<p>
The schools that produce a large amount of PhDs are the schools that are going to make it easier on undergraduates to get in to a doctoral program, which sort of makes this a revolving door thing. The benefit of high PhD productivity numbers is that there is a well-defined network of former students in academia, and the reference portion of the graduate application is incredibly important.</p>
<p>More importantly than that, if a school graduates a large amount of future PhDs from one program (or in the case of most of these schools several), then you have to assume the quality of the program is at such a level where these kids aren’t going to be going to bad programs for their doctorates. No one is going to be ranked, say, #3 in chemistry PhD productivity because their chemistry program sucks.</p>
<p>Quite frankly it’s not that hard to understand that a school that historically has a strong history of producing future doctoral students is sending those students to quality institutions, because it’s not exactly like a large majority of the people graduating from top 30 schools are looking to get their PhD at ITT Tech. If students from X school are continually admitted to graduate programs based on common sense you’d have to feel that the graduate programs they’re getting into aren’t in Bosnia.
I’d personally like to see a ranking of PhD + MD + JD, because MBA admission generally happens (1) later in a persons life (so you can’t really extrapolate that “oh, this school prepared them for an MBA and made it easier for them to get into a program”), (2) isn’t really based on the undergraduate track record.</p>
<p>Theoretically you could take the biological sciences and chemistry PhD productivity numbers to try and get a good idea of maybe how prevalent some of these schools could be in the med school process, but I think it’s a little bit of a reach.</p>
<p>As for how your chances are hurt, I’m not sure if they are, but if school X is ranked in the top ten in the survey of earned doctorates and school Y isn’t in the top fifty, I’ve got to imagine school X either does a better job of preparing students for future doctoral studies at the highest level, has a better reputation in academia or has a stronger alumni network in academia (which is essentially a track to getting into a good doctoral program anyway. nepotism = bad, but it’s prevalent in everything from academia to business).</p>
<p>“All it’s really doing is pointing out the obvious fact that LACs specialize in fields where continuing on to get a PhD is a common option.”</p>
<p>This statement is problematic in that it seeks to simultaneously single out (and depending on how it’s meant denigrate) LACs while ignoring what these lists are.</p>
<p>The problem with singling out LACs, of course, is that essentially the top private schools in the country are always reflected in these lists. CIT, MIT, Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Rice–elite private research universities and Ivies, basically. The strongest LACs in the Midwest, Northeast and on the West Coast. So, the best schools in the country with the lower student:teacher ratios in general. It’s not hard to imagine why it’s easier to get into the Harvard econ program from Swarthmore or Pomona, or MIT or Rice, than it is from NC State.</p>
<p>The only reason the top state schools aren’t on this list (and even if they were, there are only 5-10 state schools I think anyone could consider in a class with the schools listed in the last paragraph) is because they not only have a larger student body but they have commitments to the state they are in to take a certain amount of students, thus lowering the bar in terms of what it takes to gain admission. It’s not surprising most of those students aren’t going to continue their education, and while it doesn’t make the school any worse (in rankings based on GPAs/SAT scores in hs like the US News crap is does, and it certainly makes classes more crowded) it basically makes it impossible for any very large state school to get on a list that is essentially ranking efficiency.</p>