Todd R. Jones

This paper investigates which attributes of a Carnegie PhD-level institution predict the share of its undergraduate BA recipients that will earn a PhD. Four broad PhD fields are studied: humanities, physical sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences. We use restricted-access, individual-level Survey of Earned Doctorates data to determine both where and when PhD recipients received their BA, and truncation-correction methodology to account for PhD receipt after the data end. Across fields, we find that PhD production is positively related to the number of highly-ranked PhD programs an institution has, suggesting such departments may play a dual role in both producing PhDs as well as encouraging undergraduates to earn PhDs themselves. We also find that PhD production is negatively rela...