New Rankings

[bhr]

On 3/23/2017 at 0:56 AM, Warelin said:

I think you bring up several good points here including that it is human tendacy to have some bias. However, according to US News: "The questionnaires asked respondents to rate the academic quality of the programs at other institutions on a five-point scale: outstanding (5), strong (4), good (3), adequate (2) or marginal (1). Individuals who were unfamiliar with a particular school's programs were asked to select "don't know." To me, this sounds like they weren't able to rank their own program.

"Scores for each school were determined by computing a trimmed mean – eliminating the two highest and two lowest responses – of the ratings of all respondents who rated that school for the last two surveys; average scores were then sorted in descending order. " In theory, this sounds good. However, only 14 percent of people polled responded. There were 155 programs surveyed and 2 people were asked from each university. That would put the number of people asked at 310. 14 percent of 310 =43.4 people. Once you consider that most programs had 0 people responding to the survey and others had 2, it's likely that the list is comprised of the opinions of 22-35 universities.

On a side note: You bring up a very good point. I think the ivies do pay attention to each other's programs and their placement rates. If I were a director, I'd want to know what my competitor was doing, who/why I was losing candidates to them and how I could improve my own program to have less people choose to go somewhere else. I'm not sure if any of those universities could tell you much about the programs elsewhere. I'd imagine it's also true of colleges close to each other (BU,BC, NU, Tufts, Brandeis). However, I don't think that the latter group is necessarily paying attention to the first group. I think this survey has a way of meaning something if the participation was higher and some sort of concrete numbers were thrown into the mix. Do you think that the major jumps in some programs were due to its competitors perceiving it to improving its graduate program or from a better perceived placement record or a higher visibility rate?

On a side-side note: When people refer to the ivies in this context, is Brown and Cornell included in that mix? Or are they excluded in favor of Stanford/Berkeley/Chicago to refer to a "top 5" school? It's always confused me because I know a few people use it to exclusively refer to HYP.

Me? I'm referring to pretty much anyone in the top 10/huge endowments/etc.

One stat that I think would be interesting would be how many offered candidates accept. My program is at about 85% over the last four cohorts, which tells me that they are targeting the right students, who then choose to attend.

[Empyreal]

Regretfully reviving an unnecessary thread--essentially for my own edification and enlightenment, partially out of preening pride and homerism. Yes, yes, the USNews English ranking is dubious for many reasons, and I will not defend its "methodology," but its results don't strike me as absurd. If nothing else, the subsequent rambles might lay groundwork for a better ranking--

(Also provoked to fall out of lockstep and complicate the "this ranking is obviously nonsense" consensus.)  

(i) The 2017 USNews ranking--at least for the incandescent brand-name schools--corresponds to (recent) placement better than, say, the NRC rankings. (That despite the greater complexity and alleged credibility of the NRC's methods.)

NRC:

1. Harvard English--#1 in NRC survey (roughly, "quality") ranking, top-5 in regression ("reputation") ranking, #1 overall 

2. Princeton and Stanford--also top-5 in both "quality" and "reputation" and top-3 overall

3. Berkeley--tip-top for "reputation," much lower for "quality" (also true for Columbia & Yale, though those departments have smaller gaps in performance between the two measures)

USNews 2017: Berkeley and Chicago > Stanford, Penn, Columbia > Michigan > Harvard, Yale, and Princeton

Recent placement (counting TT jobs and postdocs): Berkeley, Penn, Columbia, Yale, Chicago >>> Harvard, Princeton, Stanford (and Michigan, which places fourth for NRC "quality").

One would think that Berkeley, having been exposed in the NRC books as a "name without a substance," would have plummeted in rankings and estimation since 2010! (That might have been Harvard instead--Harvard, which has the Golden Name among universities, the blessing of the NRC devas, the sleekest roster of elite literary critics, and until this year top-3 status in USNews, but startlingly feeble English PhD placement since ~2009.)

(ii) Resources outside English. (One wonders how a good ranking of English departments would incorporate these.) Berkeley and Harvard have PhD minors in fields that fill many of their English departments' gaps. Berkeley's "designated emphases" include "Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies," "Critical Theory," and "Early Modern Studies," all of which English PhD candidates can study and all of which might contribute to the English department's consistent sheen in the relevant USNews sub-specialty rankings. Harvard offers "secondary fields" in areas like "African and African-American Studies" and "Medieval Studies." (Yale, Chicago, and Princeton have something similar, though perhaps less extensive and involving less intermingling of disciplines.)

(iii) Halo effect in reputation rankings. Unclear effect--I would expect Harvard and Stanford (the two "most [over]hyped schools in America, if not the world") to consistently outrank. say, Chicago and Berkeley, if the shininess of the school or of its most famous professors predominated in the rankers' evaluations.

No time to write more.

Obvious caveats/assumptions: that I have not and cannot adduce the experience of attending any of these schools to support my claims (and thus must trust what the Internet tells me); that the schools with the most breadth and depth of resources might not be the bellwethers for literary scholarship and training of graduate students; that departments' placements and other successes are endogenous (when in fact they might correlate heavily with ranking and perceived reputation); I did not attempt to anatomize each school's results in the NRC ranking.   

Edited July 28, 2017 by Empyreal