research universities, you really see a significant number of undergrads doing meaningful research with profs their at the university?..by the way this is not rhetorical. For example, they do research over the summer. There always are a handful of happy stories where a students starts working for a prof their senior year and becomes a PhD student with that same prof…sure, but I’m talking about widespread programs (i.e. more than 10-15 students in a larger dept over the summer).

I went to a LAC and a major research university for a PhD. I’m proud of both, but I question the opportunities that undergrads at a large research university have to get to know their profs. This is the basic thing that is needed for a student to get a letter of recommendation. At umich many of the summer opportunities for undergrads actually went to students from other universities…I thought it was bizarre. There was little push to recruit undergrads at have meaningful research opportunities at the university they were attending, but lots of push to recruit from other colleges.

12

Liberal arts colleges can have majors in the professions; that doesn’t make them not liberal arts colleges. What defines LACs is their size, their focus on undergraduate students, and their focus on a well-rounded undergraduate education in the liberal arts and sciences. Swarthmore has an engineering major, but their engineering majors are still expected to get that well-rounded liberal arts education in the context of a small, undergraduate-focused community. Smith has an engineering program, too; it’s still an LAC.

Caltech, while small, isn’t an LAC - because it lacks the undergrad focus and liberal arts-type curriculum. It’s a research university. Rice is another similar place - small undergrad population, but not really an LAC because it’s a research university.

I went to an LAC and now have a PhD. I know lots of professors who went to LACs. There are lots of people from both kinds of backgrounds. In fact, I would say that LACs are disproportionately represented among professors relative to their size in the population. I don’t think it’s because they can’t get jobs so they hide in graduate school, either - that’s kind of absurd. From my LAC (which isn’t even top-ranked), far more people went straight into the workforce than went to graduate school. Writing papers is actually good preparation for lots of jobs, because believe it or not, some jobs actually require you to write (and write papers, even) as part of the job requirements. Not all jobs are at software companies and tech firms - but even at tech firms, not everyone is a software engineer or developer. There are titles like UX researcher (many of which come from social science backgrounds) and technical writer (guess what they do all day long?)

You also don’t need a letter of recommendation from someone famous to go to graduate school; the vast majority of undergrads at either kind of school are not going to be getting recommendation letters from someone famous, simply because there aren’t that many famous people to go around. (Plus, in my field, there are a few famous people at small colleges and smaller research universities.) There is definitely research experience to be had at small colleges, too. The professors at Swarthmore, Pomona, Amherst, et. al have 2/2 loads. That’s the standard load here at my large public research university. Of course, they don’t have the option to buy out and reduce their load (which is what essentially any productive researcher here at my university does), but there is still very much an emphasis on smaller-scale research and involving and mentoring undergrads in that research.

I think that a good LAC or good research university could be, in theory, equally good at preparing students for a PhD program. The key is the individual student, and how they think and what environment is good for them. Some people would flounder at a large research university and need (or want) the nurturing environment of the LAC; others would feel stifled or smothered at an LAC and need (or want) the relative freedom of a larger research university.

Also, I’ve seen undergraduate students at larger research universities get close to professors in research labs - both at a large-ish private university and at a very large public university. It certainly can be done; the students in question just need to be a little more proactive about it.

I’d disagree with that argument. A lot of medical schools are explicitly recruiting humanities majors because they want majors who have engaged with the big questions of our humanity and who often think about medicine more broadly than the science majors they get. One example of that is Mount Sinai’s Humanities and Medicine Early Assurance program.

13

I suppose it depends on what you mean by significant. I attended a large research university for both undergrad and grad school, and I’d have to say in my experience, it was not the majority of undergraduates who had that experience, but it wasn’t uncommon either. Some of it has to do with the personality of the professor, but even more of it has to do with the particular undergraduate student and how motivated and intelligent they are. I would also say it is relatively uncommon for the undergraduates who work only over the summers and much more common for those that work during the semesters for a given professor as well.

LACs have a certain advantage built in when it comes to getting to know the professors teaching your classes, that much is certainly true. It has always been my opinion based on observation that something similar can be achieved at a large research institution, but the onus is much more on the student to make the effort to get to know a given subset of the professors. I am sure this is less true in the extremely large undergraduate courses like economics 101, but it’s the later courses whose professors can write the most effective letters anyway.

