Top 10 programs in History

[Imenol]

I know it all depends on your advisor and blah blah but which are, in your opinion, the 10 best programs for a PhD in history (let us use here an alternative of Rawls' veil of justice: imagine you cannot know which field you will be working in, which PhD program will you pick to maximize your chances regardless of the period you end up studying). 

 

I guess it could look like this: 1) Princeton 2) Yale 3) Harvard 4) Berkeley 5) U-Michigan 6) Columbia 7) U-Chicago 8) Stanford 9) NYU 10) UPenn.

Thoughts? Who wants to join the name-dropping fun? 

[dr. t]

Relevant article: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005

TL;DR:

1    1.54    5    1    Northeast    Harvard University
2    2.41    1    12    Northeast    Yale University
3    4.80    1    14    West         UC Berkeley
4    5.16    1    1    Northeast    Princeton University
5    5.45    1    9    West         Stanford University
6    6.19    5    4    Midwest      University of Chicago
7    7.00    7    10    Northeast    Columbia University
8    9.97    36    7    Northeast    Brandeis University (particularly strong in very specific subfields)
9    10.84    9    3    South        Johns Hopkins University

10    11.66    9    3    Northeast    University of Pennsylvania

Edited December 16, 2017 by telkanuru

[psstein]

The study that @telkanuru quotes is oddly set up. It puts Brandeis as the #7 American History program, which indicates that it slants towards Americanists.

The issue is that PhD program rankings are often difficult to figure out and vary by sub-field. NYU, Brandeis, and Berkeley are not top-tier history of science programs, but they're all very good American history programs.

 

Edited December 16, 2017 by psstein

[dr. t]

Well, eighth. But that's not so much the product of an odd set-up as it is the fact that Brandeis is (or was) very good at placing scholars from certain sub-disciplines (Jewish history) into certain important nodes, giving it a high degree of network centrality. I certainly wouldn't go there if you wanted to study premodern China.

[psstein]

4 hours ago, telkanuru said:

Well, eighth. But that's not so much the product of an odd set-up as it is the fact that Brandeis is (or was) very good at placing scholars from certain sub-disciplines (Jewish history) into certain important nodes, giving it a high degree of network centrality. I certainly wouldn't go there if you wanted to study premodern China.

Which is why I think this whole thing of "what are the top 10 programs" is a waste of time. If you want to be competitive for jobs, it's basically some of the Ivies (exclude Dartmouth and Cornell) and comparable public institutions (UCLA, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.). There are weird outliers like Brandeis and Jewish history or Indiana and HoS, but those are few and far between.

[dr. t]

5 hours ago, psstein said:

Which is why I think this whole thing of "what are the top 10 programs" is a waste of time. If you want to be competitive for jobs, it's basically some of the Ivies (exclude Dartmouth and Cornell) and comparable public institutions (UCLA, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.). There are weird outliers like Brandeis and Jewish history or Indiana and HoS, but those are few and far between.

Yeah, that's why the above study is so intriguing. It's mapping network centrality of nodes, with edges determined by where a school places their students, i.e. who gets hired where. The more central the node, the better they are at placing more of their students at other nodes. 

According to this, you can see that the top-2 are fairly close, then the next 3-4, and then it starts rapidly decreasing from there. According to the full study, attending a school outside the top 15% (about 20 schools - for history, network centrality decreases rapidly after #19 - NYU) is not wise outside of very specific subfields if you want a TT job.

# u  cent    institution
1    1.54    Harvard University
2    2.41    Yale University
3    4.8    UC Berkeley
4    5.16    Princeton University
5    5.45    Stanford University
6    6.19    University of Chicago
7    7    Columbia University
[8    9.97    Brandeis University]
9    10.84    Johns Hopkins University
10    11.66    University of Pennsylvania
11    11.85    "University of Wisconsin, Madison"
12    13.94    University of Michigan
13    14.01    UCLA
14    15.65    Northwestern University
15    17.39    Cornell University
16    17.74    Brown University
17    18.46    UC Davis
18    18.69    University of Rochester
19    20.44    New York University

Edited December 17, 2017 by telkanuru

[AfricanusCrowther]

53 minutes ago, telkanuru said:

Yeah, that's why the above study is so intriguing. It's mapping network centrality of nodes, with edges determined by where a school places their students, i.e. who gets hired where. The more central the node, the better they are at placing more of their students at other nodes. 

