No, I’m not emphasizing the wrong things.
True understanding and experience in laboratory research fields, like the biological sciences, comes from meaningful participation in real research projects even at the undergrad level. Classroom instruction provides a necessary background, but real understanding will take place in applying that background knowledge in a lab where students often first learn to think and write scientifically. It is a significant advantage for students so interested to get that experience and get it as early as they are comfortable engaging in it. Such experiences put such students well ahead of peers at institutions that don’t provide those opportunities and that is a consistent observation across multiple institutions.
While I won’t pretend research experience is as critical for someone interested only in a clinical practice medical career, although it could be helpful for an application as noted above, for those interested in careers in the biological sciences, including those interested in becoming a physician scientist, the advantages of being at a institution with more, and move varied, research experiences is undeniable. I will caveat that if the student isn’t comfortable at that particular school, and won’t excel because of the environment, then they should look elsewhere because you first have to do well academically in order afford oneself the time to do well in a laboratory.
Pertaining to your statistics, Pitt had 55% more undergraduate students go on to earn doctoral degrees (e.g. PhD) in the life sciences than William & Mary according to the data that you cited. The “rates” you state, based on per capital student counts, are uninterpretable without adjusting for the desired career path of a student. In fact, doing a rough adjustment based on the % of life science undergrad degrees renders the rate nearly identical. However, a school like Pitt, which has six different professional schools of health sciences, has many more pre-professional degree programs and students. Professional doctorates (MDs, PharmDs, DMDs, DNPs, CScDs) are terminal degrees that aren’t included in the NSF doctoral numbers. Likewise, many more students are pursing careers in things such as business, law, engineering, compsci, communications, public health, and education which are fields that aren’t incentivized or are atypical to pursue doctorates. Nor taken into account is where the students are receiving their doctorates, doing post-docs, any funding received, or other career milestones. But because there is no adjustment for intended professional degrees or other intended career paths, there is no way to know a “rate” based on per capita counts, and the suggested comparison is frivolous at best and misleading at worse. The US News rankings based on dean surveys aren’t statistically valid to begin with and are absolutely irrelevant to real world settings of obtaining laboratory science experiences. What is relevant for a student interested in a research field is to look through the diversity of courses offerings and the faculty in those departments and the research they are pursuing and see what interests them (admitted hard at that age and lack of experience, but not unusual to already knows if they have a general interest in a something like a neurodegenerative diseases or cancer vs botany or ecology).
One example of why it is important to investigate these things is the explosion of undergraduate programs in neuroscience, a trendy degree program now offered by many smaller schools. If that is a program of interest, a student should look to see if it is actually a department with its own dedicated faculty and course offerings, or is it a program cobbled together by relying on faculty and courses borrowed from other departments such as biology and psychology. There’s a big difference in places with mature programs housed in dedicated departments and these frankenstein programs that were created primarily to attract students and not actually to prepare them for actual work and advanced study in the neurosciences.
I will have to excuse you on the R&D funding bit because most people do not have a knowledge of research funding but you are making sweeping assumptions not based on actual reality. Internal research funding at Pitt comes largely from institutional support from its affiliated medical center, over $200m a year, as well as distributions from its $4.2 billion endowment dedicated to research and academic support, other investment income, as well as strategic reserves. It does not come from undergraduate tuition. If you believe universities with a lot of research funding and a large numbers of research projects consist only of large labs, or if working in such lab is not necessarily beneficial to undergrads, then I think it is fairly obvious that you do not have knowledge or experience of these settings. Each lab, large or small and irregardless of the college they are at, varies in its culture and how undergrads are utilized, and that is always reliant on the principal investigator of that lab. Larger labs can have many more opportunities for projects and also have many more postdocs, grad students and technicians to spend time with undergrads. Plenty of smaller labs with more accessible principal investigators also exist at large research universities. There are benefits to both settings, and it is advantageous for a student to find the best fit combining both one’s research interest and ideal lab environment. And again, what any lab needs to function, at least in a relevant and productive way, is external sources funding. W&M has 5 total NIH grants: two R01s and three R15s. Not that those labs aren’t doing good work or there aren’t good undergrad experiences to be had in them, but there is a very narrow and limited range of experiences to be had there.