NRC PhD Rankings Revised

Graduate School
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How are you defining top 10? Berkeley defines top 10 in the broadest possible sense, for example. Any program that extends its lower range into the top 10 - even as low as #10 - is counted as a top 10 program. A program like medical anthropology is therefore “top 10” despite ranging between #8 and #47.</p>

<p>A better measure might be the number or percentage of programs wholly within the top 10 (or perhaps 20) range. Using Berkeley again as an example, one would have Chem E (#3-7), English (#1-9), etc.</p>

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<p>Actually, a more detailed comparison between the Harvard and MIT programs shows that they actually compete in a very broad range of areas including the natural science, the life sciences, the social sciences and even the humanities.</p>

<p>The single biggest difference in the number of programs between the two school is in the area of Health Sciences as Harvard has a school of Public Health and MIT does not. Harvard has over 10 programs in that category alone. </p>

<p>In the life sciences, MIT is slightly ahead with 5 top ranked programs as compared to Harvard’s 4, and this despite the fact MIT has no medical school. </p>

<p>In the physical and mathematical sciences, the schools are evenly matched with all programs on both sides in the top 5.</p>

<p>In the social sciences, the school are evenly matched in economics, political science, linguistics and psychology all top 5 programs at both schools. The only difference is that Harvard has a sociology department while MIT does not. </p>

<p>The major differences are obviously the vast humanities offerings at Harvard as compared to the vast engineering offerings at MIT, which largely cancel each other out. Most of Harvard’s humanities programs are in languages and history, departments that exist at MIT but don’t train PhDs. MIT has actually two top 5 ranked programs in the humanities in art history and philosophy so MIT is actually stronger in the humanities than Harvard is in engineering. </p>

<p>If architecture had been included as an NRC field as it should have been (after all nursing and agricultural sciences are) , MIT would have some of the strongest programs in that field. Its media arts and science program home of the Media lab is considered the best in the world. Its urban planning program is also considered the best in the field. Neither is ranked by the NRC. </p>

<p>So, all in all, MIT belies the characterization as just a STEM school such as Caltech or Georgia Tech. It is really a liberal arts university with a strong science focus. It has helped shape many disciplines formerly considered as humanities disciplines into science disciplines such as economics, linguistics, political science and psychology. It has shaped modern neuroscience. It is actually right now helping to reinvent the fields of anthropology, philosophy, sociology and even history by introducing quantitative methods of analysis.</p>

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<p>I am defining it the same way Berkeley, Harvard, MIT and every other university does: if either the top range is of the R or S ranking is 10 or below then the program is a top ten program. Nobody uses the whole range as it is more dependent on factors outside of the school’s control such as number of programs in the field. In some fields the variance is very large in others much less so.</p>

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<p>They used to, but now it’s called UC Davis.</p>

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<p>^ It was renamed in 1974 as the College of Natural Resources.</p>

<p>It offers two NRC ranked programs in Agricultural Sciences in nutrition and plant sciences.</p>

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<p>Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far, although I suppose it depends on how you define a “good postdoc/associate/academic track at a research university”. I suspect that a PhD in economics from any top 25, or perhaps even top 50 program, would probably land you a postdoc/tenure-track position at some research university, albeit perhaps a low-tier one and also perhaps in another country (which is why this analysis depends on how you define “good”) It may also perhaps not be within the specific department that you want - for example, you might have to go to a business school or a policy school rather than a pure economics department (but I hardly find that to be a handicap considering that the former tend to pay better anyway, although the environment may not be to your liking). Let’s face it, there are a lot of low-tier research universities out there. There are also an especially large number of foreign universities who are looking to staff up their economics/business/policy departments, and may be willing to pay for the privilege. I can think of several newly minted PhD’s who had foreign academic job offers that paid far better (sometimes by nearly 2x) that being offered by their US counterparts. </p>

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<p>Sure, but that’s the top 300. Presumably, if you’re heading to industry, you’re not one of the top 300 economists in the world anyway. {If you are indeed one of the top 300 economists in the world, then you should easily be able to secure tenure somewhere.} </p>

<p>I suspect most PhD’s in economics from any top 25-50 program will be able to find a fine job at a consulting or financial services firm. Granted, maybe it won’t be a BB or a major strategy house. But you can surely find a decent industry job somewhere. There are plenty of boutique funds or consulting firms that you can find. </p>

<p>Economics is one of the few academic disciplines where jobs - both academic and industry - tend to be relatively plentiful.</p>

<p>Consider the Phd placement of the graduates from Rutgers. Certainly we can all agree that Rutgers is not anywhere near to being a “top 5” economics school. Yet the placements seem to be quite respectable - you have a smattering of decent academic placements (including Yale, Oxford and NYU) - along with quite respectable industry placements. Now, granted, perhaps some graduates who performed poorly simply didn’t report their offers, but nevertheless what is reported seems to be quite healthy. </p>

