I’m not talking about institutions granting PhD degrees. I’m talking about the undergraduate programs that produce the most students receiving PhDs. This is called the undergraduate origins of Doctoral Recipients. This information is useful for people want to know where they should go as an undergraduate to have the best chances for getting their Doctorate. And it’s not always the places you think.
I’ve created two lists of colleges to target for merit aid, one consisting of only 50-50 schools and a more general list taking into consideration test scores. Since all the colleges on the lists are private schools, I thought I would create a list best financial bets for 50-50 public universities. As I started looking at the schools, I realized that the criteria I used for the private colleges didn’t exactly apply to the public universities.
Since 2000, the percentage of Hispanics enrolled in college has increased by 50% to 15.8% of all college students. There are 444 colleges and universities with 500 or more full-time undergraduates where ten percent or more of the undergraduate population is Hispanic. A total of 92 of these schools appear on the 50-50 schools list.
There are no Historically Black Colleges or Universities that meet the 50-50 criteria. I have created two tables of 50-50 schools that may be of use to African-American students or anyone looking for schools with more diversity.
I’ve finally finished updating my list of 50-50 colleges. There’s nothing sophisticated about the 50-50 list, it’s simply a list of all colleges and universities that accept at least 50% of students and have at least a 50% graduation rate. That means that these are schools most students could get into and have a good chance of graduating as well.
Too often students limit their choices because of preconceived notions about what is “best” or “required.” If you want to do pre-med, you must be a major research university; if you’re interested in film, nothing less than a film school will do. And if you want to be an engineer, you must attend an engineering school.
After the Ivy League schools and their competition as ranked by US News, the next level of desirable institutions of higher education tends to be top research universities, usually state flagship institutions. While there are many different reasons why high school students want to go to research universities, for a certain group of students, the reason is the access to and influence of research.
There’s a widely held belief that the harder it is to get into a college, the better the college must be. After all Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale all have acceptance rates of less than ten percent and look how good they are. Or are they good because they have acceptance rates of less than ten percent?
Since last April I’ve been creating lists of 50-50 schools by various topics. There have been 31 topics generating 58 tables. The idea behind the lists is provide people with different ways of learning about schools they may have never heard of before with a minimum set of standards.