What’s more important for undergraduate school selection, overall strength/ranking/prestige/fit or number of top graduate/doctorate programs on campus?
Another one of those questions that has been discussed many times before, and whose answer is “it depends”. For many students, neither is the major factor in the college choice decision.
It really depends on the student and the area(s) of interest, I think.
For a student with a well-defined academic interest, especially a student interested in pursuing graduate studies, a university with an excellent PhD program in that area could be an excellent choice, although it may not be quite as strong as other universities overall (URI for oceanography, U Cincinnati for Classics, Rutgers for philosophy, U Arizona for anthropology, etc.).
On the other hand, there are many schools that provide excellent undergraduate educations but offer relatively few PhD programs (or none at all). No one would dispute that Swarthmore offers a very rigorous undergraduate education.
To take anthropology as an example, strong anthropology programs at universities - Michigan, for example - typically have faculty in the four major subfields (archaeology, linguistic anthropology, bioanth, and cultural anthro). In a smaller anthropology department, virtually all of the faculty members may specialize in the same subfield, most often cultural anthropology. The anthropology program at Williams has only one archaeologist and not even a single biological anthropologist on faculty, for example.
@warblersrule However, one of the most important things that PhD programs consider is whether a candidate has research experience, and LACs generally provide many more opportunities for undergraduates to not only participate as RAs, but to actually do their own research, and publish it in peer-reviewed venues.
Overall, LACs have a much higher percent of graduates who pursue PhDs than do research universities, despite having fewer faculty in any given field.
So, overall, if a kid wants to do a PhD, attending a LAC is likely one of the best ways to start their academic career.
As one would expect. For one, LACs typically do not have schools of architecture, business, engineering, etc. – disciplines in which it is rare to pursue a PhD. An apples-to-apples comparison normalizes by the number of students in each major, NOT by the overall undergraduate student body, but this has not been done. The PhD production lists are of little value when comparing colleges of disparate size and academic focus.
As for research opportunities, the degree to which undergrads and grad students compete is often exaggerated. The two rarely occupy the same niche. If you’re an archaeology major on your first excavation, you’re going to be doing the grunt work, not working as a supervisor, and that’s true whether you’re attending a LAC or a university. On the other hand, I’ll admit that undergraduate science majors at universities - especially those in the life sciences - often work their way up the lab hierarchy more slowly than those at LACs. Students at LACs typically work closely with faculty, whereas students at universities often (if not usually) work more closely with PhD students, but there are trade-offs for each.
I’ll also note that the competition for and availability of research opportunities varies considerably by department. Cornell graduated fewer anthropology majors than Beloit last year (5 and 20, respectively), for example, but it produced markedly more biology majors (459 and 11, respectively). Even accounting for graduate students, there is a much better student-faculty ratio in anthropology at Cornell, whereas a biology major would get much more faculty attention at Beloit.