Top Stat PhD programs 2021

[Stat Phd]

Hi all I’m applying this year to a PhD in statistics, and wanted an up to date list of the best PhD programs to apply for. 

[DanielWarlock]

It depends on your research interest. I don't know what you want in terms of a "top list". There are numerous rankings out there, but they are overall ranking of the entire statistics department instead of a particular subfield, based on ranking criteria you might or might not think is relevant. 

That said, the newest ranking released 2021 is QS World University rankings by subject from 4 days ago. Under the "Statistics & Operational Research" subject, top 10 is

1. MIT

2. Harvard

3. Stanford

4. ETH

5. Oxford

6. Cambridge

7. Berkeley (UCB)

8. NUS

9. Georgia Tech

10. Imperial College London

Link: https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2021/statistics-operational-research

 

 

 

Edited March 7, 2021 by DanielWarlock

[bayessays]

US news is really as good of a place as any. Then learn about the peculiarities of the programs to find the ones that fit your goals best.  There are no other worthwhile rankings, and if they were, they would probably just be someone on this forum doing a slight re-ranking of US News.

[Stat Phd]

7 hours ago, DanielWarlock said:

It depends on your research interest. I don't know what you want in terms of a "top list". There are numerous rankings out there, but they are overall ranking of the entire statistics department instead of a particular subfield, based on ranking criteria you might or might not think is relevant. 

That said, the newest ranking released 2021 is QS World University rankings by subject from 4 days ago. Under the "Statistics & Operational Research" subject, top 10 is

1. MIT

2. Harvard

3. Stanford

4. ETH

5. Oxford

6. Cambridge

7. Berkeley (UCB)

8. NUS

9. Georgia Tech

10. Imperial College London

Link: https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2021/statistics-operational-research

 

 

 

Thanks. Indeed, Removing the non-US schools, the top 20 US are similar to the US news top 20.

US news for reference:

1. Stanford
2. Berkeley
3. Harvard
4. University of Chicago
5. University of Washington
6. Carnegie Mellon
7. Duke
8. NC State
9. Tamu
10. Upenn
11. Wisconsin 
12. Michigan 
13. Minnesota
14. Iowa
15. penn state
16.  Columbia 
17. cornell 
18. Purdue
19. UNC
20. ohio state

Edited March 8, 2021 by Stat Phd

[Stat Phd]

I think will create an overall ranking aggregating all rankings. 

[csheehan10]

12 hours ago, DanielWarlock said:

1. MIT

2. Harvard

3. Stanford

4. ETH

5. Oxford

6. Cambridge

7. Berkeley (UCB)

8. NUS

9. Georgia Tech

10. Imperial College London

I'm not sure how useful this is for stats specifically, as several of these programmes lack independent statistics departments (MIT has Mathematics, or Operations Research, ETH has Mathematics, Cambridge has the department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics) so  a lot of these universities wouldn't suit someone who wanted to do statistics (esp applied statistics)

[trynagetby]

Here's my very affective (read unscientific, subjective) rankings from  stalking alumni placements and professor productivity. It's pretty much a reranking of US News with the added information of the tiers indicating where the big jumps in quality are. I think within tiers the choice doesn't matter too much.

Stanford Tier:

Stanford.

Elite Top:

Berkley, Harvard, CMU, (Likely UChicago but I didn't research them)

Top:

Uwashington, Duke, Michigan, Columbia, Cornell, UNC

Up there:

NCSU , TAMU, UT Austin, UCLA, Wisconsin

Edited March 8, 2021 by trynagetby

[Stat Phd]

2 hours ago, trynagetby said:

Here's my very affective (read unscientific, subjective) rankings from  stalking alumni placements and professor productivity. It's pretty much a reranking of US News with the added information of the tiers indicating where the big jumps in quality are. I think within tiers the choice doesn't matter too much.

Stanford Tier:

Stanford.

