<p>This is kind of nice:</p>
<p>Note that minority participation in college and university faculties hasn't changed in 30 years. It's not the lack of qualified undergrads at the best institutions, or more minorities among them. It's just not, as the Swarthmore "Asian" data suggests, the desirable place to be.</p>
<p>Maybe. But, then again, some schools (#26 being one) still don't believe that women are cut out for teaching positions in many of their departments, so it's probably asking a bit much for the "good ol' boys" to care much about expanding the ranks of minority professors.</p>
<p>As long as the role models are white males, what do you expect?</p>
<p>St. John's! St. John's! St. John's!</p>
<p>(It would have been another good option for the OP's D - they want reasoners and thinkers, make you prove it via 15 pages of essays).</p>
<p>Mini:</p>
<p>I'm not sure what IPEDS data you were looking at, but I checked the actual Swat PhDs by race from 1999-2003 compare to actual graduations by race from 1990-1994.</p>
<p>The PhDs mirror the actual graduations pretty closely:</p>
<p>Black: 5.1% of graduates, 4.2% of PhDs
Asian: 6.8% of graduates, 6.1% of PhDs
Hispanic: 2.7% of graduates, 3.3% of PhDs
White: 79.6% of graduates, 80.8% of PhDs</p>
<p>These are kind of tricky stats to track because the percentage of Hispanic and especially Asian Swatties has been growing at a very rapid rate in recent years. It's possible that Asian/American will hit 20% in this incoming freshman class.</p>
<p>BTW, Asian/Americans and Internationals are currently about the same percentage of financial aid students as their percentage of the overall student body. Af/Am and Hispanic are a larger percentage of aid students than their percentage of the overall student body.</p>
<p>I "googled" looking for further Ph.D. production info. One of the problems I have with interesteddad's approach is that his ranking includes other terminal degrees, including D.Div. and, I think, Ed.D., as well as doctorates in medical sciences (mostly, I think pharmacy) which I don't view as any less professional that M.D. and J.D. degrees. </p>
<p>Reed posts the data by field. It also posts the breakdown for female Ph.D.s separately. It's for the time period '92-'01. For parents of daughters who think the Ph.D. rankings are relevant, this might be of interest. See <a href="http://web.reed.edu/ir/phdfemale.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.reed.edu/ir/phdfemale.html</a></p>
<p>I wanted to see how the top private universities stack up compared to the top private LACs. (Note Reed and other LACs do very well. You can read the list. I personally just wanted to see whether, if you buy the Ph.D. as indicative of educational quality, whether a female would be better off at HYPSMC or AWS.) Here how Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore rank by field--looking only at schools ranked in the top 10 for FEMALE Ph.D. productivity:</p>
<p>History: 2) Yale 3) Swat 8) Princeton
Life Sciences: 1) CalTech 3) Swat 5) MIT 10) Princeton
Biological Sciences: 1)CalTech 3) Swat 4) MIT 8) Princeton
Humanities: 2) Yale, 5) Swat, 7) Amherst
Anthropology: 7) Yale
English Lit: 1) Yale, 2) Swat, 3) Amherst
Foreign Lang: 6) Amherst, 8)Yale, 9) Williams
Math and statistics: 1) CalTech, 9)MIT
Political science: 1) Princeton
Math and computer science: 1)CalTech, 3) MIT
Physics: 1)CalTech, 3) MIT, 10) Princeton
Area and Ethnic studies: 3) Amherst
Social Sciences: 2) Swat, 6) Yale</p>
<p>Stanford came in #5 for medical sciences--I'm really not sure what that includes other than pharmacy--but is not on the list for anything else. Harvard is not in the top 10 for any subject.</p>
<p>OOPS!!
Physical sciences: 2) CalTech 4) MIT
My advance apologies for any other errors. Do look at the link.</p>
<p>Jonri:</p>
<p>The Reed data is from the same National Science Foundation research database. It's widely used by the entire academic community, just about every college tracks this data using the NSF database. For example, here's an 84 page report prepared by Centre College giving historic data for each five year period going back to 1970, both overall and for women.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, most of the other reports available on the web, including the NSF's own spreadsheet published each year, do not adjust for the number of graduates. This makes comparisons between schools of different sizes pretty much useless.</p>
<p>The reason I first started playing around with the NSF's customizable database on the web is that Reed only lists the top-10, which (IMO) is far too limited a list. There are fantastic schools that may only be in the top 20 or even top 100, especially if you want to capture the really good publics which are never going to make the top-10 on a per capita basis.</p>
<p>The second reason is that Reed conveniently omits the tables for several fields in which they don't do so well. No Econ, no Psych, no Art/Music, no Engineering, no Math, etc.</p>
<p>Marite, Thanks for your thought-provoking answer to my question.
