Too much emphasis on 'well-rounded'?

interesteddad · July 25, 2005, 11:27pm

In this case, I was responding to Northstarmom's comment that Harvard students are not as "intellectual" as students at some other schools. I don't believe that to be the case. I think there are very few colleges or universities that have more "pure intellectuals" than Harvard and the best available measure of "pure intellectual" career paths supports that view.

I think the PhD production stats are useful for five reasons:

A) They are the only available long-term comparative measure of outcomes across the entire universe of colleges and universities.

B) Looking at the schools that have high PhD production rates, there seems to be a striking correlation with schools that are known for rigorous academics and a degree of seriousness about learning for learning's sake. So there may be some value in using this data as a "proxy" for other qualities, especially given the complete lack of alternative statistical measures.

C) They provide an interesting, and often contradictory, view of colleges relative to "input" metrics like average SATs or selectivity. To me, identifying colleges that are relatively easy to get into, but offer rigorous academics is one of the most helpful things a college forum can provide. Not everyone can get into Harvard or UChicago or Caltech or Stanford.

D) They provide a valuable check for "conventional wisdom", particularly in fields where career paths are almost exclusively academic or research oriented. For example, if a college is "supposed to" have a great Physics department, but produces no Physics PhDs, you have to wonder why?

E) Within a small sample of similar schools, the data can help identify the relative interest in and resources devoted to various departments. For example, if a school produces huge numbers of PhDs in romance languages, but relatively few in Psychology, you could conclude that, perhaps, the Romance Languages department is more prominent at that school. An extreme example of this might be Caltech, which produces huge numbers of science and engineering PhDs, but virtually none in the humanities and social sciences. Similar, but less extreme, examples crop up at many schools and shed light on the focus of those schools in a way that glossy viewbooks cannot. Conversely, many students do not know what field they want to major in, so a school that has relatively even quality across a wide range of departments might be a suitable choice. This, too, can be gleaned from PhD production data, at least to the extent that it is better than no data at all.

dstark · July 25, 2005, 11:35pm

How many PHDs do the universities produce each year? Has the number been increasing or decreasing over the last 20 years (Or whatever timeframe you have data for)?

jonri · July 26, 2005, 12:00am

I've never bought the idea that the % of doctorates says anything important about a school. There are many, many other factors which may explain some of the differences. A few ideas..

One reason that HYPSMC types may not go after a Ph.D. in the same way is that they may have more options. Are you sure that if Goldman Sachs interviewed at Earlham that nobody would sign up? My own kid spent a summer doing the big business thing--and disliked it. However, the option of trying it out was there. I see that as a GOOD thing, not a bad one.

Another reason may be that there are a lot of fields in which a Ph.D. really isn't all that useful.

Both Harvard and Yale have many students who go on to lives in the performing arts. Ph.D.s really aren't useful. To my way of thinking, Jody Foster is genuinely intellectual. Having become extraordinarily successful as an actress, she took time away from making $$$ to go to college. She majored in comparative literature. Yo Yo Ma refused to go to Julliard and went to Harvard instead. At the time, it was seen as a tremendous gamble and one he insisted on taking because he wanted to learn about subjects beyond music. More recently, Julia Stiles (sp?) has studied at Columbia and Natalie Portman at Harvard. Portman was an Intel semi-finalist, BTW. Seems pretty intellectual and academic to me. There are lots more kids who make it AFTER college--David Duchovny (sp?) went to Collegiate, a top private school in Manhattan, where he was "head boy." He then went to Princeton.

Creative writing is another field in which very few people get Ph.D.s. Yes, Tom Wolfe did--but he's rare, and his novels are somewhat jounalistic. There are certainly a lot of grads of top schools who write books and plays. Are you going to tell me that they are less "intellectual" or even "academic" than someone who gets a doctorate in education or divinity?

Closely related is journalism. I know Tom Friedman was a Marshall scholar, but I don't think he has a Ph.D. Are you going to tell me he's not an intellectual or not academic because he doesn't? (He took one journalism course--in high school.) He's just one example.

There are other fields in which it's very useful professionally to get a Ph.D. Education comes to mind--it's hard to become principal of a high school in many upscale suburban communities without one. I'm not sure I buy the idea that someone who gets a Ph.D. in education administration or some such thing is an "intellectual."

What about fields like clinical psych? criminal justice? social work? Nursing? Are you going to try to convince me that someone who gets a Ph.D. in nursing is by definition more "intellectual" or "academic" than someone who gets a MD? That someone who gets a Ph.D. in criminal justice is more "intellectual" or "academic" than someone who goes to Yale Law school?

