Best Stat PhD programs for Industry/Government Placement

[literaryreference]

I am curious about what people believe are the best schools for Industry/Government placement, and if there is any major divergence from the list of top schools for academic placement (excluding biostat). Based on anecdotal evidence, a few I think would make the list are:

Harvard

Berkeley

CMU

NYU

UMD

Purdue

Iowa State

NC State

UNC

Stony Brook

Again, this is based largely on anecdotes from people I have spoken with. Obviously as has been mentioned many times before, choice of advisor has a major impact, but options for advisors are not independent of school quality. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[Stat Assistant Professor]

+ Duke

 

UNC, Duke, and NCState have the advantage of being located in the Research Triangle.

 

I have not heard anything at all about NYU or Stony Brook placement. NYU's stats program is extremely small -- it's in Stern, and they aim to have only 1-2 new students for the Statistics PhD concentration every year (just like most management doctoral programs). This suggests to me that they aim to place people in academia rather than industry?

[BoFoSho]

I am kind of surprised Washington fails to make your list. Or is that just me?

[wine in coffee cups]

I don't understand how to identify "the best schools for Industry/Government placement". "Best" in what sense? Everyone who took a non-academic job is in a position doing interesting and challenging statistical work? Highly paid positions? Well-known companies? The department is a feeder for particularly industries or agencies? Or focusing on the negative, what would bad industry/government placement look like?

 

I am kind of surprised Washington fails to make your list. Or is that just me?

Again, I don't really get this exercise, but UW skews academic and there's not a lot of industry or government PhD placements to speak of. That may evolve as the recent glut of students in interested in machine learning graduate.

[clurp]

I think the best way to determine this will be to look at the industry placements for each school and see which look best to you. As an example, when I compared UNC and Duke's placements, it seemed to me like Duke's industry placements were in finance and tech while UNC tended to place people into pharmaceutical companies and SAS. There are some exceptions (a UNC alumni went to Goldman Sachs and some Duke alumni have gone into pharma), but maybe you can see trends. Another thing to ask about is where students tend to do internships over the summer. 

Edited April 3, 2014 by clurp

[wine in coffee cups]

I think the best way to determine this will be to look at the industry placements for each school and see which look best to you. As an example, when I compared UNC and Duke's placements, it seemed to me like Duke's industry placements were in finance and tech while UNC tended to place people into pharmaceutical companies and SAS. There are some exceptions (a UNC alumni went to Goldman Sachs and some Duke alumni have gone into pharma), but maybe you can see trends. Another thing to ask about is where students tend to do internships over the summer. 

Completely agree! I think whether industry placement from a program is good or not is subjective and hard to generalize. I have no intention of working in clinical trials or finance, for instance. Strong placement into those fields is largely irrelevant to me (and perhaps even a drawback if it indicates allocation of resources away from things I care about), but ought to be a selling point for someone who might want to work in one of those areas.