I appreciated that you did not get hung up on semantics but understood that I was asking about how to find colleges that truly sharpen the way students think and stretch their curiousity, in spite of what their ultimate career path may be. Your focus on answering the question, rather than arguing merely to prove yourself superior, is exactly what I hope my children will find in college.</p>
<p>Thanks for the link; I appreciate it. However, I have real trouble with the methodology. CalTech is ALWAYS going to "beat" MIT because it offers fewer majors. At least, if I understand the data correctly..</p>
<p>Yale comes out #1 in English lit for women. Not surprising, since Yale has one of the best English departments in the country. BUT..a disproportionate % of students, especially female students, major in English. So, assuming this stuff is relevant in the first place...shouldn't the relevant stat be the % of students who major in a particular department who get a Ph.D.? ..at least if we are trying to measure the strength of an undergrad department?</p>
<p>To illustrate, MIT offers LOTS of outstanding majors that CalTech doesn't. So, if we look at the narrow band of subjects both schools offer and then adjust for the TOTAL # of students at each school (per capita), the % of the student body in each individual subject will be higher at CalTech. I THINK what you'd want to do is adjust MIT's number by eliminating the students who major in poli sci, econ, philosophy, music, and business--all very strong majors at MIT that are non-existent or weak at CalTech. Otherwise, it seems to me, you are comparing apples to oranges. If the percentage of students majoring in each subject at MIT and CalTech who go on to get Ph.D.s is EXACTLY the same, CalTech will look a LOT better in the stats because the percentage of the whole student body majoring in each of those subjects is higher. I hope that's clear. </p>
<p>This is basically the same mistake USNews made the year that CalTech was rated #1. That year, USNews weighed how much spent per student VERY heavily. CalTech came out first. Why? Because it costs more to educate an engineering major than a philosophy major. MIT spends less per student...but it may not spend less per student on students who major in tech subjects. Weighing that factor so heavily meant that schools with high percentages of students in tech subjects soared in the ratings, and those with strong classics departments plummeted. Pretty silly if you ask me..USNews realized its mistake and never used that criterion again.</p>
<p>I think the big publics will be wiped out in the competition IN PART because they offer so many more majors. The % of students in the student body who major in any particular subject is going to be FAR lower than at a LAC that doesn't offer business, agriculture, engineering, journalism, education,communications,etc.majors. If you look at the stats for any particular major, and ONLY adjust for OVERALL school size, you've really stacked the system to favor LACs and AGAINST large public Us. We want to know what % of English majors at UMich-AA or Berkeley got Ph.D.s--not what percentage of the student body got Ph.D.s in English. I don't have to look at ANY data to know that a higher percentage of the overal student body at any half-way decent LAC will get more Ph.D.s in English than at UMich.</p>
<p>If you've ever read the old Gourman reports, he does the opposite. He measures the overall quality of an institution in large part by the # of programs it has rated in the top 50. So, the more majors you offer, the better the school. The LACs get wiped out. </p>
<p>If I'm missing something..let me know..I'm serious..I'm not trying to score debating points. But from one I can see, the fewer departments a college or university has, the better it's going to do using this methodology. </p>
<p>I still have lots of other reservations. Including doctor of divinity degrees benefits schools with high percentages of main-stream Protestants, especially church-going Protestants. HINT: Most D.Div. become ministers. Catholics aren't going to get D.Divs. Neither are Mormons. They are totally worthless for them. I don't know if rabbis usually do.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Stanford came in #5 for medical sciences--I'm really not sure what that includes other than pharmacy--but is not on the list for anything else. Harvard is not in the top 10 for any subject.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>A couple of pharmacy schools dominate the per capita production in "Medical Sciences", so I think it is pretty much just pharmacy. Swat is just dreadful in that category -- outside the top 100 per capita, in a dead tie with Oral Roberts University!</p>
<p>It's interesting to look at the historical rankings for women PhDs. In the decade of the 1970s, Harvard was ranked #6 overall in per undergrad female PhD production (this must have been Radcliffe). After deep-sixing Radcliffe and going co-ed, it fell to #29 for women in the decade of the 80's and continued to decline to #56 in the 90's. One can only assume that Larry Summers will make it an institutional priority to reverse that trend.</p>
<p>That is really the exception. Most of the other traditionally-male schools are now ranked about the same for women's PhD production as they are overall.</p>
<p>Jonri:</p>
<p>I understand what you are saying. Where I differ is that I don't view PhD production as a "qualitative" measure. Rather I view it as purely as a statistical descriptor. It simply raises flags. If I see a school that produces a ton of PhDs in a particular field, I figure it might be worth looking into that school a little bit if I'm interested in that field.</p>
<p>Let me give you an example. Swarthmore is the #1 producer of Economics PhDs by a mile, producing more than double the number per undergrad than the three schools tied for second place (Grinnell, Williams, and Carleton).</p>
<p>What does that mean? IMO, it does not mean that Swarthmore has a better Economics department than Williams (although it's probably pretty decent). To me, it means that Swarthmore is a school that produces a lot of PhDs, period (it does - 21% of Swarthmore grads get PhDs). And, that within Swarthmore, the Econ department attracts a high percentage of Swarthmore students (it, in fact, does - 14% of the graduates last year). And that of that large group of Econ majors, a higher than average percentage opt for an academic/theoretical/think tank/public policy career for which a PhD would be an appropriate degree (yep, about 15% of Swat Econ majors got PhDs.). All of that is more "descriptive" than "qualitative".</p>