According to this, you can see that the top-2 are fairly close, then the next 3-4, and then it starts rapidly decreasing from there. According to the full study, attending a school outside the top 15% (about 20 schools - for history, network centrality decreases rapidly after #19 - NYU) is not wise outside of very specific subfields if you want a TT job.

# u  cent    institution
1    1.54    Harvard University
2    2.41    Yale University
3    4.8    UC Berkeley
4    5.16    Princeton University
5    5.45    Stanford University
6    6.19    University of Chicago
7    7    Columbia University
[8    9.97    Brandeis University]
9    10.84    Johns Hopkins University
10    11.66    University of Pennsylvania
11    11.85    "University of Wisconsin, Madison"
12    13.94    University of Michigan
13    14.01    UCLA
14    15.65    Northwestern University
15    17.39    Cornell University
16    17.74    Brown University
17    18.46    UC Davis
18    18.69    University of Rochester
19    20.44    New York University

The study's ranking always confuses me. Is there anyone with a PhD from Rochester who has been hired for a tenure-track job at a top institution in the past 10 years? More than two or three from Brandeis?

Concerning outlier fields, one should mention that the training in some fields at some of the Ivy Leagues is relatively poor, and this affects job prospects too.

Edited December 17, 2017 by AfricanusCrowther

[psstein]

51 minutes ago, AfricanusCrowther said:

The study's ranking always confuses me. Is there anyone with a PhD from Rochester who has been hired for a tenure-track job at a top institution in the past 10 years? More than two or three from Brandeis?

Concerning outlier fields, one should mention that the training in some fields at some of the Ivy Leagues is relatively poor, and this affects job prospects too.

You're dead on here. I'm curious as to the temporal scope of the study, though I may have missed it. Sub-fields play way more of a role than I think this study lets on.

There's also the importance of your advisor. I've referred to Indiana, so I'll stick with their HPS program. Newman and Meli (Newman especially) are outstanding scholars. Anyone who works with either one of them has a damn good shot at a job. Now, compare that with somewhere like Berkeley or Brandeis, who either don't have HoS or have mediocre HoS programs.

 

 

[psstein]

1 hour ago, telkanuru said:

Yeah, that's why the above study is so intriguing. It's mapping network centrality of nodes, with edges determined by where a school places their students, i.e. who gets hired where. The more central the node, the better they are at placing more of their students at other nodes. 

According to this, you can see that the top-2 are fairly close, then the next 3-4, and then it starts rapidly decreasing from there. According to the full study, attending a school outside the top 15% (about 20 schools - for history, network centrality decreases rapidly after #19 - NYU) is not wise outside of very specific subfields if you want a TT job.

I absolutely agree with you. There are limitations to the study, but overall, it's not a bad thing to be aware of.

I was advised that I shouldn't go on to graduate school if I couldn't get into an elite program. I wish that advice were handed out more often. As my undergrad advisor put it, a huge number of PhDs graduate each year with no realistic chance of obtaining a tenure track job.

It's certainly food for thought when someone comes on here and says he's applying to USF, ASU, OSU (Oregon State), UT-Austin, and some other mid range PhD programs. Come to think of it, I know of one scholar hired out of ASU, and he was an American West specialist. 

[VAZ]

6 minutes ago, psstein said:

t's certainly food for thought when someone comes on here and says he's applying to USF, ASU, OSU (Oregon State), UT-Austin, and some other mid range PhD programs

I don't think UT-Austin History should be a "mid-range PhD program" and put along with the other few you quoted.

[psstein]

2 minutes ago, VAZ said:

I don't think UT-Austin History should be a "mid-range PhD program" and put along with the other few you quoted.

I should be clear, I don't think it's a mediocre program. I'm talking about people who think about PhD admissions as "safety" and "reach."

[VAZ]

1 hour ago, AfricanusCrowther said:

Is there anyone with a PhD from Rochester who has been hired for a tenure-track job at a top institution in the past 10 years?

