List of top 10 US places for doctorates for 2016:

Rank Institution Doctorate recipients

1. U. of Texas at Austin 849

2. U. of Wisconsin at Madison 823

3. U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor 819

4. U. of California at Berkeley 796

5. U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities 787

6. Stanford U. 763

7. U. of Florida 730

8. Purdue U. at West Lafayette 727

9. Ohio State U. 716

10. U. of California at Los Angeles 689

https://www.chronicle.com/article/universities-that-granted-...

There were ~55K doctorates issued in the US overall.

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=297405

So really, 78 is a year is pretty low for a place like Caltech.

> 78 is a year is pretty low for a place like Caltech.

Except that Caltech is pretty small. When I attended, the student body, undergrad and grad, was about 1500. It was smaller than my high school.

Makes sense - the top schools on the list are over an order of magnitude larger, by student population.

This comparison makes no sense whatsoever, I'm pretty sure if you looked at the data 100 years ago the student body was significantly smaller and with few PhD's across the board.

So you can't compare a current day number to a 100year average

Interesting, those are all somewhere in the range between elite and thoroughly respectable. There's no random crap schools you've never heard of pumping out oodles of PhDs every year, which is good news at least.

They probably filtered out those schools. According to this[1], Walden University was #7 in awarded PhDs in 2018.

[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf20301/assets/data-tables/table...