<p>I’m a “rising” junior and I’m curious about good PhD programs for cultural anthro</p>
<p>“Good” PhD programs are based on your research interests. If you are interested in how socioeconomic change affects women in developing countries, the perfect PhD program for you may be different from that of someone who is interested in human-environment interactions in the Near East. (Or not - those two descriptions were taken from the same department.) There are other factors that go into good - like maybe you want to use a certain technique that was fostered at a particular university, or there’s a special collection you’d have access to at a particular place.</p>
<p>I advise you to begin with the NRC’s [url=<a href=“NRC Rankings Overview: Anthropology”>NRC Rankings Overview: Anthropology]rankings[/url</a>] of anthropology programs. You can sort them by rank by clicking “S-rank high” or “R-rank high” (the ranks are calculated differently but will be largely similar). Try not to focus on absolute numbers, but rather groups of schools (top 20ish, top 30ish, etc.) Then go to the departmental websites of these places and click on their faculty profiles/descriptions. Don’t just rely on those, though - sometimes they haven’t been updated in months or years. Most faculty will have laboratory websites; click on those to see recent field schools or projects they are working on. Search Google Scholar to see what recent publications they have, and you may even want to look them on on NIH RePORTER (or whatever the NSF equivalent is) to see if they have gotten any federal grant funding in the last 2-3 years, and on what.</p>
<p>Thanks! Of course “good” isn’t universal, but rankings can be useful to an extent.</p>
<p>I tried reading about the method they use for rankings, but it still makes little sense. Can anyone explain these rankings to me? <a href=“NRC Rankings Overview: Anthropology”>http://chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124703/</a></p>
<p>Did you see this webpage?</p>
<p><a href=“New Doctoral-Program Rankings: Frequently Asked Questions”>http://chronicle.com/article/New-Doctoral-Program/124634/%20<view-source:http://chronicle.com/article/New-Doctoral-Program/124634></a></a></p>
<p>Both rankings are created by regression analysis. 21 different characteristics of doctoral programs are assigned weights on the basis of rankings by professors.</p>
<p>The basic difference is that the S-rankings take into account the actual ratings professors give programs. The R-rankings are created by comparing the responses on the surveys to the actual characteristics professors said were important, and then ranking based on the objective characteristics universities actually possessed.</p>
<p>The basic idea was to discover discrepancies between the characteristics that faculty members said were important and the characteristics that they (perhaps unconsciously) seemed to value when they rated actual programs. (You might tell a surveyor that nutrition is the most important quality of a restaurant, but when you’re asked to rate specific restaurant chains, it might become apparent that you actually value low prices.)</p>
<p>The S-rankings are based on what faculty members said were important; the R-rankings are based on what they actually seemed to value when rating programs.</p>
<p>oh ok thanks!</p>