Ph.D. Productivity as a Proxy for Academic Quality

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Ten schools disproportionately produce PhDs on a per capita basis: </p>

<ol>
<li> Cal Tech</li>
<li> Harvey Mudd</li>
<li> Reed</li>
<li> Swarthmore</li>
<li> MIT</li>
<li> Carleton</li>
<li> Grinnell</li>
<li> Chicago</li>
<li> Bryn Mawr</li>
<li>Oberlin<br></li>
</ol>

<p>REED</a> COLLEGE PHD PRODUCTIVITY</p>

<p>How do you intrepret this? Is it not a proxy for academic quality and intellectualism? </p>

<p>These schools have produced over long periods of time! They are not flukes.</p>

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<p>No its just means that they were stupid enough to go and get a PhD instead of getting a real job with higher and nicer wages. Its actually the reverse lol</p>

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<p>There are a number of variables you’d need to control for before you could draw any conclusions from that list. </p>

<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>

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<p>Yes, PhD productivity is the best proxy for academic quality, in my opinion. </p>

<p>College names don’t get you as far as some people on CC appear to believe. You don’t want to go to Harvard and work at McDonald’s your whole life. (Well, at least Harvard students would have Ivy League grade inflation.)</p>

<p>The comprehensive study of PhD productivity is here:
<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/nsf08311.pdf[/url]”>http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/nsf08311.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>annasdad - what variables would you have to control for and how would you conduct the study?</p>

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<p>As a proxy for academic quality? No.
As a proxy for intellectualism? Certainly, although to what extent is certainly clouded.</p>

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<p>Caltech is the only one disproportionate at 36% of undergrads; the others are more closely in line, with gradually dropping percentages. The cutoff at the top ten is not significant:</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/swarthmore/771367-compare-swarthmore-vs-haverford-2.html#post8771582[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/swarthmore/771367-compare-swarthmore-vs-haverford-2.html#post8771582&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The above tltle is not significant for this thread.</p>

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<p>HockeyKid, I’m in no way qualified to design such a study or come up with a comprehensive list of controls. A couple off the top of my head, entering stats and distribution of majors. </p>

<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>

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<p>That might be true if the statistic were used to compare schools of similar size (large vs large, medium vs medium, and small vs small), but comparing large and small schools on a per capita basis skews the analysis to unduly favor small schools - much the same way a comparison of total numerical PhD output would favor large schools.</p>

<p>Ever notice that tiny countries, schools, companies, or what have you almost always come out on top in the various per capita comparisons? By lumping all schools in the same size category the question really becomes one of: Among schools that produce PhDs, which school is the smallest? It’s a pretty good proxy for small size.</p>

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<p>It’s just one more stat to look at to determine the quality of the school along with the hundreds of others you can look at, and it should obviously be a much more important factor in selecting a college for those students who are planning on going to grad school than those who aren’t. PhD production isn’t a guarantee of a quality institution, but it’s one indicator that when considered along with the other factors can help you get a picture of the quality.</p>

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<p>A school producing a lot of PhDs could mean a lot of different things, all a the same time:</p>

<ol>
<li>The students are intellectual and want to stay in academia</li>
<li>The school produces students who are able to get better support in completing a PhD</li>
<li>The students can’t find a job, so they figure a PhD is the best way to go</li>
</ol>

<p>But I don’t think it necesarrily means the students are brighter. There’s nothing to distinguish people who get their PhDs at Harvard from those who get them at the University of Phoenix.</p>

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<p>^That’s a very misguided perspective. The University of Phoenix doesn’t offer PhDs in any sought after (or mainstream) areas. </p>

<p>The bulk of PhD programs are extremely selective and, unlike a Bachelor’s, most students will never qualify or be admitted to such programs. Very few universities actually have the finances to offer an extensive array of doctoral programs and, even for the ones that do, the list of programs offered are very scarce.</p>

<p>The only universities capable of offering a wide array of doctoral programs are large state universities, such as Berkeley, or universities with huge endowments, such as Harvard or Stanford. There are usually few university options for attaining a PhD in a specific subject area and admission is very selective. </p>

<p>Because of the selectivity and lack of university options, all PhD programs are “prestigious”. If you are able to attain a PhD, chances are you are very intelligent.</p>