<p><a href=“http://economics.rutgers.edu/graduate/phd-job-placement-mainmenu-230[/url]”>http://economics.rutgers.edu/graduate/phd-job-placement-mainmenu-230&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I find it interesting, and a bit troubling, that this thread was removed by the hand of the all-knowing CC moderator to the Graduate School forum. That decision reflects a persistent bias within CC that says graduate program rankings are irrelevant to undergraduate education. IMO that’s complete and utter hogwash. </p>

<p>Ultimately the grad program rankings are about the strength of the faculty, which should be a concern to prospective undergrads. In fact, the data presented in this thread are far more relevant to prospective undergrads than to prospective grad students, because the grad students are locked into a particular discipline and care only about the rankings of their own department, not about other departments; whereas undergrads typically come in with much more uncertainty as to their ultimate major, and consequently should be far more concerned that the school they’re entering has faculty strength across a broad range of disciplines.</p>

<p>Poorly done, CC moderator! FAIL!</p>

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<p>Public school fanboys can’t have any fun. Whisked off to CC neverland…aka the grad school forum.</p>

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Really! I am not at all convinced that is indeed the case - though the NRC and many posters here would protest mightily otherwise. For example, many of the following ranking factors are only tenuously connected with faculty quality…if at all.
[ul][<em>]GRE scores
[</em>]Average PhDs 2002–2006
[<em>]Percent 1st yr with full support
[</em>]Percent completing w/in 6 years
[<em>]Time–to–degree
[</em>]Percent faculty interdisciplinary<br>
[<em>]Percent non–Asian minority students<br>
[</em>]Percent non–Asian minority faculty
[<em>]Percent female students<br>
[</em>]Student work space
[<em>]Percent female faculty<br>
[</em>]Percent international students<br>
[<em>]Health insurance<br>
[</em>]Number of student activities offered[/ul]</p>

<p>A philosophy professor at NYU perhaps said it best:</p>

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<p>Equally disquieting is this claim:

[quote]
The second thing I was struck by was the low weights given to two out of the three variables relating to faculty quality in the R-ranking. Both the productivity measure and the percent faculty with grants count for less than does, for example, average student GRE or the average number of PhDs produced per year. If the R-rating were to be taken seriously and the coefficients held fixed then programs would have more effect on their rating by granting more PhDs than by increasing faculty productivity. ([source](<a href=“http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/10/more-peculiarities-of-the-nrc-rankings-the-more-women-and-minorities-the-worse-the-program.html]source[/url])%5B/quote”>http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/10/more-peculiarities-of-the-nrc-rankings-the-more-women-and-minorities-the-worse-the-program.html))
[/quote</a>]
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<p>^ So do you like the USNWR grad rankings better? They are more faculty focused and current than NRC.</p>

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<p>So when’s the NRC gonna come out with the next ranking? Hopefully we don’t have to wait for another fifteen years for this.</p>

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<p>Need to get the NRC to change the name to just department rankings and drop the PHD aspect. Then they can drop all that other nonsense too. Just say who has the best dept for XXXX and be done with it.</p>

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<p>A few caveats on Berkeley: it did much worse in the S-rankings than in the R-rankings, which suggests it’s riding more on reputation than actual defined quality. It also gets points for its agricultural offerings, which aren’t taken seriously in the academic community. For example, U Nebraska-Lincoln was booted out the AAU recently for not maintaining the association’s standards of research productivity, but that was only because they would not consider its agricultural research (the grants for which are distributed by a federal formula rather than competitive peer review). The tallies that were counted earlier include any ranking that has an upper-range in the top 5 or 10, though statistically that’s an uncommon placement (the ranges are within a 95% confidence interval). And of course, it gets more points for administratively dividing up disciplines. It’s not that other schools don’t have the same academic offerings in those areas, but rather they don’t divide the discipline up and call each division by a specific name. </p>

<p>The result is that Berkeley gets lots of points for ‘gaming’ the rankings, which makes sense considering that the entire faculty/university were out in full-force to do these rankings (more so than other schools, definitely). These rankings have been Berkeley’s main claim to fame, so I’m not surprised. They stood to lose a lot by not gaming them this time around.</p>

<p>Harvard also gets a significant boost because of its professional school for public health, which has 10 programs within the single ‘public health’ ranking (that’s by far the highest # of programs rated within a single ranking), all but one in the top 10 and nearly all in the top 5. Most universities don’t have public health offerings.</p>

<p>Either way, there’s still not much point in placing value in these rankings when the data they’re based on is still being called into question.</p>

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<p>They bit off more than they can chew, clearly. And it’s more that academics don’t like erroneous data, though some do have problems with the methodology itself. Some of them probably feel that using ranges cheapens the rankings. Others dislike how NRC’s methodology led to comparison of a wild variety of different programs, e.g. Johns Hopkins cognitive science being compared to other universities’ linguistics (if they had compared JHU cogsci to other universities’ cogsci, JHU would not be #1).</p>

