Safety Schools?

[a cup of coffee]

It's good to aim high, but I wouldn't use rankings as a direct indicator of hireability. A lot of schools that don't make it that high on the rankings list have excellent placement records. I didn't get into a school as prestigious as my naive, naive mind predicted, but looking at where grads there got jobs last year made me feel very optimistic. What else matters?

[lyonessrampant]

That's a good point, but UWisconsin-Madison is a GREAT program, which is ranked pretty highly isn't it? A lot of it, I think, has to do with what people in the field know about a school. I've only heard people say good things about UWisconsin-Madison for example, but if you attend an unranked school that no one really knows about, that's probably not going to do you any favors when you're looking for a job. So the ranking does and doesn't matter in my opinion. It is an arbitrarily assigned number that doesn't directly correlate to a job, a great education, or student happiness, but it is something of a weathervane for what to expect. I think this whole field (the admissions game and also job seeking) has A LOT to do with who you know, what they know about you and where you came from, and shady deals conducted in smoking rooms. . . or something like that, and in that case, rank or prestige does have an impact, but it is only one of many variables, I think.

[booksareneat]

Rankings are helpful in a sense. I think it's better to think of the schools in tiers, though. Some on that top tier are better at job placement. For example, UW Madison (which is a great school, but one going through an existential crisis as I've heard it--losing key faculty in recent years) does not say what their placement rate is (http://www.wisc.edu/english/graduate/nextgen.html), but their grads get jobs at other state universities  and good private schools . If you look at WUSTL (https://english.artsci.wustl.edu/phd-alumni-directory), they put people in what seems like a slightly lower tier of teaching positions --places like LSU and Wake Forest. The next tier seems to be the programs that place their graduate in the smaller liberal arts schools and branch state schools--these are the UICs (http://www.uic.edu/depts/engl/programs/ ... dents.html) and Loyolas (http://www.luc.edu/english/graduate_placement.shtml), etc...

The question is how good are they at putting you there? If, then, you're lucky enough to have a choice (this year, that will be fewer of us) you ask for numbers and ask, how many of your graduates are placed into small liberal arts schools? How many go to research universities?

That is what rankings tend to correlate to, not the ease of acceptance. The problem is that for some reason everyone thinks that because they love books and criticism, they need to be Harold Bloom or Frank Kermode or whoever and so they think, I need to go to the best, so they all apply to Ivies, thinking this will make them the best. That's fine, we need more kickass brilliance, but people shouldn't assume that the only way to go is "the best". You will probably have as good a chance of getting a job from WUSTL as you would Harvard, but the job you find will be different.

Did that sound preachy? I came to the end and thought I sounded preachy. I'm trying to ignore Bussy D'Ambois right now... c'mon Bussy, get in a fight or something!

[Yellow#5]

I didn't mean to say that Lyones has "dreams" because the schools were high ranking, just for wanting to go to grad school at all. Having dreams means sometimes they are frustrated by bad advice, shoulda woulda coulda scenarios, but being frustrated as we all are beats showing up at the bar every day at 5:01 and sending emails to all your old friends twice a year that read,

"what's going on with you? Nothing new here, as usual."

(Just got one of those emails yesterday. It made me greatful to have something I really want, even if I don't get it.)

[booksareneat]

Interesting. Where did you say you found that list of placement rankings? Again, I think it's good to note that some schools are better at placing different kinds of jobs. If you want a teaching gig, then it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a better chance at getting hired if you're from UW Madison than say UIC--UIC may have a better placement rate (I don't know their rate), but it is for a different sort of job.

Depends on your priorities.