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<p>I think it is important to take a college’s/university’s academic offerings into account when looking at PhD productivity. Some universities have many non-traditional majors, such as Art, Architecture, Music, Nursing etc… Other universities offer only traditional majors. Clearly, all things being equal, the latter will produce more PhDs than the former. That being said, as some have mentioned above, most universities will have a PhD productivity of 4%-8%. In fact, as the data shows, only 8 non-LAC institutions have a PhD producitivy rate over 8%. Schools like Columbia, Michigan, Northwestern and Penn have a large percentage of the undergraduate student populations majoring in untraditional majors, which explains why they have a lower PhD productivity rate. It does not mean that those universities are not as good as their peers academically…or that their student bodies are less intellectually inclined.</p>

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<p>The LACs’ percentages are high also because of self-selection; students who want to be in a smaller environment known for leading to advanced grad school tend to gravitate to such schools, skewing the numbers.</p>

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<p>The financial return on investment from getting a PhD is not necessarily very good ([PhD:</a> Is It Profitable? Calculating the Return on Your Investment](<a href=“http://www.brighthub.com/education/postgraduate/articles/78167.aspx]PhD:”>http://www.brighthub.com/education/postgraduate/articles/78167.aspx)). But that isn’t really the issue here. The productivity numbers measure PhD completions. Whether a PhD makes good financial sense or not, getting one is hard. It takes ability, training, and a high level of motivation for academic work. If you choose to go that route and see it through, your teachers must have done a pretty good job stoking the fire in your belly. </p>

<p>So in my opinion, PhD productivity is possibly the best outcome-oriented measure we have for academic quality. Unlike other outcome measurements (like average alumni earnings), it is closely tied to how well a college prepares and motivates students for work in the very subjects colleges teach. It would be even better if we had more data (for example, to isolate PhD production only for the arts and science students in large universities), but we don’t.</p>

<p>Look again at the schools on the top-10 list above. They share significant characteristics. These schools aren’t succeeding by this measure just because they are small, and certainly not because their students are too stupid to find “real” jobs. Just understand there is nothing magical about “top 10”. As someone pointed out, below CalTech the rest are rather tightly clustered.</p>

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<p>Most colleges prepare people for real jobs after college–teachers, nurses, engineers, business, computers where a PhD is not needed and may be a liability. Some prepare people for Starbucks or grad school. Nothing that special about that.</p>

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<p>There are several problems with the PhD productivity figures. </p>

<p>(1) Most students have neither the need nor the desire for a PhD. </p>

<p>In fields like engineering, nursing, and education, you can get a decent job with a bachelor’s degree. For example, only 16% of new teachers have a master’s. Students in fields like geology, public policy, public health, and architecture can get great jobs with a MS/MPP/MPH/MArch/etc. Additionally, many students choose to attend professional schools like medical, law, and business school. Many liberal arts students choose to forgo further education entirely and enter directly into the workplace after college (e.g. an English major going into publishing). One cannot assume that a sociology department is weak simply because it sends all of its students to law school.</p>

<p>(2) There is no accounting for the quality of the PhD programs. </p>

<p>Sentiment was right, to an extent. Most PhD programs have become quite selective, and even programs that are honestly pretty poor in quality have admit rates below 20% or even 15%. Nevertheless, there is a huge difference between sending 3 students to Harvard and Stanford for molecular biology and 5 to Northern Arizona U. There are always a handful of programs in each field that tend to dominate the field. (In art history, for instance, curators almost inevitably come from Harvard, NYU-IFA, and to a lesser extent Yale, Columbia, and Berkeley.)</p>

<p>(3) PhD completion data and classroom offerings are not necessarily linked. </p>

<p>To demonstrate this, I’ll use an extreme example. Marlboro made the top 10 list for anthropology PhD production. The school, however, has exactly one anthropologist on staff. This fall a mere 2 courses in anthropology are being taught at Marlboro. Compare this to a school like Penn, which has a half dozen experts in each of the subfields of anthropology, multiple archaeology labs, a world class anthropology museum, etc. For a student wanting access to the best professors and resources, there is simply no comparison.</p>

<p>

Though most graduate students would substitute “passionate” for “stupid,” there is much truth in this.</p>

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<p>Hardly. Most teachers go on to get masters, as do many engineers, businessmen, and even some nurses.</p>

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<p>No, they do not and if they do it’s out in the future.</p>

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<p>

</p>

<p>Correct. The percentages can serve to guide students who do have this sort of academic bent to locate a relative high concentration of like-minded peers.</p>