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In a good year, the NIH funding at Wesleyan can apparently be even higher. The $1.6 million figure is for 2008, but the 2005 figure was $3.2 million, and the 2006 figure was $4.1 million.</p>
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<p>That doesn’t begin to make up the difference in endowment spending. Using 2008 numbers (I’d use the post-crash numbers if Wesleyan would post theirs), endowment spending was $53 mllliion ($36,000 per student) at Swarthmore versus $35 million ($11,000 per student) at Wesleyan. So a few million in contract research sales hardly puts a dent in the different. </p>
<p>It seems to me that, by offereing PhD programs, Wesleyan is really selling a university feature/benefit package and not a liberal arts college product. Perhaps it would make more sense to evaluate Wesleyan as an alternative to Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth rather than a competitor for Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore. There are pros and cons to both.</p>
<p>Anyway, I wasn’t really thinking of Wesleyan when I made the comment that a colleges might love to get out from under some of these PhD programs. The issue of cost versus benefit has popped up at Bryn Mawr. Willliams is on the hook for providing professors to the Clark masters program, and so forth. These small programs are not without signficant cost. Here’s another example at the undergrad level. Williams pays for two full-time faculty slots to staff the Mystic Seaport Program. Over the years, they have averaged 7 Williams students per year at Mystic.</p>
<p>^^^But, here’s the thing: it’s not like the Swarthmore or the Wesleyan bursar is standing on the steps of Old Main and peeling off dollar bills as each student lines up for their share. It doesn’t work like that. If each college experience is, as you say, a “product”, then certainly, it is a <em>total</em> package. At the risk of fighting one bit of sophistry with more sophistry, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. For example, you can’t put a price tag on an undergraduate sharing co-authorship on their first peer-reviewed journal article, or their presenting a paper before their first national conference. You may call that a university product or experience. What would be the comparable Amherst, Williams or Swarthmore experience? Flying someone free of charge to Gambia as part of their study abroad expenses? I think it’s great that Swarthmore can do that.</p>
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<p>That’s quite common across all fields at Swarthmore. In fact, it would be the unusual published journal article that doesn’t include undergrad authors.</p>
<p>For example, this webpage lists recent Swarthmore published research from the Chemistry and BioChem department. Student authors are indicated with asterisks next to their names:</p>
<p>[Department</a> of Chemistry and Biochemistry](<a href=“Chemistry & Biochemistry :: Swarthmore College”>Chemistry & Biochemistry :: Swarthmore College)</p>
<p>I know it’s common at Williams, as well. I assume it is at most liberal arts colleges. Undergrad participation in faculty research is one of the key selling feature/benefits of an undergrad-only college.</p>