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Exactly. The "big five" programs will always remain at the top overall. There the movement is mostly tied to specific fields: which particular one(s) is/are at the momement better or worse for 20th century or Renaissance or Chinese or what have you. IMHO there have been some actual changes in quality in the next 5-10 programs. For example, Berkeley definitely pales to what it was 10-15 years ago, UCLA is also weaker, but Chicago is stronger overall and Stanford seems to be on an upward trajectory. But whether or not this matters in terms of placement is debatable. I suspect Berkeley will still place well enough on its famous name, solid training, and good incoming students, at least for another decade or so. The real change is the tier below that, at places like CUNY, Indiana, Rutgers, Bryn Mawr, BU, Delaware, or Santa Barbara. A generation ago they had stronger faculties and used to place decently enough (often quite well in certain subfields), but now even their very best students working with high profile scholars are extremely lucky to get any tenure line job anywhere. So to whoever asked: no, the rankings haven't really changed. Which PARTICULAR program of the top 10 is right for you might be different now than it was before (Prof. X is now at Y instead of Z, Prof. A retired from B and wasn't replaced, so forth), but the list of top programs is basically set in stone, at least for Western art. As someone has already pointed out, non-Western fields work a bit differently, possibly because there's still new hiring going on in those areas, esp. for contemporary.

Wow, thanks for doing this research. A few remarks. NYU obviously has an "in" with the Met and that is why many people go there, so the fact they placed 22 in the Met internship is not very surprising. Also, the number of NYU PhDs per year is not 22, and a lot of people go to NYU to become curators, not professors. So NYU's placement rate for professorships is actually much better than it looks on the spreadsheet, probably similar to Columbia's. Berkeley's placement rate will be lower in the future because many top profs retired, such as TJ Clark and Anne Wagner. It's still a good PhD program but not what it was like 10-15 years ago. BU is a pretty good school but its placement rate seems a bit high on the spreadsheet. Please delete SCAD from your list of "good" placements, because it really isn't. Overall results are not surprising. The same 5 programs that have been the "top" programs for the past 50 years (Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Princeton, Yale) are still there at the top, with the same 5 programs that have always been just behind them (Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan) still right there behind them. The lesson is that if you want to be a professor, go to one of those 10 programs (which one is a personal choice depending on your field, $$, so on), or possibly MIT for modern architecture, or else don't go at all. Maybe the list is different for curators and someone can crunch the numbers for that???