<p>I ranked the Ivy League Schools based on the number of PhDs earned by their bachelors graduates between 1995 and 2006. I obtained this information from the National Science Foundation Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED). To adjust for school size, I divided the number of PhDs by 12 to get PhDs per "class" or year. I then divided PhDs per class by the size of the class graduating in 2007-08. I would have preferred to divide by the average class size 1990-2001 but I couldn't find that information so I used 2007-08 instead. </p>
<p>This number is an estimate of the percent of the graduating class that earns a PhD, achieves the ultimate in scholarship.</p>
<p>I obtained the numbers of bachelors grads 2007-08 from the US Dept of Education IPEDS website for all schools except Cornell. To find the number of bachelors grads in just the endowed colleges, I went to their web site. (The Cornell PhDs are just from the endowed colleges, too. That is all that was available from NSF.)</p>
<p>percent PhD production, school, PhDs 1995-2006, PhDs per class, bachelors degrees awarded 2007-08
14.6% Cornell Endowed Colleges 3616 301 2063
14.4% Harvard University 3032 253 1755
14.1% Princeton University 1915 160 1137
13.9% Yale University 2195 183 1319
10.1% Brown University 1870 156 1542
7.8% Dartmouth College 1020 85 1084
6.0% Columbia University 1325 110 1824
5.8% University of Pennsylvania 1918 160 2766</p>
<p>Here’s the top 100, with the actual numbers of graduates from a 10 year period offset five years earlier from the ten year period for PhDs.</p>
<p>**Percentage of graduates getting a PhD
Academic field: ALL</p>
<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees:
ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database</p>
<p>Number of Undergraduates:
ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database</p>
<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period. Includes all NSF doctoral degrees inc. PhD, Divinity, etc., but not M.D. or Law.** </p>
<p>
1 35.8% California Institute of Technology
2 24.7% Harvey Mudd College
3 21.1% Swarthmore College
4 19.9% Reed College
5 18.3% Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6 16.8% Carleton College
7 15.8% Bryn Mawr College
8 15.7% Oberlin College
9 15.3% University of Chicago
10 14.5% Yale University
11 14.3% Princeton University
12 14.3% Harvard University
13 14.1% Grinnell College
14 13.8% Haverford College
15 13.8% Pomona College
16 13.1% Rice University
17 12.7% Williams College
18 12.4% Amherst College
19 11.4% Stanford University
20 11.3% Kalamazoo College
21 11.0% Wesleyan University
22 10.6% St John's College (both campus)
23 10.6% Brown University
24 10.4% Wellesley College
25 10.0% Earlham College
26 9.6% Beloit College
27 9.5% Lawrence University
28 9.3% Macalester College
29 9.0% Cornell University, All Campuses
30 9.0% Bowdoin College
31 8.9% Mount Holyoke College
32 8.9% Smith College
33 8.8% Vassar College
34 8.7% Case Western Reserve University
35 8.7% Johns Hopkins University
36 8.7% St Olaf College
37 8.7% Hendrix College
38 8.6% Hampshire College
39 8.5% Trinity University
40 8.5% Knox College
41 8.5% Duke University
42 8.4% Occidental College
43 8.3% University of Rochester
44 8.3% College of Wooster
45 8.3% Barnard College
46 8.2% Bennington College
47 8.1% Columbia University in the City of New York
48 8.0% Whitman College
49 7.9% University of California-Berkeley
50 7.9% College of William and Mary
51 7.8% Carnegie Mellon University
52 7.8% New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
53 7.7% Brandeis University
54 7.6% Dartmouth College
55 7.5% Wabash College
56 7.5% Bates College
57 7.5% Davidson College
58 7.2% Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
59 7.2% Franklin and Marshall College
60 7.1% Fisk University
61 7.1% Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL)
62 6.8% University of California-San Francisco
63 6.8% Allegheny College
64 6.6% Furman University
65 6.5% University of Pennsylvania
66 6.5% Washington University
67 6.5% Bard College
68 6.4% Northwestern Univ
69 6.4% Rhodes College
70 6.3% Agnes Scott College
71 6.3% Spelman College
72 6.2% Antioch University, All Campuses
73 6.2% Kenyon College
74 6.2% University of Dallas
75 6.1% Ripon College
76 6.1% Colorado College
77 6.1% Bethel College (North Newton, KS)
78 6.0% Hamilton College
79 6.0% Goshen College
80 6.0% Middlebury College
81 6.0% Erskine College
82 5.9% University of the South
83 5.8% University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
84 5.8% Drew University
85 5.8% Wake Forest University
86 5.8% Tougaloo College
87 5.8% Goucher College
88 5.7% Chatham College
89 5.7% Cooper Union
90 5.7% Alfred University, Main Campus
91 5.7% Tufts University
92 5.6% University of California-Santa Cruz
