I got an email this week from a California mother who was happy that her child would be a attending St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a wonderful public liberal arts college, in the fall.
Her husband, however, remained skeptical. He worried that his daughter would be jeopardizing her chances of going to graduate school if she went to an obscure liberal arts school. He thought she’d have a better shot at attending graduate school if she earned her bachelor’s degree from a large state university in California or elsewhere.
Here’s my answer to that: Nonsense.
Students who attend liberal arts colleges enjoy many advantages that students at large public institutions often don’t.
At liberal arts colleges, there is a much greater chance for undergraduate research. Classes are routinely small. Instead of 200 or 300 in Calculus II, you may have 15 or 20 students. Students have more opportunity to develop bonds with professors because the learning is in small settings and not lecture halls. And remember, it’s the professors who are writing those graduate school recommendations. My son, who is a sophomore who intends to major in math and minor in physics at Beloit College, is certainly experiencing the benefits of connecting with his professors.
Okay, you might be wondering, but where are your facts to back up your claims?
To answer the email from the mom, I tracked down a report produced by the National Science Foundation that examined where scientists and engineers, who had earned PhD’s, had obtained their undergraduate degrees. The majority of schools in the top 50 list of PhD-producing schools were liberal arts colleges.
When the NSF looked at what schools were producing the most PhD’s, per 100 undergraduate degrees granted, only three public institutions made the list – University of California-Berkeley, William and Mary College and New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
50 Top Schools for Science & Engineering PhDs
Without further ado, here are the top 50 schools where graduates ultimately received a PhD in science or engineering:
- Cal Tech
- Harvey Mudd College
- MIT
- Reed College
- Swarthmore College
- Carleton College
- University of Chicago
- Grinnell College
- Rice University
- Princeton University
- Harvard University
- Bryn Mawr College
- Haverford College
- Pomona College
- New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology
- Williams College
- Yale Univeristy
- Oberlin College
- Stanford University
- Johns Hopkins University
- Kalamazoo College
- Cornell University
- Case Western Reserve
- Washington College
- Brown University
- Wesleyan University
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Macalester College
- Amherst College
- Duke University
- Beloit College (My son’s school.)
- Bowdoin Collge
- Wellesley College
- Ressenlaer Polytechnic Institute
- Earlham College
- Franklin and Marshall College
- Lawrence University
- University of Rochester
- University of California-Berkeley
- Dartmouth College
- Occidental College
- Hendrix College
- Vassar College
- Trinity University
- College of William and Mary
- St. John College
- Bates College
- Whitman College
- Brandeis University
- Hampshire College
Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller, and she has just released an eBook, Shrinking the Cost of College: 152 Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow me on Twitter.
Read More:
Which is Better: A University or Liberal Arts College?
New York University: Tale of 2 Students
Beware of Wildly Different Grad Rates
The list provides the “pipeline schools” for science and Engineering doctoral degree corrected for graduate population. I really dont know what information to make out of the list
Does it show that the naturally more curious and therefore research oriented students attend those schools ? or does it show that their students are specifically encouraged and prepared to attend graduate schools and obtain the PhD DEGREE ? Grade deflation at certain top schools such as Harvard puts their students at a competitive disadvantage in GPA and grad school admission profile in Engineering. Caltech is a small school, and so any few number of students who attend grad school for PhD have a disproportionate rate even when normalized. But of course, Caltech is a first class research university with Nobel quality research and faculty. I opine that some students at some top universities can easily make lots of money without earning a PhD, and this option which also reflects the school’s quality and alumni strength, may mitigate the number who see a need for a PhD to have a good life !.
The number of PhD’s the institution grants is a meaningless statistic. One instead needs to look at the number and quality of peer-reviewed research publications. Some of the school listed here are notoriously known in their respective specialty fields for granting graduate degrees of minimum content and poor quality. The actual list of of the best schools for earning a PhD is completely different.
Ummm— these aren’t the best schools for earning a PhD. And this isn’t the number of PhD’s that institutions grant. This is, based on 100 degrees earned, the number of students who go on to get PhDs after earning their undergraduate degree from one of these schools. So it’s essentially the best school to get your undergraduate degree from if your end goal is earning a PhD in science or engineering.
And you’ll notice that many of these schools don’t even grant PhDs (e.g. small liberal arts schools such as Carleton or Lawrence).
Hi Jessica,
You’re right. This isn’t a post about PhD institutions. My post was about institutions that produce, as a percentage of their undergrads, the most students who end up getting PhDs. Yes, as you suggest, many of these schools are liberal arts colleges that don’t have PhD programs. That’s the point I was trying to make. You don’t need to go to a research university as an undergrad if you want to eventually get a PhD!
Lynn O’Shaughnessy
What is significant about “per 100 undergraduate degrees granted” as opposed to “per 10” or “per 1000” or any other number? Do more or fewer publics make the list if a number other than 100 is chosen?
No the per 100 just allows you to compare different sized schools with each other. If they did it by total number of PhDs then big schools would have all the top spots. It could be any number though.
Thanks Peter for the explanation. I forgot to reply to that original question. My bad!
Lynn O’Shaughnessy