Kira Thurman (2013), Assistant Professor at UMich with a cross-appointment in German Literature. She might be the only one who qualifies.

Earlier than that, David Steigerwald (1987) at Ohio State and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1984) at Harvard; David Eltis (1979) at Emory and Bruce Levine (1980) at UIUC, both emeritus, as well as Russell Jacoby (1974) at UCLA (untenured).

And if MA counts, Stephanie McCurry (1983) at Columbia. 

[AfricanusCrowther]

4 hours ago, VAZ said:

Kira Thurman (2013), Assistant Professor at UMich with a cross-appointment in German Literature. She might be the only one who qualifies.

I'll grant that.

[dr. t]

8 hours ago, AfricanusCrowther said:

The study's ranking always confuses me. Is there anyone with a PhD from Rochester who has been hired for a tenure-track job at a top institution in the past 10 years? More than two or three from Brandeis?

Concerning outlier fields, one should mention that the training in some fields at some of the Ivy Leagues is relatively poor, and this affects job prospects too.

The data are available for download, so according to that, Rochester has been the degree-granting institution for 20 tenured professors: 1 at Harvard, 2 at Columbia, 2 at Johns Hopkins, 1 at UCLA, 2 at NYU, 1 at Rutgers, 1 at UI (Urbana-Champ), 1 at Georgetown, 1 at UMaryland, 1 at Ohio State, 1 at UI (Chicago), 1 at LSU, 1 at Ohio University, 1 at Houston, 2 at UOklahoma, and 1 at Northeastern.

The data are not limited in temporal scope. It simply includes all current professors, and this is indeed a problem. It does, however differentiate between "assistant," "associate" and "full", which is not a strict temporal division, but is helpful. Rochester only has 3 current graduates who are not 'full'; all are associate professors: at Georgetown, UMaryland, and UOklahoma.

If you count the number of active tenured professors by the schools they attended, the graph looks like this: 

Or if you look at only recent appointments (exclude full profs) it looks like:

 

 

You can see that Rochester has had a particularly bad run for its rank, and that Brandeis has its position by placing very few people in excellent positions. Note also that tOSU (#57) is punching well above its weight in terms of sheer numbers - placing a lot of its students at less prestigious institutions. In either case, the overall fall-off after UCLA (#13) is insane, and after UI (U-C) (#33) catastrophic.

Edited December 17, 2017 by telkanuru

[dr. t]

Finally, looking at assistant professors only, we see that, while Harvard and Yale hold their space, UCBerk, Princeton, and Stanford have recently been suffering, but that UChicago, Columbia, and UMich have been doing well. UT Austin (#29) is also punching well above its weight, though in terms of placements, it certainly looks "mid-range".

Schools that have had at least 10 recent hires are, in order: Harvard (70), UChicago (56), Yale (47), Columbia (47), UCBerk (36), UMich (35), Princeton (32), Stanford (29), UPenn (25), UCLA (25), UWisc (24), NYU (22), UNC (17), JHU (16), UT-Austin (16), Cornell (15), Northwestern (14), Rutgers (13), UCSD (12), Emory (11), and Brown (10). Note these numbers are not weighted for cohort size.

The way Harvard dominates these data is just nuts.

Edited December 17, 2017 by telkanuru

[AfricanusCrowther]

Thanks, that's very helpful. I suppose, ideally, one would want to consider program size as well.

Edited December 17, 2017 by AfricanusCrowther

[Imenol]

Do these numbers reflect actual differences in quality? Is Harvard really significantly better than, say, Princeton? I guess it depends on your subfield, but it is hard for me to find many people in the ranks of the Harvard faculty that have exerted a comparable influence in their fields as some Princeton profs. I mean, I haven't checked when this study was made, but is there anyone at Harvard who is, to his subfield, as influential as Peter Brown to Late Antiquity or Anthony Grafton and Natalie Zemon Davis to Early Modern Europe or Linda Colley to Modern Britain? 

