UChicago's Ranking as a PhD Feeder School

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

We’ve heard a lot about career advancement and professional school (law, business, medicine) following graduation from UChicago, but my daughter (who just joined the class of '21) is also interested in the prospect of an academic career. I am very interested in the following statement I found on the college admissions website:

“Many students look to further their education by attending graduate school. University of Chicago undergraduates find tremendous success in applying to and succeeding in top master’s and PhD programs around the world. Within five years of graduation, UChicago students rank among the highest choosing to advance their education even further. With numbers ranking higher than any other university college, fifteen to twenty percent of undergraduates will go on to earn PhDs!”

https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/aftergraduation/future/graduate-school-prep

So it’s sounds like UChicago considers itself to be the #1-ranked PhD feeder school, and I’ve certainly heard that before. Does the College provide any detail behind that statement? Looking for specific numbers, schools attended, what type of academic program, etc. To us this is an important metric, but I can’t find current data on the internet nor on the college website specifically, though perhaps my Google skills are poor.

So if anyone can provide information or a link, please post here! Thanks a million!

2

I have to say that I’m not very impressed with the grammar or even the plain meaning of what is being said in the quoted blurb. Is that second-to-last sentence saying that these graduates are achieving something better or higher than graduates of other schools five years out? “Rank among the highest” is an abominably imprecise phrase in any event, smacking of the advertising world. But the reference to “within five years of graduation” suggests that something is actually being measured, though I doubt it actually is. And why “within”? Do some of these graduates arrive at this high ranking earlier than five years?

The last sentence is even worse. What numbers are we talking about here? You have to read this a couple of times to relate those vague “numbers” to the somewhat precise “fifteen to twenty percent”. I suppose what is being said in clunky language is that the U. of C. rate of fifteen to 20 percent is higher than that of any other “university college”. But that’s an odd description in itself: Is that phrase attempting to create a subset of colleges inside universities as against colleges that are simply colleges? Probably not, but why use a phrase calling for speculation? If a distinction is being made, what is the point? And finally, how does this assertion relate to the apparently precise assertion being made in the immediately prior sentence? That is, is this “going on” to earn a Ph.D. being measured “within five years of graduation”? The suspicion is that the two sentences are saying pretty much the same thing. Rephrase and delete!

I know I’m quibbling, but this is not the way I learned to write at the U. of C., where grace and precision are valued. In those long ago days it was already being routinely said that the College was an incubator of Ph.D.'s, a “teacher of teachers”, and so on. I have no doubt that was true then as it is today. However, I must also say that in the one year of grad school I myself did at the University I met some very brilliant kids who had received perfectly wonderful educations from some very non-elite schools, both private and public. I value very much my Chicago education, but, as with many things in life, it’s what you do with the cards that are dealt you that really matters. Being accepted as a Chicago undergrad is just the beginning.

3

**Science and Engineering PhD’s. **

https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/#tab1. Look at table 4

Chicago came in 9th.

For all others

https://www.pomona.edu/sites/default/files/bacorigins_2003-2012.pdf

Life Sciences: Chicago 9

For all PhD’s: Chicago 10

Math and Computer science: Chicago 7

Physical Sciences: Chicago 14

Social Sciences: Chicago 4

Humanities: Chicago: 14

Lol. Looks like @JHS posted the same link from pomona in the other thread :slight_smile:

4

delete - was going to copy the link from @JHS on the other thread but @denydenzig already included it above ^^

Edit - ok next time I’ll read the entire post before posting myself. I see that @denydenzig has also made reference to the Pomona data.

5

As I noted on the other thread, Chicago does pretty well when you compare it to the other universities most like it, i.e., comprehensive universities with liberal arts-style colleges. It may “only” be tied for 10th in overall PhDs, but it’s a very close third in its category, a few tenths of a percent behind Harvard and Princeton. It’s pretty much in the Harvard-Princeton neighborhood in every category, and that’s hardly a terrible neighborhood to be in.

