Negative effect of a degree from liberal art college to apply for statistics phd degree

[statistics225]

I am an international student graduating from a small liberal art college in the U.S, with a double major in mathematics and computer science. I am applying to statistics Ph.D. right now and I am worried a lot about my chance of getting into a school.  My concern is from the fact that our school offers limited choices of courses, including some essential statistics classes, like stochastic process, advanced probability, advanced mathematical statistics etc. In addition, since the liberal art college doesn't offer graduate courses, I think my academic background is very week, comparing to those applicants from big universities. Does anybody have any idea of what to do with this situation? Do I still have a chance to get in a 40-50 ranking Ph.D.? Thank you in advance for any comments/suggestions.

Some of my positive facts: summer research experience with one publication(first author); One year Honors thesis with statistics professor. Major GPA 3.95.

[AsianSpice]

Your GRE scores, GPA, and your research experiences would be your advantages over other international students (if you don't mess up GRE too badly).

Try to get solid recommendation letters from your profs. In a small school (probably a small department as well), getting to know your profs is crucial, and letting them know you is even more important. Make sure your profs can provide strong recommendation letters. 

It's important to show grad schools that you are capable of conducting research and you can and enjoy studying/doing research at a graduate level. Use your liberal arts background and write a good personal statement. 

You should try to take advantage of your background, and show them what you have done and what you are capable of doing in the near future. 

I would suggest that you apply to a good range of schools, top/mid/safety. Schools ranked between 40 and 50 would be your safety picks for sure.

I am an international student studying in a small liberal arts college as well. Feel free to ask me any questions that you have. 

Stay positive. Best of luck. 

[cyberwulf]

A lot depends on how highly regarded your "small liberal arts college" is. Williams, Amherst, and Pomona (for example) seem like they would qualify as "small", and having a 3.95 from one of those schools would likely put you in a strong position to be admitted to some very good (think top 10) programs. If by "small" you mean "not well known/regarded". then your results might be more uneven.

[statistics225]

8 hours ago, AsianSpice said:

Your GRE scores, GPA, and your research experiences would be your advantages over other international students (if you don't mess up GRE too badly).

Try to get solid recommendation letters from your profs. In a small school (probably a small department as well), getting to know your profs is crucial, and letting them know you is even more important. Make sure your profs can provide strong recommendation letters. 

It's important to show grad schools that you are capable of conducting research and you can and enjoy studying/doing research at a graduate level. Use your liberal arts background and write a good personal statement. 

You should try to take advantage of your background, and show them what you have done and what you are capable of doing in the near future. 

I would suggest that you apply to a good range of schools, top/mid/safety. Schools ranked between 40 and 50 would be your safety picks for sure.

I am an international student studying in a small liberal arts college as well. Feel free to ask me any questions that you have. 

Stay positive. Best of luck. 

Thank you very much for your suggestions and courage.

[statistics225]

6 hours ago, cyberwulf said:

A lot depends on how highly regarded your "small liberal arts college" is. Williams, Amherst, and Pomona (for example) seem like they would qualify as "small", and having a 3.95 from one of those schools would likely put you in a strong position to be admitted to some very good (think top 10) programs. If by "small" you mean "not well known/regarded". then your results might be more uneven.

My school is not among those prestigious colleges like you mentioned, which is what I concern the most. But it is pretty well known around the area it locates. I wonder how much attention that a graduate admission put on the reputation of an undergraduate school? Sometimes small LAC students just don't have an opportunity to take advanced courses due to its course design and limited faculty members.

[Bayesian1701]

34 minutes ago, statistics225 said:

My school is not among those prestigious colleges like you mentioned, which is what I concern the most. But it is pretty well known around the area it locates. I wonder how much attention that a graduate admission put on the reputation of an undergraduate school? Sometimes small LAC students just don't have an opportunity to take advanced courses due to its course design and limited faculty members.

Things may be different for you as an international student (who are usually held to a higher standard) but stochastic processes and graduate coursework aren’t necessary to get into a PhD program. They are helpful if you have them but not disqualifing if you don’t. Coming from a SLAC that is not good will probably hurt you more than no graduate courses.  Where did you apply? 

[bayessays]

You're right to be somewhat concerned, but for the completely wrong reason. The concern is definitely not about how much coursework you have taken - no program, even Stanford, really cares at all if you took a stochastic processes class.  The concern is the rigor of your classes. You don't need to go to Amherst or Williams, but once you get outside the top 50 or so nationally ranked liberal arts colleges, the quality starts to decline quite a bit.  For example, I have known people with 4.0s and master's in math from unknown schools who struggled immensely with their intro probability class in grad school - it's hard to know whether to take a risk on a student from an unknown school because you have no idea what their A in real analysis means.

[BiostatsinSeattle]

I would also add that the foregoing rationale is equally true as applied to large public universities.  The question is, which one?  Graduating from Cal or Michigan or UVa or UCLA is much different than graduating from, say, Mississippi State or Kansas State.  The idea that attending a LAC, all else being equal, is somehow a disadvantage in applying to graduate school, in area, is not well founded and a bit absurd.  I don't know anyone who understands how these things work who would remotely agree with that notion. In fact, if anything, there is a view out there, with which I don't entirely disagree, that it is often an advantage.  There are many people who still view a rigorous liberal arts education at a small college to be the gold standard in undergraduate education. This is a very debatable topic, so I don't intend to get into a side-debate about it here.  But kids from schools well outside of the Williams, Amherst & Pomona group of tippy top LACs go on to elite graduate education in the sciences in droves.

