The Story of One Cohort

[BigTenPoliSci]

I’m coming back here for the first time in a long time to give you a different perspective on placement figures.

I don’t know of any departments that outright lie about placement, but departments have some deceptive techniques to make placement seem better than it really is. The most common technique is multiple counting. I had two one-year positions before getting offered a tenure-track and my program counts me each time. So if you don’t look carefully and critically at our placement page, I count as three placements. Most programs do some version of this little deceit.

A better way to look at placement is some version of a survival analysis, but it doesn’t need to be that complicated and I don’t have the data anyhow. What I do have is the outcomes of our cohort, so I’ll describe that here. My program was in the Big Ten, somewhere between 15 and 25 in USNWR rankings. We have a history of placing okay, but we aren’t putting people into prestigious R1 jobs with regularity. Based on stories I hear from friends who came out of similar programs, our cohort’s experience is fairly typical.

We started with a big cohort: there were 18 of us. The first big drop off happened after the third year, when we were down to 14. We would lose a couple more over the next two years. None of us finished until the end of year 6, when 2 defended their dissertations and took tenure-track jobs and 1 defended and took a visiting assistant professor position. The big wave of defenses happened after 7 years, but none of those finishing were going into tenure-tracks – mostly postdocs. It’s now coming to the end of the 8^thyear for our cohort and of the 18 who started, this is the breakdown: 10 have PhDs, 4 are in tenure-track jobs, 4 are in postdocs, 1 is in a visiting assistant professorship, and 1 is in a non-academic job. Put into percentages, 56% of our cohort has a PhD after 8 years and 22% are in tenure-track jobs. Our program’s placement is considered fairly good.

Those in tenure-track jobs and those who didn’t finish were not always the ones faculty and cohortmates predicted in the beginning. You should take two things from that: one, if you have convinced yourself (even privately) that you are a star prospect, these odds still apply to you; and two, be nice to the ones who everyone says aren’t going anywhere and don’t take the egomaniacal “stars” of the program very seriously. It’s all pretty random.