In Social Sciences, it’s 4th, right behind Harvard, and significantly ahead of Princeton and Yale at 14th and 15th, respectively. In Life Sciences, it’s 9th, but 1st among peers, with Cornell 2nd and Harvard 3rd. In Math/CS, it’s tied for 7th with Princeton, one skootch behind Harvard at 6th and Rice at 5th, with Carnegie-Mellon 4th. In Physical Science, it’s tied for 11th place with lots of others, including Rice, with no peer institutions ranked higher. Harvard is one level down at 15th, with Princeton tied for 17th. In Humanities, it is 14th, but a tenth of a percent behind a four-way tie for 10th including Princeton and Harvard, and four-tenths behind Yale at 8th, the highest placement of any peer. It doesn’t show up in the top 25 in Psychology, but neither do Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford, among many others. (Yale, Duke, Brown, and Brandeis do make the top 25 here.) It also doesn’t rank at all for Geoscience, but then none of its close peers does, either. (Interestingly, Caltech is #1, and MIT is #25. It’s an odd category.)

What these figures show is that if what you care about most is hanging out with the thickest concentration of future PhDs, you should go to Swarthmore, Reed, or Caltech (if your interests are Caltech kinds of interests). If for whatever reason you are looking for Ivy-model universities, not tech schools or LACs, Chicago is clearly part of the lead group. It’s not clearly better than the others, but it’s not lagging behind anyone.

(Interestingly, Stanford is 7th among what I would regard as peer universities overall, but it shows up in the top 25 in only three categories, and its highest placement in any of them is 17th. The peer university top 10 goes Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, Yale, Rice, Brown, Stanford, Rochester, Duke, then either Case Western or Cornell depending on your definition of “peer.”)

(Of course, if you look at absolute numbers of PhDs, not percentages, things get turned around a lot. Berkeley rules, Cornell and Michigan a distant second and third. Chicago would be in 14th place – 13th if you don’t count MIT – in between Northwestern and Columbia, which isn’t such a bad neighborhood, either, especially considering that during the period considered only one of the colleges that produced more PhDs graduated less than 50% more people than Chicago. Harvard would be 4th, Princeton – the next smallest college in the group after Chicago – would be 9th. MIT, Virginia, the other Ivies besides Dartmouth, and Duke fill out the rest of the top 15.)

6

Very true, @JHS. What I find interesting is the that UPenn is near the very bottom of the Pomona list. In fact, it turns out far fewer undergrads that go on to earn PhDs than the other schools it tries to emulate, like UChicago, the rest of the Ivies, and the schools you have noted above. On a positive note, I am now more impressed with Swarthmore than I was previously due to its strong position on these lists.

7

The LAC’s have an impressive track record on this metric! Wondering if more exposure to faculty for instruction and research opportunities has anything to do with it. Smaller student size, more personal attention, as well?

@Marlowe1 I agree with you - the grammatical gymnastics must be in order to separate out the “university colleges” (Harvard, Princeton, UChicago, etc.) from dedicated liberal arts or tech schools. All admissions offices are very good at making their school #1 in SOMETHING. Wouldn’t surprise me if some UChicago alums take less than five years to complete their PhD; however, I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen much at Chicago itself! I see that the Pomona study uses the five-year-out working assumption so guessing that UChicago is relying on an updated study of this kind.

Uchicago’s rank is impressive at third among the peer universities; however, I keep going back to that 15 - 20% which definitely implies a breakaway number one spot, assuming that rest of these schools haven’t moved much. In fact, 20% seems outlandishly high. What would have changed at the College in the past 10 years, other than Nondorf at the Admissions helm? I’m generally confused now. Did they do their own study?

8

The Pomona analysis looked at people who earned PhDs in 2003-2012, and measured the percentage by using the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 1998-2007. Now, most of the peer universities had stable undergraduate populations during that period, but Chicago (and, to a lesser extent, Princeton) didn’t. As the tables show, Chicago averaged 1,000 ABs and SBs per year during that decade ended 2007, but Chicago made a decision to expand its class size in 1998, and only really got that underway in the next few years. It was growing its class size very quickly right at the end of that period. It may well have had 1,200 graduates in 2007, and only 800 in 1998.

Five years after graduating from college, very, very few people have completed their PhDs; the only people I know who did that were in a lab science or were stone geniuses. (None of my older child’s friends got a PhD within five years of college graduation, and only three will have done it within eight years. Many more are in PhD programs now, or thinking about starting them.) So for Chicago, there are a lot of people in the denominator that may have gotten PhDs after 2012 – in fact, plenty of them are probably still in graduate school now, and some may not even have begun yet. That will be true for every college. However, if their class sizes weren’t growing, it wouldn’t affect the numbers in the table the way it does for Chicago, where the classes least likely to have completed their PhDs were up to 50% larger than the classes most likely to have completed (in 14 years after graduation).