<p>On your CalTech versus MIT thoughts, I think it's much simpler than that. I think Caltech is simply a PhD producing machine. Forget departments, they produce twice as many PhDs per capita than MIT, period. Interestingly, they even produce as many Economics PhDs per capita as MIT even though they don't offer an Economics major. Doesn't make CalTech "better" than MIT. It's just tells us something descriptive about the two schools.</p>
<p>The reason that huge state universities don't produce as many PhDs per capita is that a smaller percentage of their students are involved in those kind of academic pursuits. The fact that they have Nursing School and Agriculture School and all that is what makes them different than a school that is specfically focused exclusively on arts and sciences. The undergrad Physics department at UCB is, almost certainly top-notch. But, it is one tiny slice of a big pie. Couple that with the fact that state schools attract a different kind of student body (as a whole) comprised of future doctors, future scientists, future car dealers, future insurance agents, etc -- typically a much broader slice of humanity than you will find at an elite private college. So all the PhD production numbers are doing is describing that reality.</p>
<p>Your D.Div. issue is an interesting one. I saw it quite clearly in the data. My attitude is "so what?". Some schools produce a ton of doctoral degrees in English. Some in Anthropology. Some in Divinity. To me, that simply describes something potentially interesting about the schools. When I look at the top per capita producers of doctorate degrees in Religion and Theology, I see a lot of schools with strong religious traditions (including Wheaton, Davidson, Swarthmore, Haverford, and St. Olaf), so it's not surprising that these schools would produce higher percentages in this area. I assume that many of these doctorates are, indeed, preachers:</p>
<p>1 Oklahoma Baptist University 13
2 Ouachita Baptist University 10
3 Hardin-Simmons University 9
4 Howard Payne University 8
5 East Texas Baptist University 8
6 Columbia International University 7
7 Louisiana College 7
8 Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL) 7
9 Union University 7
10 Philadelphia College of Bible 6
11 Central Bible College 6
12 Southern California College 6
13 St John's College (both campus) 6
14 Southwest Baptist University 6
15 Mississippi College 6
16 Davidson College 6
17 Samford University 5
18 Reed College 5
19 Houghton College 5
20 University of Mobile 5
21 St Olaf College 4
22 Campbellsville University 4
23 Amherst College 4
24 Asbury College 4
25 Cumberland College 4
26 Olivet Nazarene University 4
27 Carson-Newman College 4
28 Haverford College 4
29 Swarthmore College 4
30 William Carey College 4
31 Northwest Nazarene College 4</p>
<p>If a high number of Swarthmore econ majors get PhD's.... how does that square with Interestdad's earlier statement that Deloitte and Goldman Sachs were the two largest employers of Swarthmore undergrads- many of whom, presumably, are econ majors? Do the econ kids go off to Goldman Sachs, and then, as a result of their early training at a highly intellectual, theoretical place like Swat, realize the error of their ways and end up getting a PhD, whereas the kids at Goldman from other institutions end up staying in banking? Or are these stats meaningless?</p>
<p>Time to find another number to crunch, my friend.</p>
<p>And to answer the earlier query, many pulpit Rabbi's have PhD's; many study for a PsyD or EdD. The Rabbinic ordination, in an of itself, does not have an equivalent in academic parlance... typically called "smicha", which is given after intense study in Jewish law, in concert with, but separate from, the academic degree granted by the institution. Most Rabbinical schools in the US require a BA or BS before smicha, and many require an MA as well.</p>
<p>There are Rabbi's who study at Divinity school, but usually after they have completed smicha, and they are rarely at Divinity school for a D. Div. </p>
<p>Whether the stats for Cal Tech and MIT is at all useful for your average 17 or 18 year old trying to decide where to go, I leave to the collective wisdom of this board. In my experience, most kids make the decision based on weather (huge difference), finances (Cal Tech has merit aid, MIT does not), field of interest (if you're an Engineering/Music double major, and we know several at MIT, you don't go to Cal Tech), and "college town ambiance" (some kids love Cambridge/Boston, others don't). If Interestdad knows an 18 year old who is more interested in PhD production than these other decision-making factors, more power to him.</p>
<p>First, thanks, Blossom! I do know rabbis usually have a BA/BS before they start studying to become a rabbi. I just didn't know if Jewish theological seminaries granted D.Divs. Looking at the list interesteddad posted, I think it's obvious that, while the actual #s are small, including it improves the overall ranking of schools like Davidson. </p>
<p>But, this makes me wonder..</p>
<p>"Harvard was ranked #6 overall in per undergrad female PhD production (this must have been Radcliffe). After deep-sixing Radcliffe and going co-ed, it fell to #29 for women in the decade of the 80's and continued to decline to #56 in the 90's."</p>
<p>Is it POSSIBLE that whoever compiled this list didn't base it solely on the percentage of WOMEN at a college who got terminal degrees?!!! In other words, when Radcliffe was separate, the per capita adjustment would have been based on the # of Cliffies. After the adjustment, was it based on the TOTAL size of the Harvard class, including men? That would explain the sharp decline...and make this stat even MORE suspect. It would give women's colleges a HUGE boost. I know what I'm suggesting sounds ludicrous...but..I still wonder.</p>
<p>interesteddad, you also say:
"Your D.Div. issue is an interesting one. I saw it quite clearly in the data. My attitude is "so what?".