Maybe the differences among schools at the same level are in part the result of what students major in. Maybe CalTech beats MIT because you can major in business or poli sci or econ or music at MIT--these are all very strong majors there, but not at CalTech. (I don't think it's even possible to major in business at CalTech; MIT has an excellent undergrad business program. I seriously doubt that many of the biz grads get a Ph.D.)How would they compare if you ONLY compared the rates of Ph.D.s at MIT/CalTech in majors which exist and are strong at both? Maybe UChicago beats Northwestern in part because very few of the students who get degrees from Medill, the journalism program there, get Ph.Ds and very few of the students who major in performing arts at Northwestern do. Does the presence of a strong performing arts program and strong journalism program really make Northwestern an inferior school? How well do grads of women's colleges do when doctorates in education, nursing, social work and other practical fields are separated out? I don't purport to know--just asking.

Finally, there's the little matter of graduation rates. Reed's has climbed dramatically in recent years, but I think it still hovers around 70%. There was a time when it was more like 50%--and I think that time is included in the Ph.D data you are using. If you only focus on the % of GRADUATES who get Ph.D.s it's a positive advantage to have people flunk out, drop out, or transfer. I think it would be MUCH more telling to compare the percentage of students who start any given school who get a Ph.D. than to compare the % of graduates who do--at least when you are looking at the data in choosing which college to attend. I think that's ESPECIALLY true when you are looking at colleges below the top tier. Now, it's true that PART of the reason may be that a given school doesn't just hand out degrees--it makes you work for them. However, PART of the reason could also be that a college doesn't provide very good support services for students who are struggling. It may not offer free tutoring or remedial courses, etc.

interesteddad · July 26, 2005, 1:10am

[quote]
How many PHDs do the universities produce each year? Has the number been increasing or decreasing over the last 20 years (Or whatever timeframe you have data for)?

[/quote]

Total PhDs and doctoral degrees per year have increased from 18,000 in 1966 to 45,000 in 2001, an increase of 246%. 4-year degrees have increased 240% over that time frame.

The 45,000 PhDs and equivalent research doctorates (Education, Juridicial Science, Public Health, etc.) in 2001 compares to a total of 80,000 "first professional degrees" which includes Medicine (16,000), Law (39,000), Vet, Dentistry, Optometry, Osteopath, Chiropractic, Pharmacy, Podiatry, and Theology). So the number of PhDs is not inconsequential at all. I don't think anyone would object to looking at Law School outcomes as a valid comparison of undergrad collleges, but there seems to be more resistance to considering PhDs, despite the fact that PhDs outnumber Law degrees.

If we look at PhDs where the undergrad college is an identified US college or university in the NSF survey, the total is 272,734 over the most recent 10-year period or 27,000 per year.

Nationally, about 2.5% of these identified graduates of US colleges are known have gotten PhDs or equivalent research doctorate degrees over the most recent 10 year period. But, that includes graduates of every accredited 4-year college in the country, literally thousands of schools, including community colleges, etc. - many of which produce zero PhDs.

At the "better" colleges and universities, the percentage is much higher. For example, the top 200 per capita PhD producers includes nearly every school ever mentioned on college confidential and then some. These schools average 6.7% of their graduates getting PhDs.

The top 100 per capita producers range from 5.3% to 36% and average 9.1% of their graduates getting PhDs. Those are signficantly large percentages, at least as informative as the percentages getting law degrees and more informative than the relatively small percentages getting MDs.

interesteddad · July 26, 2005, 1:15am

[quote]
I think it would be MUCH more telling to compare the percentage of students who start any given school who get a Ph.D. than to compare the % of graduates who do--at least when you are looking at the data in choosing which college to attend.

[/quote]

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. When I first tallied the PhD numbers, I used enrollment as the denominator. People bellyached that this was not fair to all the big name schools that have absolutely pathetic graduation rates. So, I came up with a way of using actual number of graduates as the denominators and, now, complaints about that.

I think Rosanna Rosannadanna was right.

[quote]
How would they compare if you ONLY compared the rates of Ph.D.s at MIT/CalTech in majors which exist and are strong at both?

[/quote]

Be my guest.

Hint: It's a pain in the butt to track down the number of graduates in each major for a single school for a single year, let alone over a ten year period for some 4000 colleges and universities. Let me know when you've got it compiled!

pafather · July 26, 2005, 7:38am

coureur:"Plus, when you can fill up your entire freshman class with kids who have perfect grades and perfect or near-perfect SATs, on what basis do you choose to accept some but not others? "

I would suspect that at least some faculty members would be willing to have some especially excellent academic students. The difficulty is that between grade inflation and SAT score inflation, one cannot distinguish by grades and SAT scores who is particularly bright. Have you looked at the math portion of the SAT I or even SAT II Math IIC? It is WAY TOO EASY to distinguish among the top students.