It’s entirely possible that if you go back 20-30 years, and look class by class, you could find 15%-20% of the graduates getting PhDs, without being inconsistent with the Pomona analysis.

Also, it’s fair to point out that the students Chicago is accepting these days are somewhat different from the students it was accepting in 1994, or even 2003. Back then, its admission rate was around 40%, and it received about a quarter of the applications it gets now. Today’s students are more successful on average than those of the past, and ironically that may make them less likely to want PhDs, as opposed to MBAs or JDs or simply making a lot of money. They have more real-world options. And getting a PhD in most fields certainly seems less attractive than it may have in the late 90s or (especially) the early 2000s. There’s no guarantee that the class of 2021 will look like the class of 1998 when it comes to getting PhDs.

A final, unrelated point. One reason I think top LACs have a higher percentage of students getting PhDs is that the students don’t really know a lot of graduate students while they are in college. They don’t see them every day, and know how miserable they are. They also don’t see as many junior faculty stressed to the breaking point, not to mention oppressed adjuncts. LAC students may well have have a rosier view of graduate school than research university graduates. I’m sure they wise up quickly, but since you can’t get a PhD without starting a PhD program, and more of them (by percentage) start programs, more finish, too.

9

We knew a few in my husband’s field at UChicago who were able to finish in five; one guy finished in four and got a decent offer at the end of it so that was quite remarkable. This field isn’t as typical for the long PhD programs. My brother took six or seven for his PhD in one of the physical sciences and that seems a lot more typical. The couple who lived above us in Hyde Park were Nth years in some humanities program - they were taking forever to finish.

@JHS I was wondering whether the smaller-but-growing class size during that time period would have impacted the denominator and depressed the percentage. But I agree with your view that the type of student matriculating at Chicago today might result in a different percentage than 25-30 years ago. However, more PhD’s are now working in a professional capacity so the additional time to earn the degree may well pay off with big bucks on Wall Street or Silicon Valley. To some extent, these pecuniary opportunities also impact time to graduation, as several can leave with their ABD (all-but-dissertation), work for a few years, then go back and finish at some point later on (same with foreign students who might take some time off to work in their home country, flying back occasionally to meet with - or even just skyping- their advisor).

One reason LAC’s might be originating more PhD’s could simply come down to the type of student attracted to that particular environment. A scholarly kid who is drawn to research in the life sciences might like the idea of a PhD as well as the opportunity to work directly with faculty as an undergrad, and so chooses Carlton. The LACs we’ve visited are very proud of the number of kids going on to do graduate academic work, so reputation and focus are also factors. The larger “university college” might attract a more diverse variety of student, some of whom are there specifically to become leaders in their professional field or in industry, and are relying on the reputation of a Harvard or Princeton to help them get there.

With a university culture that emphasized graduate work for much of its history, UChicago’s undergrads could have chosen the school precisely for that culture. That would easily explain percentages that blow away other university colleges. Now, with the college restored to its original size, it may resemble more of an Ivy League school, including in the mix of students. That, of course, would suggest percentages that are more in line with the top PhD-originating Ivies. Would love to see that Pomona analysis updated through 2016.

10

I can well believe that this rate of 15-20 percent once applied and might even still apply after those size-of-class adjustments work through. Of five old B-J friends from the sixties (including me) who have remained in touch, three of us acquired Ph.D’s, all in more or less regulation time frames. Not much of a sample, I realize! But if the kids who come to the University, then as now, are famously or even infamously more focussed on their studies, that one in five take this to its logical conclusion hardly seems surprising, even with all the economic incentives pointing elsewhere. That was not much of a consideration for me and my friends. The question for us was more whether grad school - and the scholarly life generally - would prove to be too restrictive of our broader intellectual interests, a necessary evil rather than something very satisfying in itself. (The jury’s still out on that one.) Admittedly, much has changed from former times when “self-selection” produced a harvest of eggheads and not many of those types who would call it a day with a B.A. and a professional or no other degree. Maybe the percentage has come down, and maybe that’s just as well. My group all believe that the undergrad experience was where the excitement was anyhow.

