<p>this might be relevant
[nsf.gov</a> - SRS Baccalaureate Origins of S&E Doctorate Recipients - US National Science Foundation (NSF)](<a href=“404 Page Not Found | NCSES | NSF”>404 Page Not Found | NCSES | NSF)</p>
<p>[NRC</a> Rankings in Each of 41 Areas](<a href=“http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc41indiv.html]NRC”>NRC Rankings in Each of 41 Areas)</p>
<p>The NRC rankings are old, but they do seem to do a reasonable job of assessing academic prestige.</p>
<p>^^Those rankings are for the DOCTORATE programs.</p>
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Don’t count on it. A top LAC is a much safer bet.</p>
<p>The “hidden gems” are usually very specialized programs (like Landscape Engineering), pre-professional programs, or special honors-type programs, like the tutorial program in Ohio. Only the last ones are relevant for future PhDs.</p>
<p>^Interesting. I wasn’t sure about undergrad, though I had heard good things about Pitt and philosophy.</p>
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I’m aware of that, but when the topic is prestige in academia I don’t think there’s that much of a difference.</p>
<p>Pitt’s undergrad philosophy program is a affiliated with the Honors College, right?</p>
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<p>Here’s the 2009 Philosophical Gourmet’s ranking of philosophy “faculty quality” based on surveys of 260 leading philosophers. Survey participants were not permitted to rank their own school or the school from which they earned their Ph.D. You may agree with the ranking or not, but I do think it’s a fair reflection of how a school’s faculty is perceived by others in the business, including those who will be making graduate admission decisions in the top grad programs, paying close attention to which applicants are getting the strongest recommendations from people they consider among the top scholars in the field:</p>
<p>School / mean score / median score (on 5-point scale):
- NYU / 4.9 / 5.0
- Rutgers / 4.6 / 5.0
- Princeton / 4.3 / 4.5
- Pittsburgh / 4.2 / 4.0
- Michigan / 4.1 / 4.0
- Harvard / 4.0 / 4.0
- MIT / 4.0 / 4.0
- Yale / 3.9 / 4.0
- Stanford / 3.8 / 4.0
- UC Berkeley / 3.8 / 3.5
- UCLA / 3.8 / 4.0
- UNC Chapel Hill / 3.8 / 4.0
- Columbia / 3.7 / 4.0
- Arizona / 3.7 / 3.5
- CUNY / 3.6 / 3.5
- Notre Dame / 3.6 / 3.5
- Brown / 3.5 / 3.5
- Cornell / 3.5 / 3.5
- Southern California / 3.6 / 3.5
- Texas / 3.4 / 3.5
- UCSD / 3.3 / 3.5
- U Chicago / 3.3 / 3.5</p>
<p>From there it drops off pretty quickly. </p>
<p>“Hidden gems”? How about #1 NYU, #2 Rutgers, #4 Pitt, #13 Arizona, and #15 CUNY? MIT at #6 in such a deep humanities field might surprise a lot of people, as will the fact that 3 of the top 5, 6 of the top 12, 8 of the top 15, and 10 of the top 22 are publics—while schools like Penn (#30), Duke (#26), WUSTL (#30), Georgetown (#36), Northwestern (#41), Johns Hopkins (#43), and Rice (#48) are farther, in some cases much farther, down the list.</p>
<p>A couple of caveats. First, people do get into top graduate programs in philosophy from leading LACs, especially those with stronger philosophy faculties like Wellesley, Amherst, and Pomona. And certainly a few get in from other schools, public or private; it will just be harder to find recommenders whose letters will carry as much weight. The other point of caution, though, is that however certain you think you are of your intended major when applying to undergraduate schools, there’s a good chance you’ll change your mind. So choosing a Rutgers or a Pitt might be riskier than choosing a school with strong faculties in many or all disciplines.</p>
<p>Keilexandra,</p>
<p>Both Pitt and Rutgers have top PhD programs in Philosophy (depending on your area of interest), but neither is a “gem” for undergrad, although you could get a fine education there.</p>
<p>When applying to PhD in Philosophy, people are applying with a specific field of philosophy in mind, and the ranking for them may change depending on the strength of the department in that specific field.</p>
<p>From my limited experience, the 6 Swarthmore graduates who applied for Phil PhD last year were all accepted into very top programs (all in top 10 from the list above), often with multiple acceptances, and all fully funded.</p>
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<p>This I agree with.</p>
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<p>This I disagree with. Where the “prestige” of an undergrad degree might help is in getting into a top grad program in the first place and thus getting going on the rest of it. Or as a UCSD professor who sits on her department’s grad admissions committee told us, they accept grad students only from colleges with acacdemic reputations in the field above a certain level. If you are a top kid coming out of a school below that level, your app doesn’t even get seriously looked at. </p>
<p>So undergrad prestige probably shouldn’t count for anything, but sometimes there is a reputation threshold that must be met. So in that sense it does count.</p>
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<p>Mollie is exactly right.</p>
<p>I can’t remember the name of this great book I read about in regards to admissions for those interested in PhDs in the humanities, but it stated that for most competitive PhD programs (top 10), where you go for undergrad does and will matter. Relatively unknown or weak undergrad programs(not necessarily schools), won’t help you gain admissions into already competitive phd admissions, even if you have everything else going for you(recs, gpa, test scores, etc)</p>
<p>It advises those students who didn’t attend top undergrad programs, to consider obtaining a master’s degrees at universities that are strong in one’s intended phd field first and then applying for a phd program upong completion of the masters. this will help them or should help them in establishing themselves for admissions to top phd programs.</p>
