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<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>