NRC rankings

[hashslinger]

Can anyone help me make sense of the new NRC rankings for English programs? More importantly, can anyone tell me if these rankings are worth paying attention to?

I guess I'm mainly looking here: http://graduate-scho...______________U

and here: http://chronicle.com...English/124728/

I guess I'm just utterly mystified. I know that the US News list we've been going off of for years has a weakness for "big names" and undergraduate reputation, but I'm pretty surprised by some of these results. I never thought I'd see a world where University of Kentucky and Arizona State are considered better than Cornell and Chicago, and where UConn is considered better than JHU and Duke. (I'm not knocking those programs. I'm just saying.) Also, U.S. News favorite Berkeley's so low-ranked it might as well just pack it in (it's now behind Oklahoma. I didn't even know Oklahoma had a PhD program). What's going on here? How important is this list when deciding to apply to programs? When on the job market?

Edited November 5, 2010 by hashslinger

[adaptations]

Hopefully I can provide a few insights on the rankings although I am certainly not an expert. First, I wouldn't be overly worried about them. Instead focus on programs' placement records and the strength of your research match with faculty. Second, the NRC rankings have a ton of information and you need to be careful when looking at how to interpret it. There is both an S and R ranking, and within each schools are NOT provided a specific rank. Instead they are given a ranking range. This is the probable range of the school ranking based on a specific confidence interval (I can't remember the exact interval and am being lazy so am not going to look for it right now, but I would guess it is 5% or 10%).

For example, since you mentioned Berkeley I looked at their rankings. Berkeley's R ranking is 2 to 17. This is still a very high ranking, which means there is a very strong probability that Berkeley is truly ranked between 2 and 17, but given the noisiness of the data a specific ranking can not be determined. I highly recommend reading the relevant sections of the National Academies' website to get a better sense of the meaning and usefulness of the bounty of data presented in the results.

[bigdgp]

Can anyone help me make sense of the new NRC rankings for English programs? More importantly, can anyone tell me if these rankings are worth paying attention to?

I guess I'm mainly looking here: http://graduate-scho...______________U

and here: http://chronicle.com...English/124728/

I guess I'm just utterly mystified. I know that the US News list we've been going off of for years has a weakness for "big names" and undergraduate reputation, but I'm pretty surprised by some of these results. I never thought I'd see a world where University of Kentucky and Arizona State are considered better than Cornell and Chicago, and where UConn is considered better than JHU and Duke. (I'm not knocking those programs. I'm just saying.) Also, U.S. News favorite Berkeley's so low-ranked it might as well just pack it in (it's now behind Oklahoma. I didn't even know Oklahoma had a PhD program). What's going on here? How important is this list when deciding to apply to programs? When on the job market?

Also, a cursory glance at any major English department in the country's faculty profiles will affirm that, in the stat that matters, the Harvard's, Chicago's, Columbia's, Berkeley's and so forth far outmatch schools like Kentucky, ASU and Oklahoma. The placement record of a school is really the only stat you need to worry about. Even more than that, it would be smart of you to try and find out where professors who specialize in your discipline at various institutions got their PhD's. I say this because a university department will almost always have a period or discipline within the department for which its placement record and reputation are significantly higher than that of its overall ranking (unless, of course, you are at Berkeley, where the reverse could be true). I am a medievalist, and this is very much the case with Fordham and Notre Dame in my area. Neither is very high on the USNWR rankings (ND is in the 40's and Fordham in the 70's). However, in medieval literature, USNWR ranks ND in the top 10 and both have excellent placement. I would worry about fit and placement records instead of overall rankings. The more you can learn about a school's (or even a specific professor's at the school) ability to position you, in your discipline, to get the kind of job you want, the better.

Edited November 6, 2010 by bigdgp

[rav140]

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.

[Pamphilia]

More even than checking out who used to place well, try to find out what programs' placement rates are *now* (overall and in your subfield) and *where* programs are placing (the where is important to see if a program consistencly places grads at locations/institutions where you would like to work; after all, we are all after any job but we also all have designs on certain kinds of jobs). Some of the old powerhouses, who have names and reputations that still make most of us shiver a little, are not placing as strongly as they used to. Many of them have been struggling to get their grads jobs (any jobs, not just prestigious ones) in the last few years. And there are other programs that might have been regarded as the middling sort previously, but which are beginning to dominate placement over the old powerhouses. This is why it's not only important to check current faculty pages, which reflect what programs were places well from last year up until 30 or 40 years ago, but see where recent grads are ending up, if anywhere.

ETA: I know that the NRC report is trying to take the above into account, but it's very hard to make heads or tails of the thing without a strong stats background. At least to me. It's over my head.