My daughter, who had previously scored 790 on SAT I M, 800 on Math IIc, etc. took the new SAT and scored well on the two new verbal sections, but did poorly on the Math section. She knew when she took it that it was very easy and that she knew how to do every problem. We got back the detailed score report (or whatever they call it) and she missed a total of 3 problems ad received a 710. I realize the scores are all weighted by percentiles and my daughter must have made three errors, but that seems like too few errors to have caused such a decrease in the score. As a student and later a faculty member in engineering classes, most exams would have a mean of around 60 to 70 percent correct. The top students were much easier to identify. I hated exams when the professor would make a test too easy so that a silly mistake would put you near the class average. I guess the top students could take other types of compettive math exams, but am I the only one who thinks the SAT tests should be made more difficult so the average RAW scores are decreased, to distinguish among top students?

marite · July 26, 2005, 8:46am

I agree with PAfather that the ceiling on the SAT is too low. It has been pointed that the SAT works find at differentiating high ability kids in 7th and 8th grades. Kids who score in the 97th percentile or above on grade level tests, perform very differently on above grade tests, namely the SAT. Unfortunately, there does not exist above grade tests for 11th and 12th graders.
This is what makes so difficult judging students with equally good GPAs (owing to widespread grade inflation) and stellar, near perfect SATs (as is the case of the OP's D). Hence, the need for adcoms to divine whether a student has an intellectual "spark" from the essay, recs, or ECs. It would not prevent adcoms from trying to build a class that is diverse in terms of interests, backgrounds, etc..., but it would reduce the seeming arbitrariness of the selection process.

Donemom · July 26, 2005, 10:12am

I think that that's the way to go for students who want to really stand out in an academic area like Math. The American Mathematics Competitions and a whole host of others give gifted math students an opportunity demonstrate their abilities at a higher level.
Likewise, joining a competitive math team if available, or taking a college math course can help such a student stand out.

marite · July 26, 2005, 10:25am

I agree that students who want to shine in math can demonstrate their talent through a variety of ways: competitions, college level math exams, etc... At the same time, I think PAfather has a point. When a test has a relatively low ceiling, it does not take many errors to truly lower a student's score. Unfortunately, some highly able students often make careless mistakes on the easiest rather than the most difficult parts of easy tests. Similarly, foreign languages SAT-IIs are criticized because it is easy for native speakers to achieve high scores. By the same token, it is difficult for non-native speakers to achieve such high scores because the curve is brutal.

Tigers_Rule · July 26, 2005, 11:32am

Davidson College attracts and shapes the most well rounded students in the nation per ISI's Coosing The Right College.How true!

idler · July 26, 2005, 11:49am

Of course before the SAT was "recentered" an 800 really meant something, and 1600s were rare indeed, just a handful each year. I'm not certain, but I don't think the practice of using best individual scores from multiple sittings was as widespread either. I remember when a 1400 meant you were "ivy league material," an idea that lingers on to mislead people to this day.

interesteddad · July 26, 2005, 11:51am

White, Wealthy, Protestant, and Round.

marite · July 26, 2005, 12:24pm

Recentering did lead to score inflation, but mostly on the verbal section, where, in some cases, it raised scores by 80 points. On the math portion, there was little change. At the top, some scores actually dropped by 10 points.
I prefer to differentiate between the verbal and math portions. A score of 1400 could be 800 in one and 600 in the other section or 700 in each, or any combination in between. For some schools, it may matter a lot more than others if a student does particularly well in one section, rather than so-so in both.

idler · July 26, 2005, 2:13pm

You know, I've seen those college board recentering conversion tables, which do indeed show much less, hardly any, effect on math score, and wondered about them, because the total number of math 800s is now about 10,000 per year.

FrenchBaroque · July 26, 2005, 2:35pm

Did I miss something here? Haven't read through the entire thread, because volumes of statistics just get to me, but what do Ph.D.'s have to do with undergrad college admissions? Does it occur to anyone that students all over the world more often get an undergrad degree from one college (say, Princeton), and get a graduate degree from Yale, Harvard, Penn, Chicago, Berkeley, etc. The exception is to get your undergrad & grad degrees from the same institution.

I feel sorry for the OP, poor thing. Talk about a detour!

interesteddad · July 26, 2005, 2:45pm

Since 1920, the National Science Foundation has continuously tracked every PhD receipient in the US and the undergrad college he or she attended. The mechanism is a survey of every graduating PhD each year and the response rate is something like 97%, so it is a very complete database. They include in their database the field in which the PhD was received.

Thus, there is a database, available for custom table building, that includes every graduate of every college in the US who went on to get a PhD (or similar degree) and in what field. The same database has a year by year tally of the number of graduates from each college, so it is possible to do a per capita analysis.