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<p>That’s probably true. Berkeley definitely likes PA more, not just for undergraduate rankings, but for the NRC version of it too: it does much better in the R-rankings.</p>

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<p>Also, regarding the counting of program that has at least an upper-range in the top 5 or 10: someone (who goes by a ton of different names on this forum; he might even be posting in this thread) averaged the ranges for each the S and R ranks, to come up with a single ranking for each. Here was the tallied result:</p>

<p>S-rank</p>

<p>Top 10
Stanford 41
Harvard 36
UCB 31
Princeton 25
Yale 22
MIT 21</p>

<p>Top 5
Stanford 28
Harvard 25
UCB 18
Princeton 20
Yale 11
MIT 17</p>

<p>R-rank</p>

<p>Top 10
Stanford 38
Harvard 32
UCB 34
Princeton 23
Yale 20
MIT 20</p>

<p>Top 5
Stanford 27
Harvard 27
UCB 23
Princeton 19
Yale 8
MIT 17</p>

<p>I like these more (Berkeley’s dethroned and Stanford trumps all :)), but again, if the NRC corrects more of its errors, the tallies will end up drastically different.</p>

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<p>Don’t S and R weightings use some of the same categories? Stanford and Harvard do have better professional schools and medical schools. For Berkeley to only be behind by 10 programs in the S weighting and claim its just “riding its reputation” is wrong.</p>

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<p>My point is that in general, the NRC rankings will place Berkeley higher in the R-ranking than in the S-ranking. That to me says it’s often riding on its reputation for a boost. Obviously it does really well in the S-rankings too, but it does even better in the R-rankings, sometimes drastically better.</p>

<p>That reminds me of another point: Berkeley gets extra points for its joint programs with UCSF (not sure whether the initial tallies included the UCSF-only programs). If Berkeley supporters are going to claim UCSF is its med school, then they can’t call foul when other universities get points for their med schools. ;)</p>

<p>And the professional schools that Stanford has don’t factor into the NRC rankings, except for the med and engineering schools. Harvard definitely gets points for its professional schools (like public health). In fact, Berkeley has more professional schools than either of them: law, business, public health, public policy, environmental design, education, journalism, information, optometry, public health, and social welfare. And more if you count chemistry, engineering, and natural resources.</p>

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<p>i wanna phanta, if Berkeley is just riding its reputation, how come it’s one of the few universities to still be winning faculty awards at the rate consistent with top privates? I’m sure they aren’t giving current faculty awards just because of Berkeley’s past…</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1149431-american-philosophical-society-elects-new-members-news-item.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1149431-american-philosophical-society-elects-new-members-news-item.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1141296-national-academy-sciences-announces-new-members-news-item.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1141296-national-academy-sciences-announces-new-members-news-item.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1084863-national-academy-engineering-announces-68-new-members-2011-news-item.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1084863-national-academy-engineering-announces-68-new-members-2011-news-item.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/908174-princeton-faculty-members-lead-nation-among-2010-guggenheim-fellows-news-item.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/908174-princeton-faculty-members-lead-nation-among-2010-guggenheim-fellows-news-item.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1090913-2011-sloan-fellows-announced-news-item.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/1090913-2011-sloan-fellows-announced-news-item.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>If anyone is “riding a reputation” it’s probably you riding those Stanford coattails as you looked for grad admissions.</p>

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<p>I never said that Berkeley doesn’t have a strong faculty, UCBChemEGrad. I’m just making the observation that it tends not to do as well in the S-rankings as in the R-rankings–a pretty objective fact. The conclusion drawn from that reality isn’t a wildly illogical one.</p>

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<p>Uh, I got into grad school because I’m first author on several publications in the most prestigious conferences and journals in my field (which are double-blind and didn’t contain information on me or my university affiliation). “Stanford coattails” had nothing to do with it, thanks.</p>

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<p>Phanta, considering cellardwellars post #29, in which he/she describes the S and R weightings, please tell me how the R ranking is more reputation based than the S ranking?</p>

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<p>mm, by Penn, do you mean UPenn or Penn State? Penn State had a MASSIVE consistent improvement on the NRC rankings.</p>

<p>Also, UWashington is missing from a lot of the lists above as well. When you look at research rankings from places like Shanghai Jiaotong, Washington is definitely among the top tier of publics (only Berkeley and Michigan are definitively better, and then Washington is competitive with UCLA, Wisconsin, and Penn State)</p>

<p>Also, what are your thoughts on this post? <a href=“NRC Rankings - are S rankings a leading indicator for R rank - Physics GRE Discussion Forums”>NRC Rankings - are S rankings a leading indicator for R rank - Physics GRE Discussion Forums. It’s titled “are S rankings a leading indicator for R rankings?”</p>