notcoachrjc

Not a flamewar, just a disagreement. But there are some issues with the premise of your argument. They're commonly made, so it's an important debate to have. When you say: " If it were true that propensity to leave academia were distributed evenly across departments, then it would be valid to compare attrition across departments in an effort to measure toxic culture, etc. " I would think it would be just the opposite. If we see a pattern of attrition that is unevenly distributed toward a certain group of schools we can infer an association. You know, stuff we do in our research. Your claim is just that: we should see more attrition at top schools because those entering have better outside options...but we don't. NYU's attrition is in the 30% range (http://politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/4610/nyu_placement_record2013.pdf), for example. Given their methods training, students should have plenty of outside options. Stanford's comparable page is down, but from what I remember, they placed about 50% of their admits into tenure-track jobs. Attrition, with the limited data available, seems to skew toward lower-ranked schools for people with fewer outside options (and those are available online as well: https://sites.google.com/site/honestgraduatenumbers/. Whether departments somehow do a better job of weeding out unqualified students or students leave on their own volition out of frustration with academic induced by the department is observationally equivalent. I just think it's unreasonable to discount the latter in favor of the former. Regarding the second point: Of course competence is a prerequisite, but there are certain advantages afforded to those with famous or well-known advisers by osmosis that other students simply do not get. Part of it may be self-selection of good students to famous advisers, but the good students get to show off much better: opportunities to meet other big names on the field, co-authorships with scholars at other institutions, invited publications that help their research get exposure. Solo publications at top places for ABDs are still rare enough that you can make a splash with a few co-authored ones (not with your adviser, of course -- these are discounted heavily). Advisers don't have to be selfless for this, they just have to be willing to have their students tag along to things, which these usually are. Contrast this to an adviser that barely communicates with their student or even one that's perfectly willing to provide feedback, but doesn't have any pull and there is a real distinction, if not in placement itself, but possibly the quality of the placement. It's why top-10 stars end up at top-10s and top-30 stars end up at other top-30s and all the way down from there.

^ Can you delete your post? The rumors site had some rumors and innuendo of bullying going on at UWisc a while ago, so the reference is likely to that. Nevertheless, they're unsubstantiated allegations -- no reasons to out someone. Plus, it's already deleted from the results page.

These are two rather strong takes, but are ultimately not accurate. Regarding 1), I really don't see how you can infer that people deciding they don't want a PhD or academia is independent of the department's actions. Foremost, the only experience a graduate student really has with academia is through his/her department. It is without doubt that a toxic department culture, evidence of poor performance in one's subfield, being ignored by one's adviser, poor training, overburdening through TA/RA work or any number of other department-related reasons can lead to attrition or a decision that academia is not "right for me." Someone is far more likely to think academia is not right for them when their department is a mess and treats them poorly. Second, attrition rates are generally higher at lower ranked departments where funding is more scarce, so the "grass is greener" for higher ranked departments argument falls flat. It's simply not true. Regarding 2), again, there's fundamental misunderstanding of how the tenure-track (and to an extent, post-doctoral market) works here. Of course there are things you can do that are independent of your adviser that help you get a job: publish, get grants (that don't require your adviser to be a PI) and network independently (which is difficult for most grad students). Otherwise, your success, for better or for worse is tied to the person chairing your dissertation committee. Throughout your graduate career, a good adviser will put you in position to succeed by not only giving feedback, but by providing access to invitation-only conferences, introducing you to big-name scholars in the field, participating in panels you organize for APSA, etc,. These intangibles are not trivial because they provides advantages and you can be that your competition on the job market is getting these. Moreover, once it comes time to apply for jobs, it's night-and-day between good and bad advisers. Good advisers will make calls on your behalf, attend your practice job talks and write not only good letters, but impactful ones for the positions you're applying for. Bad advisers will write a letter and then wonder, months later, why you haven't gotten any calls. Remember, every tenure track job you apply for gets at least 100 applications. Many of the applicants will have publications AND pedigree. You need to stand out somehow. One way is for someone on the search committee to have already heard of you or to have heard of (or from) your adviser and vouch for you. This is why it's important to compare placement, not only across, but within departments. Are some faculty member's students finishing and getting jobs and others' aren't? Is it really plausible to say this disparity is because their students are lazy or unqualified or lined up six-figure consulting gigs or whatever? This is risky. There are three reasons not to have junior faculty as your advisers/chairs. One, they might publish out and leave in a couple of years and then you're out of luck. Two, they might not publish at all (sounds like the case here), and not get tenure. Again, out of luck. Three, even if everything goes well on the first two, you want your advocate when you're on the market to have the most impactful voice possible. This is generally not a junior scholar or even an early associate. It's good to have someone like this on your committee (or even as a co-chair), because they'll be more in touch with current research and read your work, but it's also a good idea to have a more senior person as chair for all of the reasons listed above.

