<p>There does not appear to be any comprehensive, up-to-date ranking of majors or departments focused on undergraduate programs, period, whether at liberal arts colleges or at universities. </p>
<p>As others have suggested, you can browse the online course listings to observe the breadth and depth of offerings in a major. Read the course descriptions to see if any sound especially interesting. You can also look up the faculty profiles to see how many full time faculty are on staff, what are their interests, whether they have PhDs and if so, where they got them.</p>
<p>Some LACs do have reputations for strength in specific departments. Examples: Williams in Art History, Bowdoin in Political Science, Kenyon in English, Middlebury in Foreign Languages, Bryn Mawr in Classics, Beloit in Anthropology, Wesleyan in Film, some of the Keck Consortium colleges in Geology, etc. You can ask in this forum or in CC’s individual college forums whether the program you’re interested in seems to be strong at specific schools.</p>
<p>One objective measure that I consider relevant (not all posters would agree) is the per capita rate of PhD production. The theory: if a college exposes students to high-quality teaching, if it motivates and prepares them well for the most advanced work in a field, then a relatively high percentage of them will choose to do graduate work in that field and a relatively high percentage will earn the highest degrees. </p>
<p>You can compare colleges by numbers of PhDs produced in some fields by composing a search on this site:
<a href=“https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/[/url]”>https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/</a>
(results are in absolute numbers, not adjusted for program or school size; searching is not very user-friendly).</p>
<p>Here’s a list of the top 10 per capita in some popular fields:
[COLLEGE</a> PHD PRODUCTIVITY](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html]COLLEGE”>Doctoral Degree Productivity - Institutional Research - Reed College)</p>
<p>PhD productivity seems to confirm department reputations in some cases.
For example, my son’s LAC has a highly-regarded Geology program; its PhD production in Geology is #2 among LACs and much higher than it is in some of its other departments I’ve checked. Williams and Amherst are 2 of the most selective, prestigious LACs, but Williams has a strong reputation in Mathematics while Amherst seems to be relatively weak in this field. Williams, as it turns out, has produced more than 2X the number of Math/Stat PhDs in the past 5 years as Amherst has. In contrast, Amherst (which long has had a highly regarded English department) has produced more than 2X the number of English/Literature PhDs in the past 5 years as Williams has. Kenyon (famous for its English & writing programs) has produced 15X as many PhDs in English as it has in Computer Science over the same period. Beloit (with its highly-regarded Anthropology department) produced ~2.5X the number of Anthro PhDs as Psychology PhDs in 2006-10 (even though all LAC alumni earned nearly 5X as many Psych PhDs as Anthro PhDs in the same period).</p>