[dr. t]

53 minutes ago, Imenol said:

Do these numbers reflect actual differences in quality? Is Harvard really significantly better than, say, Princeton? I guess it depends on your subfield, but it is hard for me to find many people in the ranks of the Harvard faculty that have exerted a comparable influence in their fields as some Princeton profs. I mean, I haven't checked when this study was made, but is there anyone at Harvard who is, to his subfield, as influential as Peter Brown to Late Antiquity or Anthony Grafton and Natalie Zemon Davis to Early Modern Europe or Linda Colley to Modern Britain? 

According to the study's authors, they reflect prestige, which is why network centrality is the metric of choice. If you're like, say, UMich, and have a lot of students placing at a variety of different schools, it ranks you higher. But similarly, if you're able to place a few students at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, like Brandeis, you also get ranked higher. 

Anecdotally, as someone who's gone to grad school at two Ivies at different levels of the prestige scale (Harvard and Brown), there is little difference in terms of quality of instruction. This is substantially different than my undergrad experience, where the instructors at Harvard - even its night school - were markedly better than the ones I had at either UMass or BU. 

However, Harvard's prestige, coupled with its financial clout, makes it notably different when it comes to networking. Just as one example, here at Brown we have a visiting scholar come and give a small talk on their latest project once a month or so - usually either a mid-level prof or someone higher ranked who has a personal relationship with a faculty member. At Harvard, this happened every week, and it was always very senior figures who came. If you wanted, you could join them for dinner after, gratis. It would be foolish to think this does not have an impact on Harvard's placement rate.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the 'rank' of the school you attend has little relationship to your raw intelligence, as far as that's a concept that even makes sense. It will, however, have a massive impact on the work you produce, through the support (financial and intellectual) you have when producing it and the networks you develop which foster its impact.

Edited December 17, 2017 by telkanuru

[psstein]

2 hours ago, Imenol said:

Do these numbers reflect actual differences in quality? Is Harvard really significantly better than, say, Princeton? I guess it depends on your subfield, but it is hard for me to find many people in the ranks of the Harvard faculty that have exerted a comparable influence in their fields as some Princeton profs. I mean, I haven't checked when this study was made, but is there anyone at Harvard who is, to his subfield, as influential as Peter Brown to Late Antiquity or Anthony Grafton and Natalie Zemon Davis to Early Modern Europe or Linda Colley to Modern Britain? 

Ann Blair has done some very good work. Janet Browne in Harvard HoS is one of the leading American Darwin specialists. Hannah Marcus was just hired in HoS, but she has a bright future.

Michael McCormick has been very influential in rewriting Byzantine historiography.

[psstein]

2 hours ago, telkanuru said:

However, Harvard's prestige, coupled with its financial clout, makes it notably different when it comes to networking. Just as one example, here at Brown we have a visiting scholar come and give a small talk on their latest project once a month or so - usually either a mid-level prof or someone higher ranked who has a personal relationship with a faculty member. At Harvard, this happened every week, and it was always very senior figures who came. If you wanted, you could join them for dinner after, gratis. It would be foolish to think this does not have an impact on Harvard's placement rate.

I don't know if Wisconsin has colloquia on the History side of the History Department. HSMT was merged, but we've had visiting scholars coming every month or so for decades. Networking is much easier when your university is well-funded.

[Imenol]

6 minutes ago, psstein said:

Ann Blair has done some very good work. Janet Browne in Harvard HoS is one of the leading American Darwin specialists. Hannah Marcus was just hired in HoS, but she has a bright future.

Michael McCormick has been very influential in rewriting Byzantine historiography.

Yes, but consider the fields in which both scholars work. Anthony Grafton is vastly more influential than Ann Blair in early modern europe, whereas Peter Brown's influence in Late Antiquity/Early Medieval stuff is simply unparalleled, even if I do think that McCormick is an excellent scholar and his Origins of the European Economy is one of the great economic history books, of any period. Simply put, it is hard for me to see evidence of a substantial difference between Princeton and Harvard, while that index seems to imply that there is one.

[AfricanusCrowther]

11 minutes ago, Imenol said:

Yes, but consider the fields in which both scholars work. Anthony Grafton is vastly more influential than Ann Blair in early modern europe, whereas Peter Brown's influence in Late Antiquity/Early Medieval stuff is simply unparalleled, even if I do think that McCormick is an excellent scholar and his Origins of the European Economy is one of the great economic history books, of any period. Simply put, it is hard for me to see evidence of a substantial difference between Princeton and Harvard, while that index seems to imply that there is one.