Ummm..that's not mine...I think including these as "Ph.D.s" as you persist in calling them...distorts the results.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, do you have the following information? How many people become professors and assistant professors every year?</p>
<p>"But, then again, some schools (#26 being one) still don't believe that women are cut out for teaching positions in many of their departments, so it's probably asking a bit much for the "good ol' boys" to care much about expanding the ranks of minority professors.</p>
<p>As long as the role models are white males, what do you expect?"</p>
<p>I expect they'll see pursuing a Ph.d. as relatively undesirable, reinforcing opinions held by their communities already. I think the Swat data is telling, for within a community where profs have been extraordinarily successful in reproducing themselves, relative to the rest of the community, "Asians" have opted out.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think the Swat data is telling, for within a community where profs have been extraordinarily successful in reproducing themselves, relative to the rest of the community, "Asians" have opted out.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Students would not be complaining about unintelligible (mostly Asian) TAs if Asian students did not go into Ph.D. programs in large numbers. There are more and more profs of Asian origin at American universities; most of them can be found in departments of science (including computer science), engineering and med schools.</p>
<p>"I'm not sure what IPEDS data you were looking at, but I checked the actual Swat PhDs by race from 1999-2003 compare to actual graduations by race from 1990-1994."</p>
<p>Check the Williams Diversity report (Chart 30 - Rate of Doctoral Achievement within Race). 23.5% of whites at Swat go on to Ph.Ds, 10.5% of Asians. (By the way, at Carleton, it is even more extreme, at 18.8% and 4.9% respectively; at Harvard it is 22.7% and 14.7%. There is ONE school, however, where that is strongly reversed: Mount Holyoke, at 9.4% and 18.4%; it is higher there for African-Americans than for whites as well - 9.6% v. 9.4% (I'd be willing to bet that -- numbers being small -- this is almost totally due to a single professor, and now President of Spellman Bev Tatum).</p>
<p>But let's be honest - at Swat like most of the rest of these schools - more (usually far more) students go on to become schoolteachers and social workers (and businesspeople) than go on to become college professors. If SWAT (or you) or Reed or wherever truly wanted to be descriptive, shouldn't we be focusing on rates of MSWs, MATs, and/or MBAs?</p>
<p>A Doctor of Divinity is usually an honorary degree. Typically a seminary would offer a Ph.D or a Th.D. (doctor of theology) to doctoral level graduates. The master's level for professional ministry is a Master of Divinity at most places, though some call it a Master of Ministry, or a MA in ministry. </p>
<p>So, does the report say where these people are getting D.Div.s?</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>"Harvard was ranked #6 overall in per undergrad female PhD production (this must have been Radcliffe). After deep-sixing Radcliffe and going co-ed, it fell to #29 for women in the decade of the 80's and continued to decline to #56 in the 90's."<<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>One change that occurred during this time is the opening up of the law firm field to women. During the 50's, Sandra Day O'Connor, after graduating near the top of her class at Stanford Law School, was told that the only job open for her at a big LA law firm was that of a legal secretary. In the early 1970s, the big LA and NY firms began to hire a few women. By the early 1980s, women in law firms were no big deal. By the late 1980s, women made up close to 50% of the classes at many law schools.</p>
<p>I'm sure that other good paying fields (like accounting, investment banking, etc.) opened up in similar ways after 1970. One explanation for the decrease of women PhDs could be that women have chosen to go into these lucrative fields now that they were open to them--fields that don't require a PhD.</p>
<p>Does anyone have the definitive statistics (with websit to confirm) on exactly how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>