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  1. As the Pomona material shows, it has never really been the case that Chicago has "percentages that blow away other university colleges" in terms of college alumni with PhDs. The limitations of that study may have suppressed the Chicago rate some, but it probably also suppressed the Princeton rate (Princeton was growing at the same time as Chicago, though not quite as much). Business-cycle patterns of who goes for PhDs when affect everyone in the survey. And even if you accept fully the claim that 15-20% of Chicago graduates ultimately get PhDs, I don't think that "blows away" Harvard or Princeton or Yale that may be in the 13-15% range. Or, say, Cornell, where perhaps only 10% of undergraduates get PhDs, but because there are a lot more undergraduates that means at any point they may have three times the number of future PhDs in classes with one another.

Chicago has a really strong academic and intellectual culture. So do most of its peers. They all have some differences, one to the next, but I would argue that none of them is doing any “blowing away” of the rest. The fact that there are so many of them, and they all do so well, is one of the incredible blessings of American culture over the past 200 years or so.

  1. Even if you updated the Pomona study through 2016, all but a handful of the Chicago students in it would have been people who graduated from high school and entered Chicago before, say 2005, which was my daughter's class. At that point, Chicago's USNWR ranking was in the mid-teens and its EA acceptance rate was almost 50%. If you were a Chicago-type kid -- high-testing, intellectual, broad interests, scholarly, a decent writer -- you were almost assured of being admitted. But the worm had already begun to turn; even then, recent alumni were complaining about how the university was recruiting too many students who were too mainstream for Chicago. It will be another decade or more before anyone can compare the track record of the "new" Chicago with that of the other peer colleges.
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15 - 20 is up there with the highest percentage LAC’s. Check out how tight those percentages are beginning with Harvard on down - 18 institutions between 10 - 14%, for instance. So yeah, 15 - 20 blows away the University colleges. Guessing it’s not easy to add even a percent or two. The question is - where did that range come from? Is it based on genuine analysis or is it a marketing trick?

I agree it’ll be a few more years to see all the effects of recent changes, but an update through 2016 will show some movement back to a long-term average . . .or it won’t. If, for instance, the new “in-transit” percentage is around 13% or a tad lower, then you can reasonabley assume that the college is starting to shift away from attracting that type of student. You’d probably want to dig around to see where the drop is. That’s information.

My guess is that Chicago will remain around where it is in that Pomona study so up among the top PhD-originating Ivies. But I’d sure like to see a current picture just to better understand the direction that UChicago might be heading.

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@marlow1 I definitely had more fun as an undergrad (an LAC somewhere else) than as a grad student at UChicago! However, the latter was an unforgettable intellectual experience. Regardless of the statistics on eventual PhD’s, we are pretty confident that our daughter will feel at home and find her metier there. What’s particularly good news is that they are focusing on stuff like outcomes and placement rates among key employers. It’s good for these kids to have top choices, whatever it is that they decide to do after college.

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@JBStillFlying My experience was similar to yours at GSB. I also found my professors thought provoking and intellectually stimulating. In contrast my undergrad years at a lower Ivy seemed hurried and tense: everyone seemed to be only interested in what jobs they were getting or what professional schools they could get in. At U of C that was the first time I could see scholars and students that were really passionate about their class. In an ideal world I would want to go back to U of C for a PhD but not to my undergrad institution.

15

@85bers46 I’ve heard others say the same thing. My husband graduated from a top 10 uni. in the south east (at the time, a respectable backup to many ivies and so forth) but told me that if he had to re-do, he’d attend UChicago, even given the much smaller student body and “fun goes to die” aura about the place in the '80’s. He just thinks it’s a better fit for his interests and passions, which tend toward the intellectual.

16

Chicago is great and all, no doubt, but just a general caution about using those % PhD lists without applying one’s brain. Not that you brilliant Chicago people would ever do such a thing. But just to state the (to you all, undoubtedly) obvious…

Such lists are not always comparing apples to apples. And some thought must be used in interpreting the results.

Most LACs, and U Chicago also, consist entirely of students pursuing majors in Arts & Sciences subjects.
While many universities consist of multiple colleges of which Arts & Sciences is only one.

As one example, fewer than 30% of the students at Cornell are enrolled in its College of Arts & Sciences. Which is the one college there which has the most comparable majors to the LACs, etc. But data for that one college there is not broken out, the whole university is lumped together as an aggregate. Likewise for other multi-college universities.

