<p>It may be just a fluke of statistics. For 1999-2003 the list is:</p>
<p>Cal Tech
Harvey Mudd
Reed
Swarthmore
Carleton
MIT
Oberlin
Bryn Mawr
Harvard
U Chicago</p>
<p>Both lists are for all disciplines.</p>
<p>As far as I know, the most commonly agreed upon ranking of the current statistics as far as percentage of PhD's is Caltech #1, Mudd #2, MIT #3. I know Mudd was at one point ranked #1, and is catching up.</p>
<p>All of them are great schools though, no question. And all do very well in getting students into great graduate programs and high paying jobs.</p>
<p>Is there a group other than Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium collecting this data? I would think there is one statistically correct list, such that it's not something to commonly agree upon or not. Just curious, thanks.</p>
<p>My dream is to become a circus clown when I graduate from Caltech... becoming a bum is also a very popular option.</p>
<p>I'm not aware of HMC ever having been #1 on this statistic, nor of them currently "catching up." Every list I've ever seen (new and old) has had Caltech first. I'd be interested to see your sources for these alternate lists.</p>
<p>Joe:</p>
<p>This was a study done by Change magazine over a 30 year period. Check out the rankings:</p>
<p>I'd be interested in seeing their data as that runs counter to what I've seen in the past. Of course, the data in that study was in 1951-1981--not sure I've seen any other studies quite that old!</p>
<p>What brings you over to the Caltech board, besides a study from my birth year? :-P</p>
<p>Well Joe, I did say that Mudd was AT ONE POINT ranked #1. I agree, 1951-1981 is pretty old, but it still is one point.</p>
<p>I'm coming over to the Caltech board because I'm bored. I do not have much else to do. And I respect Caltech very much, it's a cool school, so I like checking out its forum. ;)</p>
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<p>I believe those involved with Cal Tech (either graduated from there or taught there) have a 1% chance of getting a Noble Prize. An absolutely ludicriously high chance.</p>
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<p>No, it's a 0.1% chance. Still, that ain't bad.</p>
<p>Amazing statistics...would anyone like to site a source, or is my lit teacher going to have to use her F stamp on you for plagarism? Or something.</p>
<p><a href="http://web.reed.edu/ir/phdrank.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.reed.edu/ir/phdrank.html</a></p>
<p>hendrix???</p>
<p>I meant that I want to know where the .1/1% nobel stat came from.</p>
<p>It's about .1%. I actually have an Excel spreadsheet produced by someone reliable with the numbers for the top 20 universities, and I have been meaning to double check before posting. The numbers are quite remarkable.</p>
<p>Ben Golub's reliable source is more than a good enough source for me.
That blows my mind.</p>
<p>Well, it's not that hard to just derive on an order-of-magnitude basis from first principles. Caltech has about 20,000 living alumni (this may even double-count those who got more than one degree from Caltech). Many people from the classes in the 40's and 50's are still living, and Caltech really only became Caltech in the mid-late 1910's. (Also it was smaller back then.) So we'll say that brings us to 30,000 alumni ever. We'll neglect the number of faculty as trivial--reasonable for order-of-magnitude because it's not more than a couple thousand more. Caltech is up to, what, 31 Nobel Prizes now? Hence, ~0.1%</p>
<p>QED.</p>
<p>(Note that if you count only people who studied Nobel-eligible subjects--i.e. toss out most of the engineers, the numerous GPS people, mathematicians who didn't study physics- or econ-related stuff, the odd humanities student, etc.--the numbers get even more favorable.)</p>
<p>QED = Quantum Electro-Dynamics, by Richard P. Feynman , not Quod Erat Demonstrandum.</p>
<p>addressing the nobel prize subject:
5 laureates went to caltech for undergrad
11 laureates went to caltech for grad school
1 laureate went to caltech for both</p>
<p>if you want to talk about the % of students that get nobel prizes that did caltech as undergrads... it is roughly...</p>
<p>6 recipients / ~ 17500 students (historically that did undergrad)
~0.036 %</p>
<p>grad:
12 recipients / ~25000 students (historically that did grad)
~0.048%</p>
<p>your 0.1% figure is bull.
