Punching above weight class: Baccalaureate origins of doctoral recipients

[TreadingLife]

How does your institution rank (by state, region, Carnegie classification, etc.) when looking at the total numbers of undergraduates who received doctorates over time? It would be nice if this adjusted for the size of the student body (rate per 1000 students or something like that). Regardless, it is still a fun resource to play around with.

https://www.highereddatastories.com/2020/12/baccalaureate-origins-of-doctoral.html

[sinenomine]

Woo hoo — top ten!

Interesting data set.

[polly_mer]

NSF did a study like this on the 2010 data. 

Table 4 on https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/ has adjustments by institution size.  I know about that report because New Mexico Tech (my baccalaureate alma mater) is the first public institution on the list while having an undergrad enrollment of under 2000 students in a dirt poor state not known for education.

Talk about punching above your weight!  Yeah, the big research institutions send a bunch of people to other big research institutions, big whoop.  Tech mentors students doing real, meaningful research and then sends great researchers out into the world.

[Ruralguy]

I haven't looked yet for my small school, but it can't be much more than 1 per year in all fields Per 250 grads max. I'm basing this on dat in my head for my entire career that I know of. We're  tiny, so that's possible.

[Ruralguy]

Interesting, it ended being closer to six per year, both for entire period, and just during my career. That's per 200-250 grads per year, sometimes fewer in that period. I definitely don't know of six in anyone year who went to doctoral grad school,  but I guess more do it than I thought!

[Puget]

My undergrad alma mater is at or near the top of the undergraduate only institutions list (depending on the time frame you look at), a fact they ar exceedingly proud of. It even shows up in my own current department, where there are two of us from the same moderate sized SLAC, hired within the last 5 years. Especially interesting because, although selective, it is less selective than some of the other SLACs who are lower on that list-- I'm guessing they tend to send more students into professional degree programs instead.

My employer is small for an R1, so a relative number would really be more useful. We're not going to show up high on a list of absolute numbers with institutions that have 30K+ students.

[born_a_prof]

Top 30 in doctoral institutions ...nice.

[apl68]

Alma Mater has been graduating just under 300 students per year in recent years.  And probably has been for decades, since enrollment has been pretty steady over the past 30 years.  It has produced over 530 doctorates during the period of study.

Sadly, I was unable to become one of them. 

[Cheerful]

Sadly, I was unable to become one of them.

It sounds like your life took a nice path in a different direction, apl68.  So, hopefully it's happily (not sadly), that you aren't among them.

[Ruralguy]

Putting both sources of info together, I get that my school has an "institutional ratio" (used in the NSF source) of about 2.  Two schools a bit above us in rankings (but not by a lot) and about the same size, have rations more like 5 or 6 !!!

So, although my school produces some Ph. D.'s., nope, we aren't punching above our weight class at all, at least not in this category.

Keep in mind that engineers who don't plan to be academics don't need a Ph. D, nor business minded folks or doctors (um, the kind who deliver babies, human or otherwise).
In other words, its not a great way to judge a school, at least not by itself. It does mean that my so-so SLAC doesn't have particularly academic minded folks in its ranks, but I could have told you that. I think many of them are on the faculty too (though most of them managed to get a PhD at some point in the last 50 years).

[apl68]

Sadly, I was unable to become one of them.

It sounds like your life took a nice path in a different direction, apl68.  So, hopefully it's happily (not sadly), that you aren't among them.

You're right, of course.  I'm much better off as a librarian than an academic.  If there's one thing that hanging out at The Fora has taught me, it's that failing to get into academia was probably one of the better things that happened to me!

[Hibush]

As the point person for recruiting S&E PhD students in my department, I find this list good for identifying schools that are more likely to produce successful grad students for our program. They not only have the curriculum that results in good PhD students, but also have a culture of graduate study as an expected trajectory.

Some of the schools are on my list already, but I see some schools where I should check how many students finish in relevant subjects.

Thanks for bringing this list to my attention.

[MountainU]

Super interesting how many folks think this bears strongly on them as a scholar when we should all be aware of the privilege pipelines that lead to these patterns. We should be focusing on the schools that are overproducing scholars based on their resources - not patting ourselves on the back for being part of the inequity of resource allocation.

[Ruralguy]

I find it interesting that some low resource schools seem to be producing a lot of scholars,
almost as high as places we've all heard of. Perhaps that's privilege related as well. Perhaps
average SES of students at such schools is higher.

[darkstarrynight]

Thanks for sharing this - it is very interesting! My sibling and I both went to the same undergraduate institution, and both have doctorates. Our institution is in the top 10.