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Top Stat PhD programs 2021


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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 by DanielWarlock
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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 by Stat Phd
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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)

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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 by trynagetby
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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?

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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.   

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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