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But I think that’s the point – being at a school where it’s easy and normal to get a meaningful research position early on makes a difference both in terms of students’ initial graduate school aspirations and in terms of the ease of getting into a top program. Whether that’s because of the perceived prestige of the school, or whether it’s a combination of institutional resources and faculty having connections at top programs, I am not terribly concerned. </p>
<p>That absolutely doesn’t mean that students with the initiative and drive to get research positions outside a school’s limited resources won’t get into a great graduate program, but it’s harder to be those students, and fewer of them exist. I’ve likened academic success at a top program to trying to lose weight with a dietician and a trainer, versus trying to lose the weight yourself. Of course you can do it yourself, but you’re more likely to succeed with lots of guidance, not to mention social pressure.</p>
<p>In my program, I’ve also noticed an interesting trend in terms of the labs that students select. The students from top schools gravitate toward the really outstanding labs publishing in Cell/Nature/Science-type journals. I don’t know whether this is student-based (that the students from MIT/Harvard/Yale want to be in the labs doing the cutting-edgiest science, that those students are not afraid of the long hours and hard work entailed), or whether it’s advisor-based (that advisors prefer those students as PhD students, for their personal qualities or given their previous credentials).</p>
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<p>I’m not surprised. Swarthmore has one of the strongest philosophy departments among LACs, with faculty who are doing serious scholarship and consequently are recognized by the people who make admissions decisions at the top grad programs. Just don’t assume that the Swarthmore experience is representative of LACs in general. some have strong philosophy departments, some don’t.</p>
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<p>This is about right, with some qualifications. In many fields it’s a pretty “clubby” world when it comes to admission to top graduate programs. A strong recommendation from a recognized member of the club counts for a lot. An equally strong recommendation from an unknown counts for a lot less. That’s not the only factor, but it is a factor. That said, people do get into top grad programs from lesser-known schools or from “good” schools without distinguished undergrad programs in the field in question. Other things equal, though, your odds are better if you get strong recommendations from recognized figures in the field, and they’re going to be much easier to find if your undergraduate school has a strong program in that field.</p>
<p>Why going to a top program may be important if one wants a career in science:</p>
<p>[Taken</a> for Granted: Shocked, Shocked! to Find Disappointment on Campus - Science Careers - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers](<a href=“http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_11_13/caredit.a0900141]Taken”>http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_11_13/caredit.a0900141)</p>
<p>Perhaps a bit overstated, I know several exceptions.</p>
<p>Two data points I haven’t seen mentioned.</p>
<p>First, you may find programs in some areas top heavy with “prestige” school graduates but that’s for the same reason law schools admit lots of Ivy, etc. students: they score really high on the tests. Putting aside issues like the strength of your program and your demonstrated interest / ability in the field, the issue isn’t so much which school you go to as your total package. Kids get into Ivies because they score high and thus they tend to score high on the GRE, etc.</p>
<p>Second, there is a good paper on how your grad school program affects earnings. In sum, there is a real difference that persists for 10 years. The long hangover seems due to the length of jobs, where those then lead, the length of time it takes to research and publish. Again, the data says that grad school matters. As to undergrad, the data says that what matters is your field and your location. If you work in x field, the pay is what it is. If you live in Mississippi, incomes are lower than New Jersey. Those are the big correlations.</p>
<p>Regarding post #27, I am not surprised at MIT’s ranking. Philosophy is considered by most to be a humanities field. Except that, ever since Russell, Alfred North Whitehead and Wittgenstein, it has been highly mathematical.</p>
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“Many”? I think you would have a hard time supporting that claim. Certainly the best programs in the fields with which I am familiar (classics, archaeology, ancient Near Eastern studies, art history) are almost exclusively found at major universities.</p>
<p>I agree with those who say a strong undergraduate program is almost a necessity, but the importance of potential in the graduate admissions process should not be underestimated. It would not be at all uncommon for a classics major at Princeton to be accepted into an Egyptology program at Penn over an Egyptology major at U Memphis, for example, despite the latter’s preparation. The ideal choice would be a strong program in a strong university, of course, and naturally there are plenty of applicants who fit that bill.</p>
<p>The top programs are overrepresented not because they are more likely to get in, but because the students who went to the top schools are more likely to be motivated to go to graduate school and seek out the resources necessary to do so. There are many more students who want to go to grad school in a department at MIT than in the equivalent department at Georgia State. This gives the illusion that the MIT students are more likely, overall, to get in.</p>
