A recent National Science Foundation (NSF) study, "Baccalaureate-origin Institutions of Science and Engineering Doctoral Recipients," confirms what administrators here have known all along: research universities -- and Cornell, in particular -- are good places to begin preparing for a career in research.
"The NSF study says a lot about the environment we have here for undergraduates," said Robert C. Richardson, the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics and the university's new vice provost for research. "We are a great research university. A lot of our undergraduates, because of the interaction they've had in our labs, see research as an exciting career option and decide to go on."
In the study, covering 1991-95, Cornell ranked third in the country, after the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as a source of undergraduates who went on to earn Ph.D.s in science or engineering. Universities ranked number four through 10 were Michigan at Ann Arbor; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wisconsin at Madison, Pennsylvania State, University of California at Los Angeles, Harvard and Minnesota at Minneapolis, respectively.
The rankings covered all baccalaureate graduates entering all fields of science and engineering, as well as subsets of the baccalaureate population. For example, Cornell ranked number two in graduating women who eventually earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering and number one in terms of graduates who earned doctoral degrees in biology and agriculture.
The rankings are available at the NSF web site http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/s4095/s4095003.wks.
Had the survey covered doctorates awarded after 1995, Cornell might have ranked even better, Richardson speculated. "In the late 1980s through the early 1990s, we were probably the best in the country, when you take our size into account, in nurturing and training future scientists," he said.
Noting that Cornell ranked in the top five research universities graduating women who subsequently earned doctorates in engineering, Richardson said: "We're doing well with women in engineering, but there is no reason to be self-satisfied because this is a difficult problem nationally."
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