<p>Anyone have a preferred method for ranking (or assessing) the academic quality of a school by purely quantitative methods? I've found a couple of useful studies and sites, but this site is by far a good one. It's from Reed College: REED</a> COLLEGE PHD PRODUCTIVITY</p>
<p>Why is getting a PhD a major measure? Most people think of it as a waste of time with poor job prospects in most areas. In other words only people with no motivation except to stay in school a few more years are attracted to it.</p>
<p>Well, for LACs, at least, the measure of students who attain PhDs in X discipline who studied at Y college would lead you to infer that Y college produces qualified students of X who are serious (maybe that’s important for academic environments and so forth), and then, you could say, Y college probably has good teachers of X discipline. For universities, this (see link below) is a nice measure of how much real research (real research, one could say, indicates acceptance by scholarly community and generally is a measure of scholarly value if published in reputable journals, though these top profs might not actually teach undergrads).
Link: [Chronicle</a> Facts & Figures: Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/]Chronicle”>http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/)</p>
<p>For those with enough motivation to put in the tremendous effort to rise to the top in order to do scientific research, or to teach all the other grad students in any field, a PhD is nearly the only ticket to that end. We’re just beginning our knowledge of biology and medicine; we’ll need every PhD in the biological sciences we can produce. I’m all for the expansion of knowledge and research, even though I was one satisfied with just a job. :(</p>
<p>Based on that, is PhD attainment of graduates as important or more important than faculty productivity?</p>
<p>How about: If graduates earn PhDs, the faculty is being productive! :)</p>
<p>The primary purpose of this statistic is to have people infer that a higher percentage going on to PhD’s is better. It ignores the fact that it is far easier for a small school to send a few students on than to have all the bio majors from Berkeley go on as they would fill virtually every PhD slot in the country. The fact also is that far greater numbers of Berkeley grads get PhD’s than grads of any LAC, whatever that is worth.</p>
<p>Setting a PhD as the ultimate achievement for anyone with a bachelors’ may suit the PhD caste just fine, but it is every bit as absurd as saying a university can be quantitatively assessed by the average annual income of its alumni.</p>
<p>I kick this survey in the face</p>
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<p>Correct. Production of PhDs may or may not be a worthy measure of academic excellence, but by making it a percentage or per capita measure will always ensure that a small school or a bunch of small schools will triumph over all the big schools. Percentage measurements almost always favor the small institutions in much the same way that tiny countries almost always win the contest to see who gets the most Olympic medals per capita.</p>
<p>Imagine a tiny Chem department at a small and remote private college somewhere that one year produces just two or three graduates. If just one of these happens to go on and earn a PhD, that school and department will clean up in the percentage PhD production contest, even though their program may well be very weak and have a negligible impact on the science of Chemistry nationwide.</p>
<p>The primary purpose of this statistic is to identify the schools, to help students find them or avoid them, as appropriate. If the fact that 36% of CalTech undergrads later earn a PhD doesn’t impress you, then ignore it. CalTech would be a terrible school for the majority of undergrads, so how could anyone say it’s a better school? Better for whom? It’s better for those who later want to earn a PhD. Some do see a link between a school’s level of academics and the academic level its graduates achieve. You can call it academic quality if you want, or not.</p>
<p>Here are the 10-year average IPEDS PhD rates for the schools mentioned (with rank):</p>
<p>1 California Institute of Technology 35.8%<br>
4 Reed College 19.9%<br>
49 University of California-Berkeley 7.9% </p>
<p>Don’t try to make this say anything more than it does; it’s just the rate at which undergrads later earn PhDs, nothing more. But people do interpret these numbers differently; perhaps the CalTechies will have trouble finding jobs, or maybe the Bears will earn much more over their lifetimes.</p>
<p>that’s pretty hardcore.</p>
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<p>It may not even be better for that. As I said, a percentage comparison will unfairly favor very small schools. Caltech has what? 800 or 900 undergraduates total - all departments combined? That’s a not even a rounding error at UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>These kinds of stats should be used only to compare schools of similar size - large with large and small with small. To use them to compare small with large is just plain bogus.</p>