Also, a cursory glance at any major English department in the country's faculty profiles will affirm that, in the stat that matters, the Harvard's, Chicago's, Columbia's, Berkeley's and so forth far outmatch schools like Kentucky, ASU and Oklahoma. The placement record of a school is really the only stat you need to worry about. Even more than that, it would be smart of you to try and find out where professors who specialize in your discipline at various institutions got their PhD's. I say this because a university department will almost always have a period or discipline within the department for which its placement record and reputation are significantly higher than that of its overall ranking (unless, of course, you are at Berkeley, where the reverse could be true). I am a medievalist, and this is very much the case with Fordham and Notre Dame in my area. Neither is very high on the USNWR rankings (ND is in the 40's and Fordham in the 70's). However, in medieval literature, USNWR ranks ND in the top 10 and both have excellent placement. I would worry about fit and placement records instead of overall rankings. The more you can learn about a school's (or even a specific professor's at the school) ability to position you, in your discipline, to get the kind of job you want, the better.

Edited November 6, 2010 by Pamphilia

[diehtc0ke]

More even than checking out who used to place well, try to find out what programs' placement rates are *now* (overall and in your subfield) and *where* programs are placing (the where is important to see if a program consistencly places grads at locations/institutions where you would like to work; after all, we are all after any job but we also all have designs on certain kinds of jobs). Some of the old powerhouses, who have names and reputations that still make most of us shiver a little, are not placing as strongly as they used to. Many of them have been struggling to get their grads jobs (any jobs, not just prestigious ones) in the last few years. And there are other programs that might have been regarded as the middling sort previously, but which are beginning to dominate placement over the old powerhouses. This is why it's not only important to check current faculty pages, which reflect what programs were places well from last year up until 30 or 40 years ago, but see where recent grads are ending up, if anywhere.

ETA: I know that the NRC report is trying to take the above into account, but it's very hard to make heads or tails of the thing without a strong stats background. At least to me. It's over my head.

This. Especially given the fact that these rankings are based on data from 2006, I think they can be used rather generally to give applicants a general idea of how programs (holistically speaking) are seen in terms of reputation but a lot more legwork must be done after the fact. From what i remember, I thought the difference between R-ratings and S-ratings was that one was based more on subjective criteria and the other was based on more objective criteria--which is which has been lost at this point. I find these to be more useful than the USNWR rankings but, as bigdgp has said, what matters more than a program's overall strength is its strength in your particular subfield.

[unfoundedstruggle]

Can anyone help me make sense of the new NRC rankings for English programs? More importantly, can anyone tell me if these rankings are worth paying attention to?

I guess I'm mainly looking here: http://graduate-scho...______________U

and here: http://chronicle.com...English/124728/

I guess I'm just utterly mystified. I know that the US News list we've been going off of for years has a weakness for "big names" and undergraduate reputation, but I'm pretty surprised by some of these results. I never thought I'd see a world where University of Kentucky and Arizona State are considered better than Cornell and Chicago, and where UConn is considered better than JHU and Duke. (I'm not knocking those programs. I'm just saying.) Also, U.S. News favorite Berkeley's so low-ranked it might as well just pack it in (it's now behind Oklahoma. I didn't even know Oklahoma had a PhD program). What's going on here? How important is this list when deciding to apply to programs? When on the job market?

Like the USNWR, these rankings don't matter at all. The NRC rankings especially have been plagued with delay after delay, etc.

Rankings don't matter. Find out where the professors you admire got their PhD, and like one of the above posters said, find out your school's placement record.

[poco_puffs]

Also, like me, you might end up at a school with a fairly low ranking, but be completely and utterly happy with the program. Also, I've been pleased to find out that a.) my school has been climbing the ranks in terms of general caliber of students (the students that are applying and being accepted are far and above students from 10 years ago) and b.) it has an excellent placement program because of the strength of its pedagogical training. We teach one class a quarter every quarter until we graduate. It's grueling, but it's loads of experience, and students are going onto the job market against students from other schools who have only taught two courses EVER in the course of their PhD at a big-name, high-ranking institution. If the university is hiring someone to flesh out their department and teaching rather than just a rockstar personality, that experience matters.

Not to mention the fact that the campus is beautiful, the living around here is fairly inexpensive, and I'm just loving life in general. I'm happy to be spending 5-7 years here.

[lifealive]

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.

I understand this point of view, but the NCR "data" (I guess we can't call them rankings) still give me pause. After all, statistics such as job placement rating and funding can get you only so far. Job placement statistics don't tell you what kind of jobs people are getting--is a program placing their graduates at peer institutions, for instance? Or at small branch campuses? I've seen programs boast a placement rating of over 90%, only to find that those jobs were ... not great. Additionally, where are graduate students or recent grads publishing? I've seen programs brag about how frequently their students publish, only to find out later that those publications were not well respected. Much of the NRC data seem skewed to favor quantity of professionalization over quality.