In such cases, the tendency towards graduate school of students pursuing identical majors vs, LAC students etc are obfuscated by the tendencies of others within the same university who are pursuing other degrees. Many of which may trend towards the “pre-professional”, with a higher tendency towards immediate employment. Admissions criteria among a university’s colleges may differ as well.

Additionally, there are also very good schools where the student bodies are known to favor employment. Some are perhaps more geared towards medical school, etc than some other places. Such schools may show proportionately fewer future PhDs than some other schools. But this does not necessarily mean that someone studying there who actually wants to get a PhD is in any way disadvantaged in pursuing such. Any more than a Chicago grad can’t get a job.

17

Random aside about the data. The NSF data looks at people who get PhDs vs people who enroll in PhD programs. IME (and this, no doubt, varies by field), the attrition rate in PhD programs is really high. So I wonder about whether the undergrad colleges that have highest PhD generation rates achieve those rates by getting lots of their students into such programs vs by training their student in ways that prepare them to complete such programs. Probably some of each, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s significant variation among the top-generating schools.
I also think percentages may matter a lot less from an undergrad student’s POV than absolute numbers, especially if grad schoolbound kids are spread out across many disciplines.

FWIW, I have a PhD-aspiring UofC first year and, thus far, I think she’s getting the kind of education that will enable her to make a well-informed decision about whether grad school/academia is really what she’s looking for.

18

Of course, this is true. But you’ll have to pardon us Chicago fans if we turn up our noses a little at that. Something I – and I think many others – affirmatively like about Chicago is that it has a more intellectual, academic atmosphere than the many colleges where the main value standard is how lucrative your first job is. It’s fine with me if people like that prefer, say, Penn to Chicago. People can differ in their value systems. For my value system, percentage of PhDs is a good indicator of academic orientation. (Or, at least, it has been in the past. The whole PhD system seems to be so broken now, I am not certain whether it will serve going forward.)

As for Cornell – of which I am a fan, see my earlier posts in this thread – there are plenty of PhD-able majors in colleges other than CAS, starting with the other big one, CALS, which is chock full of things in which people pursue PhDs. Or ILR, or Engineering (which most of these colleges have, but not Chicago, and which does produce PhDs). So while your point is well-taken as applied to the Hotel School, it’s not the case that all of Cornell’s PhDs are coming from the 30% of students in CAS. It may not even be “most.”

19

Yes there are PhDs produced at the other colleges besides Arts & Sciences colleges. But someone anticipating majoring in an Arts &Sciences subject, and comparing schools they might apply to , should be aware of the “noise” of the rate that students at an : engineering college, architecture college, business college/program, , social work college (for the schools that have them), nursing college, theater BFA program, etc. get PhDs.

Those are not on-point comparables. Whether those other of the university’s colleges produce a greater or lesser proportion of future PhDs than that university’s Arts & Sciences college does (and IMO the rate is probably lower in many cases, at programs with vocationally-oriented majors), the comingling of their data does not help illuminate the situation for those contemplating Arts & sciences majors, it disguises it. It is not an apples to apples comparison to the extent that non-Arts & Sciences college majors are interjected.

20

@monydad at #15 I think the point about looking at these stats is getting a more complete picture on outcomes. The percentages aren’t listed in any detail in UChicago’s Outcomes Report, unfortunately, and that’s a shame. NSF and Pomona data provide a great service in that aspect.

Agree with @JHS - most professional schools or colleges at the university (though I don’t know about Cornell in particular) tend to offer the PhD as well as the more popular master’s/MD/MBA, etc. And tenure-track faculty positions in engineering, nursing or business will require one, especially at a research university.

Regarding #18: Just for clarification, the terminal degree for an architect or art college is M.Arch or MFA. While there are PhD’s in those fields, they are a small number and the aforementioned Master’s degrees usually suffice for a faculty position. Those are also very small programs with typically small enrollment (hence small addition to the denominator). Nursing definitely PhD. Don’t know about Social Work.

Your point is a good one but it’s ok to look at overall percentages to get an overall picture. I also look at the %'s by field. While there is more individual variability there, it also lets me see, for instance, which types of PhD’s originate from LAC’s vs. university colleges. (Tech schools most likely grant and originate tech-related degrees, though not always! MIT, for instance, has an excellent college and PhD program in a few social science fields).