<p>The best single measure of quality is SAT scores. PhDs are not necessarily the “movers and shakers” in the world. Some schools send lots of students to law or medical school.</p>
<p>SATs alone don’t give the complete picture, however. But, many other indicators of quality are associated with SAT scores.</p>
<p>If I were a high school student who knew I wanted to work in research and/or academia, I would want to be at a school where 36% of my classmates had similar goals, rather than only 8%. The teaching would tend to be more focused on my kind of goal, rather than the goal of getting a job. But that’s just me. ;)</p>
<p>Using PhD production stats when comparing schools of similar size and type (if one’s objective is to earn a PhD) is no doubt somewhat useful. I’d hesitate to assign too much weight to that measure, though. As others have pointed out, school size can play a big role in this. Even the style of a school can affect the numbers without being an indicator of lower quality. Some undergrad schools may have more students interested in professional degrees or who plan to make their bachelor’s degree their terminal degree. That doesn’t mean a student planning to continue on to a doctorate will be shortchanged; indeed, that student may be offered more attention and resources from the profs than at a school where vast numbers of kids profess their PhD intentions.</p>
<p>It’s not dissimilar to the question, “Am I better off applying to colleges from an elite prep school that sends many grads to those schools or an average high school that does so only occasionally?” Both tracks can be rewarding, both can result in success both in admissions and in undergrad academic peformance, and both have some challenges.</p>
<p>“If I were a high school student who knew I wanted to work in research and/or academia, I would want to be at a school where 36% of my classmates had similar goals, rather than only 8%. The teaching would tend to be more focused on my kind of goal, rather than the goal of getting a job. But that’s just me.”</p>
<p>What if the comparable real numbers were maybe 15 students vs 100 planning on grad school and the one school had 12 classes in the major and the other 50? And the one had an entire building complete with library for the major and the other maybe one floor and no special collections?</p>
<p>Just a warning: the Reed Data from the link in the OP is presented in a way, that, to put it delicately, is designed to emphasize one aspect of the studies (Reed’s areas of strength). The IR office at Reed only lists, in descending order, the categories where Reed places near the top, omitting the categories where it does less well completely. That said, there’s no denying that Reed has an incredible track record for placing its grads in Ph.D. programs. For a fuller presentation of the data, and a sense of just how small the numbers are, check out Earlham’s site:</p>
<p>[Baccalaureate</a> Origins Study](<a href=“http://www.earlham.edu/~ir/bac_origins_report/bac_origins.html]Baccalaureate”>http://www.earlham.edu/~ir/bac_origins_report/bac_origins.html)</p>
<p>The Reed site is based on a single decade, but there are 5 studies of the undergraduate origins of Ph.D’s, covering different decades. I think that a record of producing Ph.D’s over several decades is one useful measure of the quality of undergraduate education in a particular discipline, even though–as others have pointed out–it’s dangerous to read too much into these sorts of studies.</p>
<p>I’d stick with the historic statistical record of achievement (1 in 3 vs. 1 in 12) that maximizes my chances, and consider the reasons those from the small schools fare better (smaller classes, no TAs, professors hired for their teaching skills, undergrads doing the research). Being near the Nobel-winning professors just doesn’t seem to help the undergrads. To be sure, Berkeley is the world-class place to earn that PhD.</p>
<p>I find this list helpful for a few reasons… first, it reinforces that schools that are not necessarily of ivy selectivity have bright, motivated, intellectual students in relatively large concentrations. </p>
<p>Say whatever you want about SAT midranges and admittance rates… it seems to me that the fact that a lot of students at, schools, Reed, Oberlin, and Bryn Mawr go on to pursue PhD’s relative to other elite institutions says a lot about the quality of the school, a lot about the quality of the students, and a lot about the goals of the student body as a whole.</p>
<p>It also, to me, underscores how important “fit” is… I felt more at home at the U of C than I did any of the other superelites I visited, and I wasn’t able to put my finger on why. I look at this chart and see that many of the other schools I considered don’t have as many students pursuing academia, and it seems to be an objective way for me to confirm my feeling that the U of C had more of an academic feel to it than the other schools I considered. I imagine a prospective i-banker might feel the same way after visiting Wharton.</p>
<p>(FYI, I have no interest in getting a PhD, none at all, but I’m tickled by those who either want one or are in the process of earning one).</p>