93 5.6% Colgate University
94 5.5% Colby College
95 5.4% Bucknell University
96 5.4% Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
97 5.4% Concordia Teachers College
98 5.4% University of Virginia, Main Campus
99 5.3% Sarah Lawrence College
100 5.3% Southwestern University
</p>
<p>I’m not sure why you would exclude some graduates of non-PhD fields at Cornell, but not do the same for the other colleges and universities. That’s a slippery slope.</p>
<p>Given that PhDs are not exactly a winning career move at the present (supply greatly exceeds demand), I wouldn’t necessarily feel bad if my school wasn’t churning out PhDs</p>
<p>The demand for *investment bankers *ain’t that hot right now, either.</p>
<p>The National Science Foundation tracks divinity degrees?</p>
<p>Don’t forget that just because the place produces Ph.D. candidates who actually complete those Ph.D.s those folks still have to find jobs. How many end up in tenured positions at universities or equivalent positions in research institutions?</p>
<p>“I’m not sure why you would exclude some graduates of non-PhD fields at Cornell, but not do the same for the other colleges and universities. That’s a slippery slope.”</p>
<p>The reason you’d want to do it is to compare Phd rates across colleges for people who are studying the same sorts of things, in the same types of colleges. Comparing apples to apples. A prospective liberal arts major might want to compare PhD rates for Haverford vs. Cornell’s Arts & Sciences College; probably less “apples to apples” with the irrelevance of Cornell’s College of Architecture thrown in. etc.</p>
<p>I think you can get reasonably close to this objective when you do % law school, because the vast preponderance of the law school applicants from Cornell are coming from only two colleges there, one of which is tiny. But it’s a little tougher to do that with Phds, because probably 4 and maybe 5 of the colleges-including some contract colleges- produce a reasonable %, so there’d be a lot more error when you exclude colleges from the denominator.</p>
<p>So you probably have to live with the heterogeneous, incomparable denominator. Recognizing that the result will have that much less utility, for an applicant to a particular one of its colleges which may have a profile of student destinations that differs markedly from this university-wide aggregate of disparate colleges.</p>
<p>interesteddad, I came up with a PhD production rate for Swarthmore of 19.9 percent using my method. That is very close to your 21.1% rate for Swarthmore.</p>
<p>You used undergraduate enrollment in your calculations and I used bachelors degrees awarded in my calculations (in the denominator).</p>
<p>monydad-- while I agree with what you’re saying in some sense, then we’d have to look at individual concentrations/majors at universities that don’t fall under a different college just because of the way it’s structured to get the same accuracy at other schools.</p>
<p>Also, I think if the point here is to compare the environment of the school, than the entire university should be measured. If the goal is to compare how well prepared you are to pursue a PhD, then your point is well taken, but the measure here is even less relevant.</p>
<p>The thing is, the “environment of the school” there, for this purpose, is largely dependent on college. There are 7 distinct colleges, with different student bodies and objectives. They differ from each other tremendously in “environment”, regarding the things you’re trying to measure here. Some of the colleges there produce a relatively high % future PhDs, I’m quite certain, and others are undoubtedly quite low. The “environments”, in this regard, share little commonality there.</p>
<p>Quite truthfully, the aggregate statistic has virtually no value to an applicant to a particular single one of its different colleges. They are that different.</p>
<p>I agree that it is difficult to truly compare apples to apples, where data is intermingled and schools offer different programs. Nevertheless, people should keep in mind what their goal is when statistics are produced or utilized. There may well be circumstances, depending on objectives, where adjustments are both warranted and feasible. These adjustments should be made in those cases, at least mentally, by those using the data. In order to get the most meaningful result.</p>
<p>The other point would be: the college of agriculture, Industrial & labor Relations, Hotel administration, are for the most part not tucked away in some other department at haverford, et. al., they are relatively distinct beasts onto themselves. The offereings of Haverford et. al. can be quite reasonably compared to Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences, if only there was data on this by itself.</p>
