Many BYU graduates go on to gain Ph.D.s

PROVO — Brigham Young University is 10th in the nation in the number of graduates who go on to earn doctoral degrees, according to a new study.

More BYU graduates earned doctorates between 1995 and 2004 than did graduates of Stanford, Yale and MIT, according to the analysis conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The ranking thrilled BYU administrators, who are preparing for Thursday's summer graduation ceremonies, the annual university conference and the start of fall classes on Sept. 5.

"The thing I like about this one is it is not a perception ranking — it's not a beauty contest — it's about actual student performance and the kind of thing we want to be really good in, undergraduate education," BYU academic vice president John Tanner said.

Size clearly played a part in the rankings, said Tom Hoffer, the principal researcher on the NORC study.

"Most of the schools in the top 10 are enormous institutions," he said. "Cal-Berkeley (which finished first), Michigan (second), Texas (fifth) and Wisconsin (sixth) are among the largest schools in the nation, so they generate more graduates than most schools."

With just fewer than 30,000 undergraduate students last fall, BYU is the nation's second-largest private university, behind New York University. With 7,000 graduates last year, BYU awards more bachelor's degrees each year than Harvard (seventh), MIT (11th), Yale (15th) or Stanford (16th).

That doesn't take away from the fact 2,116 of BYU's graduates went on to earn doctorates during the decade analyzed by the study, Tanner said. BYU's mission is to be a teaching institution, preparing students for careers or graduate education, if they choose. It is not a research university, and it offers few doctoral programs of its own.

Many BYU students move on to graduate programs at the nation's elite research institutions. For example, Cal-Berkeley has admitted 18 to 20 BYU graduates to graduate programs in each of the past three years, said Judi Sui, director of data for Cal-Berkeley's graduate programs.

The NORC's Hoffer expressed surprise at the way BYU's graduates go on to earn doctorates in the full spread of the seven broad categories of doctoral disciplines established by the NORC. In 2004, the last year of available data, 49 BYU graduates earned doctorates in the social sciences, 43 in humanities, 42 in life sciences, 35 in engineering, 27 in education, 25 in physical sciences and 16 in a category called professional or other.

Spencer Jones is one of the estimated 2,150 students who will earn bachelor's degrees on Thursday. Jones is headed to Princeton to study organic chemistry after fielding offers from Harvard, Caltech, Cal-Irvine and Penn.