In the next few weeks and months, those of you who have been accepted will begin to visit departments. There is another thread about what to ask for during these visits, the advice there mostly suggests asking rather trivial questions about aspects of graduate school that will only marginally impact your time there (course offerings, travel funding, even the stipend itself). There should be one thing in particular that you ask for over anything else: for a complete record of graduate student progress from enrollment to graduation and placement. Ultimately, the end goal of graduate school is an academic job (as I highlighted earlier, this is a fairly rare outcome). You want to put yourself in the best possible position to succeed and the only way to do so is with hard data, not a brief glimpse at a department on its best possible behavior. The former approach is fine, but rife with selection bias. Departments will highlight their best placements, their happiest students. Faculty will be the most active in both engaging with graduate students and in recruitment. Ultimately, recruitment is a way to one-up someone at a rival department or get a competent research assistant. You should discount these interactions as much as possible. A complete record of graduate progress gives you several key pieces of information: - How many people in your entering cohort are actually likely to get tenure-track jobs. This percentage is a good benchmark. - How does your subfield do compared to others? What about your adviser? If IR's rate of placement from enrollment is 50% and American's is 5%, the overall record may look alright, but a large proportion of students in the department may lack opportunity to get jobs. This is usually true for Theory (some highly-ranked departments haven't placed a theorist in over a decade). If your prospective adviser has never placed anyone into a TT job (especially if he/she's had multiple opportunities), this is obviously problematic. - What is the attrition rate? If it is high, it would be good to investigate why people drop out. - Where do graduates get academic jobs? A job is a job, but if a department is mostly placing students in visiting positions or post-docs with few tenure track jobs (and those are in community colleges, or whatnot), it may speak to underlying problems. If a department can't or won't share this information, you have to immediately be suspicious. Are they hiding behind a high attrition rate? A poor placement rate among PhD recipients? Are students prevented from getting degrees because they don't get academic jobs (you'd be surprised how common this is) to keep the PhD holder-to-academic job rate high? Again, asking other questions at these visits is fine, but for those looking at an academic career (and that should be all of you), this is the only hard data you can get and the only objective measurement of quality outside of the very noisy US News rankings. Do yourself a favor and ask.

Understandably, you've had a lot of success. But, I have to point out that you are a huge outlier in terms of job market files across the board. There are very few ABDs out there from any department that have EIGHT publications with one "top" outlet (top-3) included when they're on the market. So, there is a degree of confirmation bias here. Of course it's good advice to publish a lot and you may have succeeded at that, but some programs may not sufficiently train people or give people opportunities to pursue such a strategy, so that's where reputation and rankings become important. Having said that, there are departments in the top-10 that train their students poorly and there are departments in the 55-65 area that train their students well. But, to be a self-starter, you need to know where to start and that's where training comes in. As eigen said, these aren't attributable to just luck. It has to be said that the training at many higher ranked departments is better than the training at lower ranked departments. And, I'm not just talking about statistics and formal theory -- although these are factors. It includes knowing how to structure publishable work and research products, how to become socialized in the discipline and getting feedback on what you're working on from others grad students and faculty who well-trained (not just your adviser). Again, some departments do this better than others. Anyway, since these debates tend to turn into fights about how everyone is obsessed with rankings and R1s, I should restate that 1/3 of those on the job market get ANY TT jobs, that includes R1s, but also R2s, directionals and LACs. The point is that the job market is hard everywhere and there unplaced students ranging from Harvard to unranked PhD programs and that's something to consider at the beginning of your graduate school career, rather than the May before you're on the job market. Just a footnote, I disagree with most of this. You're not competing with your cohort for faculty attention, few will have overlapping advisers. Maybe there will be some ranking if you have overlapping letter writers and apply for the same jobs, but your competition is squarely in other departments. Also, going to conferences is important, but presenting is a double-edged sword. Conferences are for networking first, second and third. If you present at a big conference, it's likely to be poorly attended with a disinterested discussant. Small conferences are better, but as a second year, whatever you present is likely to be kinda bad and you don't want people to remember you based on that. So, present, but make sure it doesn't suck -- that's where training and being able to get feedback from your department comes into play.

