Tomorrow I’m heading down to Portland, Oregon to give a talk at Reed College. What, you’ve never heard of Reed? Shame on you! Why should you have heard of it? Because it produces an astounding number of excellent students who go on to graduate school. In fact the leading institutions for producing undergraduates who go on to get Ph.D.’s (per capita) are 1. Caltech, 2. Harvey Mudd, and 3. Reed. (For details see this page. At Caltech, 42 out of every 100 undergraduates go on to get a Ph.D., a truly astoundingly high number.)
O brave new quantum world!
Had to chime in and point out that Deep Springs College (full disclosure: one of my alma maters), while generally not part of these types of charts due to its small size, has 2/3s earning a graduate degree and over half earning doctorates. But yes, Reed is great, and people should definately get to know it if they don’t already..!
Indeed, Deep Springs College surely makes it on very few peoples radar screens! Cool solar farm, by the way 🙂
Reed’s a great place, and you should have mentioned that David Griffiths, whose books on E&M, quantum mechanics, and particle theory are much loved by many physicists, is there. I visited Reed once in my undergrad days to see a high school friend, and heard about a police car door that had been floating around campus for years as a trophy of the anti-establishment Reedies. Wonder if it’s still there?
Steve Jobs started at Reed but dropped out partly for financial reasons. He tells the story in his 2005 Stanford commencement address. His birth mother, a graduate student at the time, gave him up for adoption. Reed’s tuition was barely affordable by his adoptive parents (a term Jobs prefers not be used).