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No LAC has a good engineering program to the contrary of what many people here claim, so it's not surprising.
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<p>I think that anybody from HarveyMudd would emphatically disagree with you. </p>
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Also, I personally have not run into any students from any LAC, prestigious or otherwise, but I know plenty from schools like MIT, Berkeley, and Illinois.
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<p>Kfc4u has hit it spot on. Clearly, given the sheer size of Illinois and Berkeley, you obviously ought to expert far more of them than you would anybody from a LAC. Even MIT graduates far far more engineers than most LAC's do. </p>
<p>This is a 'percentage play'. You have to understand - LAC's are very small schools and except for a few (like Harvey Mudd), most of them produce very few engineers. However, the engineers that do get produced tend to be very good. </p>
<p>Put another way - how many new BS engineers does Illinois produce? Something over 1100 per year? That's literally twice the number of new graduates that most LAC's will produce, and very few of those engineers will be engineers. And of that 1100, how many of them have a serious chance of getting into a top PhD program? 100, maybe 150 at most? Whatever the number is, I think we can all agree that those who graduated in the bottom half of their class (hence the bottom 550 Illinois engineers) have no chance of getting into a top doctoral program. Hence, Illinois graduates more BS engineers who have no serious chance of getting into a top doctoral program than the total number of students (with any degree) graduating from almost any LAC. </p>
<p>You all ask for more comprehensive data? Fine. Here a bunch more Caltech commencement years. Go look at it, and then tell me that you don't think that the LAC's are punching far above their weight class. I see that in 2002, more newly minted Caltech PhD's did their undergrad at Harvey Mudd than did it at MIT. Now one might say that Harvey Mudd has a 'geographic' advantage because it's near Caltech, but still, when you consider that MIT has almost 6 times the number of total students (4000 vs. 700), I think it's safe to say that Mudd has been doing quite respectably. </p>
<p>But again, like I said, the point is you have to compensate for the sheer sizes of various programs. If you just have lots and lots of engineering students, you would obviously expect a great deal of representation among the top graduate programs, just because you had a lot of students in the first place. That doesn't make you necessarily a 'good' school, it just makes you a 'big' school, and more to the point, it doesn't mean that an individual student at that school is going to get good opportunities. Like I said, I would submit that the bottom half of all newly minted BS engineers out of Illinois, or 550 graduates, don't have any serious chance of getting into a top doctoral program. </p>
<p>And the REAL point is that I am asking why is it that if evals from famous profs are so important in getting into graduate school, then how do the guys from the LAC's ever get in? I would point to Harvey Mudd. Mudd is a LAC. Mudd doesn't have any highly prominent research faculty members, because it's a LAC. So how is it that Mudd alumni can be so successful in getting into graduate school? Like I said, looks like Mudd is doing just fine in matching MIT on a pound-for-pound basis, at least where Caltech doctoral programs are concerned. </p>
<p>"More than 40 percent of Harvey Mudd alumni hold Ph.D.'s, the highest percentage in the country."</p>