None of this has anything to do with getting a PhD from the same school as the B.A. or B.S. degree.

pafather · July 26, 2005, 5:11pm

I do not know how we got on this topic, but it seems to have wandered into using percent of grads going on to obtain PhDs as an evaluation of a college. In my opinion, if you really want to be objective about rating how academically strong of an undergraduate student body a college has, you would need to rate not only HOW MANY of them go on to receive their PhDs but also HOW GOOD are the PhD students they ultimately produce. How can this be performed objectively?

At the graduate level, DEPARTMENTS of different universities can be ranked very objectively as follows. In my experience, the top schools seem to preferentially recruit faculty members who received their PhDs from the best schools. In other words, a school such as MIT or CalTech is much more likely to hire a Physics faculty member from Princeton than from University of Typically Mediocre Physics Graduates (whatever school this may represent). If one could, for example, obtain a listing of all faculty members in mechanical engineering departments in the country and where they obtained their PhDs, you would find that the top schools such as MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, etc. have many of their faculty members who received PhDs from these same schools. As you go down somewhat in the rankings, schools try to hire faculty members from schools that are ranked higher than they are. If you used some simple mathematical model (such as the average faculty strength of a department is a weighted sum of the strengths of their individual faculty members PhD-granting schools), then you could probably rank order the departments with no subjective input (I havent thought of all of the details, but I would think this is possible).

Once you have ranked the average quality of the PhD graduates of a department, then you could look at which colleges the BEST PhD students come from. This is a purely fictitious example, but an undergraduate school that has 15 percent of its graduates obtain PhDs from third tier institutions may not be as impressive as an undergraduate school that has only 10 percent of its graduates receive their PhDs, but from top schools. There is obviously a lot of range in quality of PhDs even within a single department, but averages at least tell you something.

interesteddad · July 26, 2005, 5:27pm

[quote]
as an evaluation of a college

[/quote]

My view is that it may be a "descriptive" statistic, not an "evaluative" statistic. There are many excellent colleges and universities that produce relatively few PhDs. Often, these schools just have a different focus (i.e. pre-professional, business, or vocational) or, in other cases, a student body that is so large and varied that it can't produce a lot of anything on a per capita basis.

epiphany · July 26, 2005, 7:09pm

Thank you, pafather. Well put, your post. Quality of student, quality of program, quality of U, are all factors.

Perhaps someday interesteddad will rely less on statistics to prove "facts." There may be 10 genius "Ph.D.'s" at University or College X, but one super-genius Ph.D. at University or College Y. Does that mean University X is better than Y?

Volume does not tell the whole story, & never will. It does not speak to the individual quality of any single individual student at any single institution, nor to the intellectual opportunities available at one school. It is laughable that anyone could call Harvard overall, generally "more intellectual" than any other U or college. Not even worth arguing.

I have met true intellectuals from many paths & walks of life, & with many variations in educational levels. I do not yet have a Ph.D. but have met some Ph.D.'s that I could run circles around, and have.

interesteddad · July 26, 2005, 7:38pm

[quote]
It is laughable that anyone could call Harvard overall, generally "more intellectual" than any other U or college. Not even worth arguing.

[/quote]

Who said anything like that?

What I said was that Harvard is not LESS intellectual than other elite colleges and universities.

There is a huge difference in what I said and what you appear to be alleging I said.

Of its nearly 7000 undergrads (too many, IMO), Harvard has many different kinds of students. Some are very academically oriented and will pursue academic careers including teaching, research, public policy, theoretical economics, etc. Some are pre-professional and will pursue careers in medicine, law, and business. Some are focused to an extreme degree on a wide array of extracurricular activities and will pursue careers in those directions.

Most colleges and universities have these same different types of students. What gives each school its own unique identity is, in large part, the proportion of these various types of students represented in the student body. If this were not the case, Northwestern would feel just like UChicago or Davidson would feel just like Swarthmore. But, of course, that is not the case.

Historic PhD production rates (and, no, the rates don't appear to change much over time) are one metric for seeing what type of students favor a particular school. As you may know, likelihood of going on to a PhD is one characteristic that some undergrad admissions office "flag" in the admissions process, just as they flag musical talent, community service, or good pass receiving skills.

Williams, for example, designates certain applicants with a "PhD attribute". In a recent senior thesis working with Morty Schapiro, Jennifer L. Doleac studied the correlation between the various admissions office "flags" and actual performance at Williams for 1600 incoming students in the late 1990s. On the PhD attribute used by the admissions office, she found:

[quote]
Thus, it seems that those students who are
interested in pursuing a Ph.D [from the degree aspirations expressed on their enrolled freshman questionaires] do tend to be more intellectually engaged and successful while at Williams, but the Ph.D. attribute [used by the admissions office] in its current form does not capture these positive qualities.

[/quote]

If enrolling future PhDs is a sufficiently high institutional priority to warrant flagging in the admissions process, then it seems reasonable to look at how well the colleges meet this institutional goal.

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Too much emphasis on 'well-rounded'?

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