The top 10 is generally the departments ranked in the top 10 on the US News rankings: Harvard through Duke/UCLA. So there are 11. Programs outside of that range certainly place well in some areas, but do poorly in others (i.e. WashU outside of American and formal theory). As I said, these rankings are reputational, so all else equal, you are more likely to be hired from Princeton than UCLA than Cornell, etc. Remember, every job you will apply for gets a hundred or more applicants. Some places will trash any file regardless of how stacked the CV is if the program is considered too low ranked. Sometimes that cut-off is within the "top-30." It's not fair, but it's true. Penn's placement page is also a good cautionary tale. First, the most impressive placement: Michigan, appears to be an outright lie. The person has a lectureship disguised as a post-doc, not a tenure-track job. I otherwise count 12 R1 placements in 11 years, which is fine for that kind of program, but about 1 per cohort, so you have to be the absolute best out of who-knows-how many in your year to get that. Penn is also a bit of an outlier because its Ivy league pedigree gives it a leg up in placement at LACs, post-docs and think tanks. From what I hear, the training is quite poor. This probably warrants a separate post, but it's always good to get comprehensive placement records from schools (how many entered, how many made it to the job market, how many got TT jobs, where did they get TT jobs). What's listed on the website selects on the people who got jobs and intentionally removes the context of how many people didn't get jobs.

I would caution that a non-trivial amount of people I've come across (from both top-10 and not top-10 programs) have ended up teaching high school after graduating or otherwise leaving a program. And, that lecturer positions are notoriously poor in terms of job security, workload, benefits relative to public or private secondary school teaching positions. Prestige does matter, but that's not to say that all the jobs go to people from top-10 programs OR that it is impossible to get jobs at non-top-10 programs. There will be years where places like UVA or Emory or Penn St. or Cornell or UIUC (to name a few) place multiple people into R1 TT jobs. All of those candidates tend to be very well published (think ISQ, IO, CPS, JOP, etc.), well-networked and have a promising research agenda. On the other hand, even Harvard and Princeton struggle to place more than 50% of their candidates on the job market. Prestige isn't just an Ivy name on a CV, it's often resources for grad student research and field work, easier access to closed-door conferences and networks and often, an easier time getting things published (benefit of the doubt from editors, etc.). All of this CAN be overcome at non-top-10 departments, but the hoops one has to jump through are greater, so fewer people end up succeeding. Obviously, the occasional unpublished ABD will get a job based on just potential, but this is increasingly rare and tends to be confined to your Stanfords, Harvards and Princetons, rather than the entire top 10. Ultimately, going to a top-10 will help, but is in no way a guarantee of a job.

That should be the baseline realization of applying to PhD programs in political science. Below are placement statistics for the past few years from the APSA. 33% of applicants in any given year get tenure-track jobs. The placement is worst for political theory, where 16% get jobs. Note that this statistic only includes those people that actually tried to go on the academic job market, not those that didn't make it through grad school or saw the writing in the wall and didn't try. So the statistic for the percentage of those starting grad school to tenure track jobs is likely 33%*50%. 16 percent. 8 percent for theory. http://www.apsanet.org/Portals/54/APSA%20Files/Data%20Reports/Employment%20Data/2014-15.APSAGraduatePlacementReport.pdf Now, you may say, well, people still get post-docs or "non-tenure-track" jobs, like VAPs or Lectureships, etc. Maybe they can get something tenure-track afterward. True, but the 33% rule per year applies. With each passing year, you jump into a new pool with new people that's more and more competitive. That's what the statistics show. In five years, it's likely to be far more selective. Think about that for a bit and then reconsider what you're getting yourselves into. I'm one of the lucky ones that got a TT. Are you going to be?