Further, you only need 3 letters anyway, so it isn’t necessarily a disadvantage to miss out on getting to know every professor (I suspect this is highly student-dependent). Also, I would argue that it is at least as useful to have one very good letter of reference based on your research experience with two medium-quality references based on classes as opposed to three good ones from professors who you knew fairly well from courses. In that regard, I think going to a major research institution is at least as good at grooming graduate students as a LAC provided that a student actually takes advantage of the opportunities available at said research school. Most do not.

I think the expectation at most of these programs is that the summer students will come from other students as a sort of recruiting tool for getting graduate students that otherwise would have no direct exposure to the program. It is more expected that undergraduates that currently attend a given institution already have the opportunity to get involved in that research during the semester. In fact, of all the professors I have known, most who hire undergraduate workers are more than happy to keep them on over the summer without having to go through a formal REU program of any sort. It just seems like few of them actually do this, as many of them chase the money inherent in internships.

I will also point out that everything I have expressed here is based on my experiences in STEM fields. I am sure there is considerable variability across fields.

I couldn’t possibly agree with this more. Hopefully that came across in my early-morning ramble above.

While I am not all that familiar with medical schools, I’ve always heard that they also like the STEM fields on account of the particular brand of problem solving those students practice.

All I really know is that I would be awful at medicine.

14

" I think going to a major research institution is at least as good at grooming graduate students as a LAC provided that a student actually takes advantage of the opportunities available at said research school."

I think this hits at the key: it is (as they say in Ireland) horses for courses. Some students are ready, willing and able to be the student who puts themselves forward enough to stand out from the crowd in a big research institution. Other (equally able) students may not be, and may bloom better in an LAC environment.

It is a sample size of 1, but my D thought she might be interested in physics, but her one course in high school was not enough for her to be 100% certain. She chose an LAC over a research institution. First year went well, and she applied (and got) a (paid) summer research job sponsored by the LAC the summer after first year. That settled it, and she is now a physics major (and lab assistant), and for summer after 2nd year she has an REU at a big-name research institution (that she would possibly apply to for a PhD). In the meantime, she is loving life in an LAC- taking a range of courses, her ECs in her small community, etc.

The point is that she has grown into herself in the LAC environment and the opportunities that came with it. When she, like the OP, goes off to her big research institution for her PhD she will have had lots of the benefits of an LAC experience and be ready for something different. Her cousin (ok, sample size =2) went to JHU knowing she wanted to do science research, and loved it for all the opportunities, the competitive peer group and research opportunities. Horses for courses.

15

"Okay, then I’d guess that undergrads at research schools like Michigan are pretty successful at getting summer internships and then getting a decent job after graduation. People at LA schools sit around writing papers and stuff and probably aren’t prepared to get a job. So they go hide in grad school. Even if they try to get an internship, why would a software company in the bay area, for example, want someone even from a good school like Swarthmore when they can grab someone from Berkeley, Stanford, or even UCLA, where the CS/engineering programs are 1000x better?

The bottom line, if you want a Ph.D., you should go to as good of a research university as you can, get to know your professors, do well in classes, and get research experience. The only thing LA colleges have on research universities is small classes, but there are private research universities that are way better anyway. Plus the LORs you get aren’t going to be coming from someone famous, likely not even someone well-known."

I’m always surprised when I see someone post something so confidently, so surely, that isn’t accurate.

Michigan is a great school, as are Cal and UCLA, but the top LACs do better than those large schools at placing undergraduates in PhD programs AND in professional schools. Michigan graduates over 7000 students a year, while Amherst and Williams graduate 500 or less. Percentage wise, the Amherst and Williams grads get many, many more than their share of spaces in every PhD and professional program out there, as well as Fulbright scholarships and everything else.

(and believe me I’m not knocking Michigan - I went there)

16

Yes, all LAC grads are making your latte at Starbucks or heading to grad school to “hide” from the real world.