<p>In general, it doesn’t really matter where you went to college. It may help slightly to go to a more prestigious school, but it won’t hurt you to go to a less prestigious school. What matters is what you did there. I’m in a top-10 program in my field at Columbia and my classmates went to a wide variety of undergrads, from Ivy Leagues to schools I had never even heard of before. What mattered was what they did in undergrad and what they did AFTER undergrad, too, for the ones that had MAs and/or work experience.</p>
<p>I would never advise an otherwise outstanding candidate from a lesser-known school to sell themselves short and not apply to programs that were on par with their abilities. Visit the Chronicle of Higher Education fora and you’ll get the same answer. We have this discussion all the time and the consensus is always that undergraduate program has little to no impact on whether you get accepted or not.</p>
<p>If we’re talking about hiring for faculty positions the search committees could care even <em>less</em> where you went to undergrad. It’s all about your graduate program.</p>
<p>Agreed, Julliet. I know kids from strong programs in large state publics who got extensive research lab experience and into top 10 programs in their fields. I’d go where I could get the strongest research experience. If you go to a strong program or a small top undergrad program but don’t get research experience, your application won’t be as strong as someone who has worked in a research environment for 3 years. </p>
<p>If I were evaluating undergrad programs, on campus visits I would ask specifically about availability of research opportunities for undergrads. This question was a dealbreaker for DD for one school that was originally her first choice school. She chose another school where she could get involved in research as a freshman.</p>
<p>GRE scores and grades are used as basic cut off scores in many programs only to cull the list. After that, research experience, personal statements, and recommendations are used to choose applicants for interviews. The only students I know who have gone through the Masters program route to get to the Ph.D. are the ones who had lower GPAs so they have a need to demonstrate they can do graduate level work to be a strong Ph.D. program candidate. Some of them choose to work for a year as a Research Assistant (either paid or volunteer while working a second job) and reapplying the next year to Ph.D. programs.</p>
<p>It would be great to have strong recs from rock star professors but the reality is that many of the rock star professors are too busy to give time to undergrads (or grads either in some cases). A rec from a lesser known professor who knows you really well and can talk about the details of your research experience trumps a rec from a rock star prof who knows you were a member of his research team but doesn’t know you well, IMO.</p>
<p>I’d also beware of the rankings posted earlier in this thread because some of those fields have subspecialties for which the rankings don’t hold true to the ranking of the general field.</p>
<p>I’ve been on graduate school recruiting committees for years, and have been sending my students (from Ivy to large public) to top graduate programs in my field for 20 years. What is considered a top school really does depend on one’s particular field. </p>
<p>Professors choosing graduate students are not reading USNWR…they don’t care about what the general population thinks is a good school. What they know and care about are the reputations and rigor of schools in their particular field and that doesn’t necessarily correspond to a CC definition of “top school” at all. </p>
<p>Sure the Ivies and company are highly regarded across many many fields. However for a particular field, a wide swath of schools are considered great: large, small, public, private. Work with recognized professors at one of those schools and you have your ticket to a great graduate school. </p>
<p>In my field, one of the top undergraduate schools is a public university with open admissions for in state students. But its professors publish a ton and have such high regard that a student working with them will have a ticket to the best graduate schools in our field. </p>
<p>As researchers ourselves, if our kids knew they wanted an academic career, we’d strongly encourage them to scope out the field in which they want to study, to find out where the best researchers are located and the possibilities for doing research with those professors as undergraduates (and we could not care less about the ‘prestige’ of the university in the CC or USNWR sense of the word). I have total confidence they can go to a wide range of undergraduate schools and still get into a top graduate program.</p>
<p>But where it matters is graduate school. Where you go to graduate school is extremely important if you want an academic career. It is very difficulty to ‘swim upstream’ after one’s graduate school work. Always exceptions of course (I too can think of a few), but idad’s article is worth reading.</p>
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People always claim this, but in my experience it has always been the reverse.</p>
<p>The older, recognized scholars in the field are typically tenured and have more time to relax and devote time to students. It’s the untenured lecturers and professors who are frantically publishing, flying around to give lectures, etc. </p>
<p>Furthermore, everyone is trying to work up the academic ladder. Let’s be blunt – most of the professors at Mississippi State would rather be at Yale. They’re going to be publishing and devoting a lot of time to getting up and out. One of my closest friends is in a history graduate program at a less selective university in Tennessee, and his biggest complaint is the focus on faculty publishing and rapid turnover (it’s a stepping stone to better universities). Professors at stronger universities, particularly tenured ones, are less likely to be so extrinsically driven.</p>