1) I only "make up" figures because the department is not transparent enough to put their actual enrollment -> job numbers online. If they would, I wouldn't have to guess. If you can add those numbers to the conversation, be my guest, but that's what I had to go on. There are 35 students listed on the website. That is somewhat informative, but without attrition numbers, it is very difficult to get a hang on how many actually come in on a yearly basis. Based on the number listed in the website directory, three per cohort seems like an outlier. 2) There is nothing on the placement page to indicate whether a placement is tenure-track, VAP or adjunct. If there is no such indication, there is no way of knowing and one cannot assume that anyone was placed TT (I know of four of the faculty that were, so that's where that number comes from). The statement "Over the last decade, almost all graduates seeking academic positions found jobs" is hollow. For all we know, 90% of those could have adjuncted, VAPed for a couple of years and disappeared into the wilderness. 3) As far as I know, Nazarbayev pays about $50000 and in the local currency, so it is subject to fluctuations in oil prices and the ruble, which isn't doing so well these days. I would also take any story of moving to Astana, Kazakhstan for family reasons with a HUGE grain of salt. Even locals think that place is unlivable. Maybe there was something compelling the move, but it's not plausible that someone turns down a TT job in the US to go there. It might as well be called Potemkin University. 4) You're really towing the party line on attrition (along with many other things, but I'll focus on this). Faculty love to tell you about things like "poor fit" or "academia wasn't for them" for students that drop out. But there's really no way to know if it was the student or the program that led to the attrition. To write off attrition as the fault of the student basically allows faculty to shirk any responsibility for failures of mentorship or training -- i.e. doing their jobs, so I don't think most people would be as ready to discount this as much as you are.

To be completely honest, placement at both programs seems like a very distant outlier. Post-2008, Iowa touts about 20 "placements" in departments around the country (excluding Nazarbayev University, which is not really something to be proud of), with no distinction between tenure track and VAP/adjunct (http://clas.uiowa.edu/polisci/graduate/recent-placements). There are four R1 placements. At a conservative estimate of ten people per cohort, this would indicate that about 28% of those entering Iowa's PhD programs get any non-post doc positions and about 6% place in TT R1 schools. In other words, statistically, you would not only need to be the best person in your cohort, but the best, most published and most connected person in the program over the course of several cohorts. Boulder appears to do better at overall and non-academic placement (http://polsci.colorado.edu/graduate/about-our-program/graduate-placement), but has only one placement in an R1 department since 2009. Again, this is out of an unknown number of entering students, so it could very well be that the rate is comparable of Iowa's 28%. Either way, you should prepare to not be employed in academia or a job that required you to have done a PhD after you leave either school. Finally, someone mentioned elite LACs. While it is conceivably easier to get jobs here for some applicants, schools in the top 10-20 of those rankings are as if not more pedigree-seeking than R1s. PhDs from Ivys will go a long way and places like Iowa or Boulder will be heavily discounted. Additionally, it always helps to have an undergraduate degree from an elite LAC when applying. Absent these two factors, it's really not a R1 -> elite LAC drop off, but an R1/elite LAC -> very small LAC/R2 drop-off in jobs, and again, even those jobs are open to the best members, most connected and most published of any given cohort.

OP, I want to be on your side, but when I Googled "george mason political science placement," the top result was this thread. Their website doesn't seem to report anything, such as what the training (re:methods training) would be like. Frankly, programs in/or around DC draw students from the government that intend to rotate right back into government after graduation and see less of a need for tenure-track placement. George Mason's low ranking and complete inability to report any placement speak to that. Choosing a VERY low-ranked program over a program ranked around 25 is not suggested just because the fit is better. Some programs around the top 25 do place poorly, but many do not and have far better track records than a department that appears to have reaped a windfall in funding. Placement in pre or post-docs does not equate tenure track placement and "NSF grants were awarded to more than 50% of one of their classes that are at the dissertation stage" sounds like a very deceptive way of saying one person got some grant from the NSF. I'd look into other options.