Otherwise, we'll have to let the cohort of applicants from Middlebury, Wellesley, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Claremont, Haverford, Bowdoin, Colby, Vassar, Colgate, Hamilton, Smith, etc. etc. that they face an uphill battle.  Of course, that is absurd.

Edited March 3, 2020 by BiostatsinSeattle
Typo

[Stat Assistant Professor]

39 minutes ago, BiostatsinSeattle said:

I would also add that the foregoing rationale is equally true as applied to large public universities.  The question is, which one?  Graduating from Cal or Michigan or UVa or UCLA is much different than graduating from, say, Mississippi State or Kansas State.  The idea that attending a LAC, all else being equal, is somehow a disadvantage in applying to graduate school, in area, is not well founded and a bit absurd.  I don't know anyone who understands how these things work who would remotely agree with that notion. In fact, if anything, there is a view out there, with which I don't entirely disagree, that it is often an advantage.  There are many people who still view a rigorous liberal arts education at a small college to be the gold standard in undergraduate education. This is a very debatable topic, so I don't intend to get into a side-debate about it here.  But kids from schools well outside of the Williams, Amherst & Pomona group of tippy top LACs go on to elite graduate education in the sciences in droves.

Otherwise, we'll have to let the cohort of applicants from Middlebury, Wellesley, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Claremont, Haverford, Bowdoin, Colby, Vassar, Colgate, Hamilton, Smith, etc. etc. that they face an uphill battle.  Of course, that is absurd.

Many of the schools you mentioned are in the same league as Amherst, Pomona, Williams (e.g. Swarthmore, Weslyan, Middlebury, Bowdoin) or are otherwise very top-tier and nationally well-regarded. I can't imagine that a math major with a 3.9 GPA from Smith or Vassar (say) would struggle in PhD admissions for Statistics or Biostatistics -- and indeed, I have seen PhD students/grads from these SLAC's at top-tier Stat programs like UC Berkeley.

If you're talking about a very obscure liberal arts college that isn't well-known outside of the region, on the other hand, then these students will indeed face an uphill battle in PhD admissions (to the very top PhD programs, anyway -- they could still be competitive for mid-tier programs like UFlorida or Rutgers, maybe even fairly good schools like Minnesota, NCSU, or TAMU). Said students actually need to have very, very high GPAs and test scores and have taken a lot of mathematics just to compete with the applicants from UChicago, MIT, or Ivy school who might have "only" a 3.6-3.7.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Stat PhD Now Postdoc

[BiostatsinSeattle]

8 minutes ago, Stat PhD Now Postdoc said:

Many of the schools you mentioned are in the same league as Amherst, Pomona, Williams (e.g. Swarthmore, Weslyan, Middlebury, Bowdoin) or are otherwise very top-tier and nationally well-regarded. I can't imagine that a math major with a 3.9 GPA from Smith or Vassar (say) would struggle in PhD admissions for Statistics or Biostatistics -- and indeed, I have seen PhD students/grads from these SLAC's at top-tier Stat programs like UC Berkeley.

If you're talking about a very obscure liberal arts college that isn't well-known outside of the region, on the other hand, then these students will indeed face an uphill battle in PhD admissions (to the very top PhD programs, anyway -- they could still be competitive for mid-tier programs like UFlorida or Rutgers, maybe even fairly good schools like Minnesota, NCSU, or TAMU). Said students actually need to have very, very high GPAs and test scores and have taken a lot of mathematics just to compete with the applicants from UChicago, MIT, or Ivy school who might have "only" a 3.6-3.7.

But that is the gist of my post.  Which school?  I might have drawn the wrong inference from the thread, but out of concern for clarittt's, the distinction isn't large public vs. LAC, but rather, which tier.

I would also argue that we're all, me included, guilty of oversimplifying.  The kids from Whitman, Skidmore, Oberlin, Pitzer, Scripps, Brynn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, are getting into tippy top programs, and I don't think they need outpace the very tippy top kids from the top LAC cohort to get into good places.

I certainly agree there is a point where it matters.  But it's a very tough thing from which to obtain a great deal of clarity. 

[Stat Assistant Professor]

15 minutes ago, BiostatsinSeattle said:

But that is the gist of my post.  Which school?  I might have drawn the wrong inference from the thread, but out of concern for clarittt's, the distinction isn't large public vs. LAC, but rather, which tier.

I would also argue that we're all, me included, guilty of oversimplifying.  The kids from Whitman, Skidmore, Oberlin, Pitzer, Scripps, Brynn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, are getting into tippy top programs, and I don't think they need outpace the very tippy top kids from the top LAC cohort to get into good places.

I certainly agree there is a point where it matters.  But it's a very tough thing from which to obtain a great deal of clarity. 

As noted above by other posters, including a Biostatistics faculty member, it will also depend on how familiar the admissions committee members are with the rigor of the institution, not just its ranking (though institutional ranking/prestige often IS a good proxy for assessing that). For example, Reed College will probably be known for its grade deflation and academic rigor. The other schools you have listed, like Oberlin, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, etc. are also very well-regarded nationally.  

That is also why it is exceptionally difficult for international applicants who aren't from the top universities in their home countries to be admitted to PhD programs in Statistics in the USA. Accepting a student from ISI, Peking, Tsinghua, or SNU is usually a safe bet (i.e. in high likelihood, the student will be able to handle the coursework and finish the PhD within a reasonable amount of time), whereas it is a bigger risk to go with a student from a more obscure college. Actually, even at my mid-tier PhD program (ranked 40 in the most recent USNWR rankings), the grad coordinator said that they automatically rejected any applications from international applicants if they had never heard of the university -- because they were already getting a lot of qualified applicants from the top universities in China, India, South Korea, etc.