I think that the NRC ranking deserve more publicity than they're getting. "bigdgp," in your post, you mentioned job placements. Granted the NCR rankings are not subject specific, as you go on to say, but they are indeed about statistics like job placements, faculty publishing, graduate student funding and the like. For years (I hope) we've all been complaining about the US News Ranking system and how meaningless it is to send around a survey and ask people which schools they think are the best. No wonder why the rankings changed so infrequently. The NCR isn't perfect, and, yes, it resists an easy 1-25 ranking, but its a step toward a fairer system of a adjudication for English Ph.D. programs. As intellectuals we should understand that the indeterminacy of the new NCR rankings (giving a school a ranking of, say, 6-17) is due in part to the impossibility of neatly ranking the "best" programs like ducks in a row. Yet, we should also acknowledge that these new rankings are an indication that some schools (even those who we don't usually recognize as top tier programs) are doing a lot better with respect to professionalizing their students than others. For instance, I'm not sure many of the programs that rely on their own clout take the job market crisis as seriously as they should. The NCR style, I imagine, will only become more popular, as the Ph.D. ranking systems should (and need to) be based on statistics and not whether your program was a New Critical powerhouse back in the day.