Elite Top:

Berkley, Harvard, CMU, (Likely UChicago but I didn't research them)

Top:

Uwashington, Duke, Michigan, Columbia, Cornell, UNC

Up there:

NCSU , TAMU, UT Austin, UCLA, Wisconsin

Probably Stanford on elite top too?

[csheehan10]

Just now, Stat Phd said:

Probably Stanford on elite top too?

Pretty sure he means stanford is a tier above everyone else for stats.

[statsnow]

Not so sure why people think stanford is better than berkeley.  It is a smaller department than berkeley.  It is mostly theoretical.  Berkeley has much closer ties to EECS and does a lot more applied and methodological research Not getting into the politics of this however A lot of people have complained about the lack of diversity at stanford.  I have heard many female applicants accepted at Stanford have rejected it because of its diversity reputation.   I am not sure if they have ever had a black or Hispanic phd student at stanford.   

[bayessays]

12 minutes ago, statsnow said:

Not so sure why people think stanford is better than berkeley.  It is a smaller department than berkeley.  It is mostly theoretical.  Berkeley has much closer ties to EECS and does a lot more applied and methodological research Not getting into the politics of this however A lot of people have complained about the lack of diversity at stanford.  I have heard many female applicants accepted at Stanford have rejected it because of its diversity reputation.   I am not sure if they have ever had a black or Hispanic phd student at stanford.   

When people discuss rankings, the only relevant thing is how the program will affect your academic job prospects after.  You can do applied research at a lot of places and get great industry jobs, and you can be just as successful coming from Berkeley, but I don't see how one could argue that Berkeley is better.  Does Berkeley have even 3 statisticians that come close to Tibshirani, Efron, Diaconis, Hastie, Candes, Donoho in terms of influence?  This isn't a dig at Berkeley, so I'm genuinely curious as to why you think this and would be happy to change my mind if you presented some evidence.

[MLE]

1 hour ago, statsnow said:

I am not sure if they have ever had a black or Hispanic phd student at stanford.   

I think two of their current first years are Hispanic. Not that it makes the department diverse, but it appears to be a change from previous years.

[icantdoalgebra]

2 hours ago, bayessays said:

When people discuss rankings, the only relevant thing is how the program will affect your academic job prospects after.  You can do applied research at a lot of places and get great industry jobs, and you can be just as successful coming from Berkeley, but I don't see how one could argue that Berkeley is better.  Does Berkeley have even 3 statisticians that come close to Tibshirani, Efron, Diaconis, Hastie, Candes, Donoho in terms of influence?  This isn't a dig at Berkeley, so I'm genuinely curious as to why you think this and would be happy to change my mind if you presented some evidence.

Easy; Peter Bickel, Michael Jordan, Martin Wainwright. People like van der Laan, Bartlett, Brillinger, Aldous, Yu, and Pitman might not be as famous as those Stanford faculty that you listed, but its not like they are some random professors. How about Fernando Perez and his work on creating Jupyter Notebooks? Perhaps its not as much of a research accomplishment, but creating a widely-used software that makes performing statistics and data science easier is definitely worth quite a bit of influence.

I'm not trying to argue that Berkeley is better, in fact I agree that Stanford's program is better. However is it substantially better? I am skeptical. 

There is a valid point though, in that Berkeley's stats department has leaned more heavily towards machine learning recently and if you are a statistics purist you could reasonably make the argument that Stanford is substantially better if that is your criteria for evaluation.

[bayessays]

@icantdoalgebra I don't disagree with anything you said.

[MathStat]

I think rather than discussing program rankings we should make an advisors ranking, lol, but I guess that's too delicate of a topic even for an anonymous forum. 

[kingduck]

On 3/7/2021 at 10:13 PM, Stat Phd said:

US news for reference:

Is this the most recent 2020 rankings from US News? I can't seem to find their stats rankings after 2018.

[Geococcyx]

(They only do grad program rankings every several years (4, maybe?), so 2018 should be the most recent)