History Phd Rankings

[Calgacus]

Hi everyone,

I'm fairly new to the forum and have seen in several threads people referencing rankings of the programs and schools they've applied to. I'm wondering where people are finding these types of rankings published? All I've found is the U.S. News and World Report rankings from 2013, and those seem (a) a bit outdated at this point, and (b) slightly skewed by the way they do their calculations. Do people know of any other sites or publications they can link to that provide more recent rankings for PhD programs in History?

Thanks!

[TMP]

Not really.  People find out reputation by word of mouth.

[Neist]

15 minutes ago, TMP said:

Not really.  People find out reputation by word of mouth.

Yup, or at least is how it works from my experience in the history of science and STS circles. Even if they were worth looking at, I'm not sure if formalized lists exist.

[_etruscan]

Even if it's not worth it, if someone knows a rough outline of the top 20-ish "list," I won't mind if they share it here 

[Quickmick]

@Calgacus I agree on the word of mouth thing, you might want to reach out to your history dept and ask some question, I would also point out that a school with a lower 'ranking' may have a giant in your field which is a mitigating factor. That being said you can get a neat (if outdated) excel book here: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/Resdoc/ for free that gives a lot of interesting information such as enrollment, gre, health insurance, do you get an office, pubs of profs, avg time to complete, etc. They say they look at 5000 programs at 212 institutions--but I didn't count. As you may have heard, when you are looking at places it might serve you well to look at their placement statistics.

 

Hope this helps!

Q

[mvlchicago]

I mean, I don't think any set of top-20ish schools we could give you would be particularly surprising: if you get a degree from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, or Chicago, you're probably doing pretty well for yourself regardless of your job specifics (call those the bomb schools maybe?)

Then the type of schools that are in a similar tier but definitely below (Johns Hopkins, Stanford? don't have a good read whether Stanford should be up there or here, Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia, Brown, Penn, NYU, UT-Austin) are ones where the "fit" of their program to what a job is hiring matters more.

The nice thing about being in history is that stat and econ people like using the history discipline to do analytical work for the broader job market (since history arguably has implications for humanities and the social sciences). So studies often at least tell us who is getting hired effectively and can not some schools that go under-the-radar in common discourse.

Of course, the problem with any and all these arguments is that it's difficult to parse institutional networks from personal ones. So let's say person A is a professor at UArizona and person B is a professor at Harvard, both in Reformation history. If person A is the top Reformation historian in the world, person A's students will do remarkably well, even compared to person B's students. The problem is that this example doesn't appear to come up very often; more likely the top historians with the best type of networks end up being at name-brand schools. This, in turn, gives the illusion that something intrinsic to the school makes them good at producing incredible historians, when in actuality it's the people.

This is why the advice of contacting POIs, and talking to your advisors and current department is so important; because at the end of the day, you don't want data on institutions, you want data on people. 

Edited April 13, 2016 by mvlchicago

[turnings]

A study was released about a year ago looking at prestige hierarchies & hiring patterns in doctoral programs - this seems to be about the most "legitimate" measure available. The top five there are 1) Harvard 2) Yale 3) Berkeley 4)Princeton 5) Stanford. 

I suppose in my head I have a similar rough sense of prestige as mvlchicago, although I would definitely include both columbia and stanford in the list of so-called "bomb schools." Maybe hopkins too?

[knp]

That study focused on eight schools in particular, which together produced fully half of all tenure-track history professors in this country and Canada.* The top five were indeed Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, but the next three were Columbia, Chicago, and Brandeis. The authors and those who reported on the study tended to chunk them in that order, of being the "top eight". (I'm always a bit surprised to see Brandeis, I admit...I wonder what the department's strengths are?)

*I find this just profoundly undemocratic and antithetical to a vibrant scholarly exchange of ideas, but I suppose nobody is asking me.

Anyway, I find the study itself hard to read, but the most prominent article about it is this one.

Besides those top seven or so, the next couple dozen will have some extremely competitive strengths and some that are less so. E.g. if you're interested in Latin American history, you should seriously consider UT Austin and UCLA, or in colonial North America consider Penn and William and Mary, or in African history consider Michigan and Michigan State. Some of those are tougher rows to hoe than others—going to UCLA, e.g., is still a great name for basically anything, but if you're looking to be hired at a small school without any other Africanists who can serve on your search committee, they might not recognize that Michigan State is one of the best programs out there for that. It's for schools like this where the only advice we can give you is basically, "know your field," which is what talking to your professors should help you accomplish.

[turnings]

If I recall correctly, the placement of Brandeis on the list was somewhat anomalous (I can't remember the reason - I think they only looked at a particular part of its program, on "American Civilization" or something like that?). 

[AfricanusCrowther]

From the supplemental material :

"In each discipline, the US News ranking most recent to the data collection was used (Computer Science 2010, Business 2012, and History 2009). The National Research Council does not evaluate business schools as a whole, and thus no NRC ranking is available for this discipline. Similarly, the computer science community rejected as fundamentally inaccurate the 2010 NRC ranking for computer science (47); thus, we used the most recent NRC ranking of CS prior to 2010, which was published in 1995. Finally, we used the 2010 NRC S-ranking for history; when multiple departments at a single institution appeared, we selected the one closest to a general history department."

Then in a footnote:

"Specifically, Brandeis University's History department was assigned a rank of 7, the rank of its American History PhD program, rather than 61, the rank of its Comparative History program."

 

 

 

 

 

[Calgacus]

Thanks all for your feedback. It's what I expected to hear, but I still just find it a bit strange that for as much as people talk about rank, there's not actually a hard and fast yearly ranking system for history (as there seems to be in some other fields). And of course the other irony is that at least half of those top 8 departments are notorious for having toxic cultures. Oh well.

Hope everyone made it out of this year's cycle without too many new gray hairs!

Edited April 16, 2016 by Calgacus

[tenemental]

Which departments have toxic cultures? I know a few people at those top programs, and most seem pretty happy with their departments.

[Calgacus]

@tenemental Oops, didn't mean to jab at anyone's departments. I was just speaking based on things I've heard from people, but obviously everyone has different experiences, so I shouldn't have made such a sweeping statement. Those are top programs for a reason, of course!

[ashiepoo72]

I'm late to the party, but I personally think the Science Magazine study on which programs place the most people in TT jobs is extremely useful. I don't care so much about US News' rankings, and I can tell you from being at a PhD-granting institution that there's always internal movement that makes those kinds of rankings outdated pretty quickly. Anyway, I want a job at the end, so that's why I rely more on this list of "top 20" programs:

Harvard University; Yale University; UC Berkeley; Princeton University; Stanford University; University of Chicago; Columbia University; Brandeis University; Johns Hopkins University; University of Pennsylvania; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Michigan; UCLA; Northwestern University; Cornell University; Brown University; UC Davis; University of Rochester; New York University; UC San Diego

Obviously there is variation depending upon field. Your adviser/committee matters as well. There are always things we can do to be more competitive--publish, get prestigious fellowships, write so well we get awards, teaching experience. But I think aiming for the top 20 programs that place the most PhDs in TT jobs is also a reasonable threshold. Then again, there are lower-ranked programs that dominate certain fields, so really we need to be up-to-date on our fields so we know which places have the leading lights.

[dr. t]

On 4/17/2016 at 1:13 PM, tenemental said:

Which departments have toxic cultures? I know a few people at those top programs, and most seem pretty happy with their departments.

Some people thrive in cultures that are toxic to others.