<p>As I tried to explain, the reason for focusing on Cornell’s privately endowed colleges (Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Architecture, Art, &Planning, and Hotel Management) is purely pragmatic. The number of PhDs for Cornell was for the privately endowed colleges only. I did not have the number for the whole campus. Therefore it made sense to divide by the bachelors degees awarded from the private colleges. Evidently, the privately endowed colleges at Cornell have a higher PhD production rate than the NYS statutory colleges at Cornell. That is interesting and useful information.</p>
<p>I have noticed that the NSF sometimes publishes the Cornell PhD figures for the whole campus and sometimes just for the endowed colleges. I don’t know of any other university that has such a major private/public dichotomy on one campus. The statutory colleges at Cornell are actually quite elite but PhD terminal degrees in Agriculture are uncommon. The Industrial and Labor Relations School grads seek mostly law degrees, I think.</p>
<p>“The number of PhDs for Cornell was for the privately endowed colleges only.”</p>
<p>Oh sorry, I didn’t get that. Still, in that case lumping Hotel & Architecture into the denominator is sort of pointless. </p>
<p>“…PhD terminal degrees in Agriculture are uncommon.”
If those are the facts, so be it, but could have fooled me. I personally know three ag school grads who went on to get PhDs in Biology-related subjects, and are now Professors.</p>
<p>It’s fairly interesting that the top public is #49 on that list.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That probably wouldn’t be fair to colleges that humanities PhD’s did their undergrads at. We engineering PhD students have a whole slew of industry jobs to choose from outside of academia, for example.</p>
<p>monydad, I agree with you about Architecture and Hotel. PhDs are not terminal degrees in those schools, as a rule. If I excluded them from my denominator, the PhD production rate for Cornell would rise to 17.4%. To be fair, though, I should also do that for all the other schools that have programs like nursing or maybe business at Penn but I don’t have time to make that correction for every school.</p>
<p>Who cares? Its just another inane ranking thread.</p>
<p>People who are aware that an institution is being inanely ranked may care,
if they feel that misleading impressions may be made on kids making important decisions and subject to influence.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The National Science Foundation has given an exit survey (and maintained a database of responses) to every new academic doctorate recepient since 1920. Their survey captures well above 90% of all PhDs, Doctor of Divinity, Doctor of Music (or whatever that one is called). The entire database is available with a custom search engine on the internet (by field, by PhD institution, by undergrad institution, by gender, by race, and so on and so forth).</p>
<p>The NSF is primarily interested in science PhDs, but it’s difficult to fish for those without casting a net to survey all new PhDs.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, I used actual baccalaureate degrees awarded over a ten year period. I started out trying it with enrollment, but it produces some major errors for schools that have rapidly grown (like University of Chicago) in size. It also produces some anomolies with schools that have low graduation rates (although arguably, it might be more informative to use “entering freshmen”) as the demoninator.</p>
<p>I first realized that current enrollment had problems as a denominator when my lists kept coming up with University of Chicago as a weak PhD producer, a result that made no sense. I looked into why that might be happening and realized that their enrollment had grown dramatically in the last few years, so they were getting hammered with denominator much much larger than would have been representative of the actual number of graduates “back in the day”. Most schools, with fairly stable enrollment, didn’t change much. A few changed dramatically when I went to actual graduates as the denominator.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s not really a ranking thread at all. If anything, the per capita PhD production is more of a “descriptive, qualitative” characteristic. It tells you quite a bit about the relative cultures of two schools, as long as you are comparing two somewhat relative schools – for example, Harvard to UPenn, or Swarthmore to Amherst, or UCBerkeley to UCLA.</p>
<p>It’s even more informative when you start breaking it down into science, social science, and humanities PhDs. You can really start seeing each school’s academic strengths.</p>