That's probably the reaction I would have had when I was in your position, but the numbers aren't wrong. Are you so confident that you won't end up in that 65-75%? Are all but one or two students in a cohort really "mediocre" and not worth investing time in? Give it a think. I'd recheck your numbers. The most complete (now outdated) statistics are at: https://sites.google.com/site/honestgraduatenumbers/Even top-10 schools rarely place more than half of their entering classes, it's usually around 25%, varying from year to year. Imagine what it's like further down -- those programs sure won't tell you. Take NYU's 2006 class (http://politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/4610/NYU_Placement.pdf), not to pick on them, but because half of the links are dead. Great placements. Stanford. Rochester. Minnesota. But, only 4 TT of a cohort of 19. Not even 25%. They sure will tell you about those four, but what about the other 15? And these are the departments that are being transparent. Imagine what's going on at the one's that won't tell you the placement stats. Harvard included. From a friend: huge classes, little faculty attention and about half of the cohorts just disappear. And, guess what? No complete statistics, like NYU or the other schools on the site. The stats look great because there are many great placements, but that's just window dressing. Half of the people that enroll in PhD programs won't finish. They don't get to go to those government jobs or LACs (although, it's been said well here that the top programs compete for both of those, too). Think about your future. Where would you end up with a four year gap on your resume? That's your interpretation of what I said. There are certainly people who care, but many people do not or only marginally do. A friend's adviser promised him that he'd stick around until the friend graduated only to jump ship and move across the country right before the friend went on the job market. More important to you, though, is that there will be some faculty members that recruit you and make you promises during the recruitment weekend, only to disappear once you actually attend. Be cautious and on guard, because it's ultimately your life that you're leaving in their hands. But the cheap labor comment is just logic: if only a quarter (or less at lower ranked programs) get jobs, then why have graduate students? It's certainly not career training, but there's always sections to be led or data to be coded or papers to be 'co-written' (again, if you're lucky). In reality, the first two of these won't help you get a job (and will hurt your own research output if overdone) and a publication with an adviser is heavily discounted. So, again, be wary of what programs want you to commit your time to. Recruitment is the only time you will ever have leverage. The next class is just a year away.

Congratulations! Many of you have the opportunity to become political science PhD students in the fall. Now that most of you have gotten in somewhere, though, it is necessary to examine whether going to grad school is right for you. The reality is harsh and won’t be something you hear about at the recruitment weekends or from the DGS that spends his time here. At the best departments, only about half of the students finish with PhDs. It is far fewer as we go down the ranking tree. Of those, maybe half will end up with tenure track jobs somewhere. Of those, a little over half will receive tenure. Only one in eight members of your cohort will be in the discipline. Think about that for a little bit. If you’re not that one person in eight, you’re wasting your time. It’s as simple as that. The skills you acquire in grad school have negligible applications to the professional world. Each year you spend at a PhD program is a year of work experience you don’t have and everyone who didn’t go to grad school does. Each year you miss will also have a new crop of college graduates enter the workforce for you to compete with. It’s not worth falling that far behind, especially when you know there’s an almost 90% chance you ending up right back on the non-academic job market. So, you’re asking yourself, “why would faculty be so welcoming and inviting to me as we get closer to April 15? Don’t they realize that they’re likely sending me down a path to failure?” Well, guess what. They know and they don’t care. You are cheap labor to them, at best. Research assistants, teaching assistants and co-authors who do all the work on a paper (if you’re lucky). They need you. But that’s not even the half of it. Some faculty just enjoy recruitment for the sake of competing with old friends or rivals at other departments. Not only do they not care about you, their promises will literally disappear from your life as soon as you accept. That’s the world you’re entering. Be very wary. I know I wish I had been.