You might ask the large software companies why they hire LAC grads right out of school. My kid met with a senior at Amherst last month who accepted an offer from Google. That student is a CS/Biochem double major which isn’t as tricky as it sounds given that at Amherst it’s easy to double or even triple major because of the open curriculum.

17

Of course people get jobs at Google from all over. The key is putting together a great portfolio – giving yourself experience. But for the thousands of kids with little to no experience, there’s absolutely no reason to recruit from 3000 miles away when there’s someone just as good waiting for Google at Berkeley or Stanford.

Are you assuming the same percentage of the class at Michigan and LACs want to go to grad school? Because I seriously doubt that an LAC is better preparation than schools like Michigan or even Ohio State for getting into grad school. These big research schools offer so many opportunities.

18

And like I said, do you know of any professors at top, say, 50 schools who went to a LAC for undergrad? I’m not saying they don’t exist, but I’ve never met any, and I’ve studied at many strong research universities. There’s a difference between getting a Ph.D. and having a strong academic career.

19

Well, I would say that just because LACs proportionately send more students to graduate school does not mean that they do better at placing undergraduates in PhD programs. Students who go to LACs might be more motivated overall to get PhDs, or the same qualities that motivate a student to attend an LAC might be the same qualities that make them want to get a PhD later.

Well, you’ve moved the bar. The first thing you said is “if you want a PhD…” that you should go to the best research university possible. But that’s not necessarily true, because the statistics point out that it’s quite possible to get into a top research university and earn a PhD by going to an LAC - or a non-top research university, honestly (or a regional comprehensive university). Furthermore, once someone has a BA and is already in a top PhD program, I see no reason why where they went to undergrad should have any bearing on their future success - once you get a PhD, nobody really cares where you went to undergrad.

That said, yes, I know successful professors at top institutions who got their degree from an LAC. It’s actually difficult to see the BA education of many professors because they often don’t list it on their webpages - just where they got their PhDs. However, I randomly chose the #5 program in my field (UChicago) and found professors who went to Williams, Oberlin, Wesleyan, Smith, and Simmons - and two of them are big names I recognize that are not in my own subfield. At Brown, there was College of the Holy Cross represented; at Minnesota, out of the five people who I checked who actually had their BA school listed, I saw St. Olaf. And it depends on what you mean by top 50, too - if you look at LAC professors vast numbers of them went to LACs themselves for undergrad.

Google has a huge office in New York and a bunch of offices in other cities too.

20

“Are you assuming the same percentage of the class at Michigan and LACs want to go to grad school? Because I seriously doubt that an LAC is better preparation than schools like Michigan or even Ohio State for getting into grad school. These big research schools offer so many opportunities.”

Actually, a higher percentage of the classes at top LACs go to all types of grad school. Much higher. That is because the big research opportunities at the big research schools tend to go to all those thousands of grad students at those big research schools, and the majority of the undergraduate classes are huge. Meanwhile the LAC students have tiny classes, professors who know them, and all of the (admittedly fewer) research opportunities go to undergrads because that’s all there are. Perhaps lecture classes with 300 students is not the optimum way to get to grad school?

Three of the top ten universities for getting into the very top professional schools, places like Yale or Harvard Law, Chicago or Wharton Business, or Johns Hopkins or Harvard Medical, are Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore. The percentage of grads coming out of those schools and going to the elite professional schools is 4 times higher than the percentage that come out of Berkeley or Michigan.

http://inpathways.net/ipcnlibrary/ViewBiblio.aspx?aid=1577

Meanwhile 7 of the top 10 schools for producing PhDs per capita are LACs.

http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/

10 of the top 20 schools for producing science and engineering PhDs are LACs.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-50-schools-that-produce-science-phds/

And yes, many many professors and CEOs and everything else come from LACs. In pure numbers, not as many from Amherst or Williams as from Michigan or Berkeley, given that Michigan and Berkeley are graduating 18 times as many undergraduates every year. But proportionally, the numbers from Amherst and Williams are much higher. The average outcome for their grads are much better.

In essence, you seem to be making a lot of assumptions about LACs, the quality of their teaching, and the opportunities available to their students that just aren’t very accurate. Writing all those papers in all those small classes opens a lot of doors.