[hadunc]

Thanks Ranger123, that is really helpful information. Like many who have posted on this thread, I was also encouraged to apply to only the highest ranking departments. My profs really thought I had a good chance at getting into an Ivy, or at least a program ranked within the top 20. I feel a bit slighted now--not that I think they gave me bad advice, because I don't think anyone could have guessed how competitive this year would be, but because they sort of gave me the impression that it wasn't worth applying to lower-ranked programs. Now that I have been through this whole process, my outlook is very different. In a field where there are no guarantees, I think anyone's best bet is to choose a program that they like, no matter how high or low it is ranked. If you're in a prestigious program but you are miserable, then you're not going to get anything out of it. I learned this the hard way with my undergrad degree and I think the same is true once you get to grad school. Apply to programs that you would feel the most comfortable in and where you really feel you would excel, don't simply choose the one with the most name recognition.

[lyonessrampant]

Wow Ranger, that's fascinating. Thanks for the information.

[a cup of coffee]

Yes, I've been thinking over the past few weeks that I would have gone about the application process entirely differently when it came to picking schools. My only excuse is that I decided to apply in October, so I was really pushed for time. Ranger123, those statistics are interesting, but you're right that they're not that surprising. I'm not discounting Wisconsin at all, which is obviously a fantastic program all around.

[catherinian2]

R1,

Thank you for the info. It's incredibly helpful. If you wouldn't mind, can you post perhaps the first 50?

Just some additional food for thought: is this weighted for cohort size? (and historic cohort size, rather than current--programs like Duke and Chicago have slashed their cohorts within the last few years, but those students haven't hit the job market yet). A program that graduates 5 students a year and still makes it into the top 50 of your placement list would be highly impressive, whereas a program with a cohort of 25 that's hovering around the same number might be considerably less so.

I'm not very up to date on this, but I do know that Duke, Columbia, Berkeley, Chicago, Johns Hopkins used to have huge cohort sizes (over 20 or 25, I think). Other programs, like WUSTL and Rice, have maintained a smaller cohort (5-8) all along.

Regardless, I think that this list is an extremely value addition to the way we consider placement rates...which, of course, is probably a major consideration for anyone who is making a decision. Actually, if you don't mind, can you also post the number of professors placed within the top 50 from each school as well? (#1 Yale, 100....etc). While the math would remain inevitably crude, it might give us a chance to compare the numbers against cohort sizes. I would be impressed, say, if Hopkins is placing 1/4 as many professors in the top ten as Berkeley, considering that they used to be 1/8 the size of Berkeley....

[lyonessrampant]

Ranger, I'm sure you could sell that list, but you'd have to have your math checked and verified (sort of like a peer-review process) but if you were into it, you could also probably write a short paper describing your methodology, results, trends, and conclusions and get it published in a non-lit journal (stats or maybe even sociology or definitely the Chronicle of Higher Ed type of journal). Anyway, interesting stuff. Thanks again for sharing!

[thepoorstockinger]

Also keep in mind that school cohort sizes/the quality of schools change over time so any school with a PhD program founded 30 years ago will have produced more grads (and more during times when there was less competition for positions) than programs which started or expanded in the last 15 years.

The problems regarding cohort size could probably be dealt with fairly easily by someone with a really solid statistics background (i.e. someone that isn't me) - go make friends with some economics students. Particularly if you plan on selling it (and doing a secure website isn't really cheap and there are a limited number of people willing to pay for something that specific in a single discipline - so your best bet is to sell ad space on a free website and to probably find people in other fields willing to do the same thing for schools in their field to increase the content/appeal of it) you probably want someone to do statistical analysis on it to make it even more useful to people who are paying for content.

It's an interesting thing to put together because I am sure we all look at that sort of thing when choosing programs even if we don't explicitly think about it and to have hard numbers on it is super helpful. Placement in top 40 programs is probably a better, or at least more useful, metric than a lot of the arbitrary things including in rankings. Anyway, best of luck deciding what to do with your data.

Have you considered trying to turn it into a paper for a journal that specializes in education policy/PSE? Again you'd probably need to find a co-author who can help with statistical stuff, but in the long run the benefit of the publication is probably more valuable to you then the small amount of money you'd be able to generate selling the data.