don't take credit for the schools that trained many of your professors.</p>
<p>i just spent an hour compiling these stats from the caltech nobel laureate website. 31 laureate affiliates total. 17 of them were students.</p>
<p>You are vastly overcounting the numbers of alumni. The modern undergrad program begins around 1920-21 and class sizes were much smaller before WWII. Graduation rates were also low before the last two decades. Before the 1980s it was not common for more than 165 per year to graduate. It was lower still in earlier decades. Something similar is true for grads.</p>
<p>The best guess I can come up with is that there were 8000-11000 undergrad alums in the 20th century. Perhaps 14,000-15000 grads.</p>
<p>I would love to have the exact numbers of alums, living or dead.</p>
<p>rocketDA, do you know what "order of magnitude" means? Apparently not. A factor of two or three is exactly the kind of error you expect in such an estimate. Even though, as NQO points out, your alumni figure is wrong.</p>
<p>By the way, if anyone wants to compute the analogous number for ANY OTHER UNIVERSITY IN THE WORLD, you will find it to be much lower. Caltech beats the pants off everyone in this regard. How do you like them apples?</p>
<p>:-D</p>
<p>"QED = Quantum Electro-Dynamics, by Richard P. Feynman , not Quod Erat Demonstrandum." Are you now singlehandedly responsible for defining the cultural lexicon, or what? Do you get to tell me when I may and may not use certain words or abbreviations of my choosing?</p>
<p>And I agree with Ben that you seem woefully unfamiliar with the concept of "order of magnitude."</p>
<p>Even leaving that aside, your figures are, quite simply, wrong. To start, Caltech has definitely not had anything near 25,000 graduate alumni. It's only recently that they've had as many grad students as they do, and even then Caltech lists (living) 6,222 MS alumni and only 3,594 PhD alumni. Since most people who did a PhD at Caltech also got an MS along the way, I'm betting that the real number for living graduate alumni is perhaps 7500 and possibly lower. That means that the number for total grad alumni ever can't be much above 10,000, and (again) is probably lower. And this isn't even getting into the significant number of people who do all 3 of their degrees at Caltech and are thus triple-counted (and I once met a prof who had 4 Caltech degrees, actually) or undergrads who stay for just the MS (I know a couple of those too). This was more common in the early days, but we don't even need to go there to make our point.</p>
<p>So, now that we've got our figure for "all Caltech alumni ever" back down around 25,000 where it belongs (and honestly, that's still probably too high), let's get a little more specific.</p>
<p>To do a really rigorous (hah) analysis we're going to have to throw out all of the recent graduates who are too young to have won a Nobel yet. (Some of them may have already done the research, but lag time virtually guarantees that you're not getting the prize until, say, 10 years into your career.) We'll say that Caltech history starts at 1920. 10 years' worth of alumni, we'll say, lops off 10/86 = ~12%. So we're down to ~22,000 alumni who might possibly have won a Nobel Prize.</p>
<p>17/22,000 = 0.077%</p>
<p>So, we're essentially at 0.1% as claimed, and even beyond what's noted above about further double-counting we didn't even consider, we've completely SET ASIDE the following facts which in reality push it even higher:</p>
<p>1) Later years are bigger years in terms of student body enrollment, so saying that only 12% of Caltech alumni graduated less than 10 years ago is generous to your point.
2) Nobel Prizes are almost always given to quite senior scientists. Counting people in their early 30's as "Nobel eligible" is <em>exceptionally</em> generous to your point. (Just moving this one assumption to "early 40's," which is still definitely much younger than the average Nobelist's age, puts the percentage up to 0.09%)
3) If you want to get really technical, you can up the Nobel count for students to 18, because Linus Pauling won two. :-)</p>
<p>Just as an addendum, who says it's so unfair to count faculty members too? For example: Ahmed Zewail, one recent Caltech Nobelist, was mostly educated in Egypt (where he is now so revered that he's been on two separate postage stamps) but did his Nobel-winning work at Caltech. It's pretty conventional to include faculty members on lists of Nobelists, and Caltech's are all bonafide faculty. The University of Chicago claims 77 Nobels, but they'll basically add you to their list if you have any association more deep than a stopover at O'Hare in the middle of the night. I believe the majority of their list consists of "visiting faculty" who stayed for weeks or months rather than years. If Caltech were to use the same loose standards we could claim Einstein (who was a visiting prof for several years in a row) and numerous others.</p>