Harvard has extremely strong placement in East Asian, Middle Eastern, and modern European history, as well as the history of science/medicine. They're also very strong in 19th century US. Of course, it's a great place to go for most fields

Edited December 17, 2017 by AfricanusCrowther

[dr. t]

3 hours ago, Imenol said:

Yes, but consider the fields in which both scholars work. Anthony Grafton is vastly more influential than Ann Blair in early modern europe, whereas Peter Brown's influence in Late Antiquity/Early Medieval stuff is simply unparalleled, even if I do think that McCormick is an excellent scholar and his Origins of the European Economy is one of the great economic history books, of any period. Simply put, it is hard for me to see evidence of a substantial difference between Princeton and Harvard, while that index seems to imply that there is one.

Peter Brown hasn't been taking students at Princeton for years. And that's kind of the point - you're focusing on who's doing good scholarship while this study is looking at whose students are getting hired. The former has little to do with the latter, and the simple fact that twice as many Harvard history PhDs have TT jobs when compared to Princeton tells you something about those programs.

Edited December 17, 2017 by telkanuru

[psstein]

2 hours ago, telkanuru said:

Peter Brown hasn't been taking students at Princeton for years. And that's kind of the point - you're focusing on who's doing good scholarship while this study is looking at whose students are getting hired. The former has little to do with the latter, and the simple fact that twice as many Harvard history PhDs have TT jobs when compared to Princeton tells you something about those programs.

The institutional factors are incredibly important. From what my colleagues have told me, Princeton's department has, recently at least, started to shove their students out the door after five years. That's a problem for any non-Americanist.

 

5 hours ago, Imenol said:

Yes, but consider the fields in which both scholars work. Anthony Grafton is vastly more influential than Ann Blair in early modern europe, whereas Peter Brown's influence in Late Antiquity/Early Medieval stuff is simply unparalleled, even if I do think that McCormick is an excellent scholar and his Origins of the European Economy is one of the great economic history books, of any period. Simply put, it is hard for me to see evidence of a substantial difference between Princeton and Harvard, while that index seems to imply that there is one.

It's not solely based on who does good work , it's also based on things like niche fields. Princeton hasn't had a medieval historian of science in God knows how long. Harvard was a hub for medieval history of science for generations (Murdoch, Gingerich, Park, Sarton, Cohen all taught there). There's also the reality that hiring committees may not know the shape of your field as well as you do. If I'm hiring for a history of science position and I don't know anything about the field, I'm more likely to interview someone from Harvard than I am someone from Indiana, despite the fact that a historian of alchemy from Indiana may be very well qualified.

Edited December 18, 2017 by psstein

[ashiepoo72]

On 12/17/2017 at 5:16 PM, psstein said:

It's not solely based on who does good work , it's also based on things like niche fields. Princeton hasn't had a medieval historian of science in God knows how long. Harvard was a hub for medieval history of science for generations (Murdoch, Gingerich, Park, Sarton, Cohen all taught there). There's also the reality that hiring committees may not know the shape of your field as well as you do. If I'm hiring for a history of science position and I don't know anything about the field, I'm more likely to interview someone from Harvard than I am someone from Indiana, despite the fact that a historian of alchemy from Indiana may be very well qualified.

Just a comment on hiring committees not knowing the contours of all subfields--true, but in my (subjective) experience, they tend to do the research on subfields for which they are hiring. They also tend to know the biggest names in most subfields, or at least one or two people on a hiring committee usually do (so they'd recognize their letters of recommendation). My MA program was hiring an Africanist and looked especially close at candidates from MSU, which is totally not an Ivy but is well known for African history. None of the scholars at my program did African history, but they were capable of looking at the NRC data (which I was told they like much more than USA Today rankings, even though it's woefully out of date). Even more often, they talk to their colleagues/friends, who are historians of all kinds of subfields at all kinds of institutions. Maybe this depends on the hiring university. TBH, it could be that a place like my MA needed to be cautious about who was hired because if the person didn't stick around, that tenure stream wouldn't be left open for a new hire--therefore, they put the work in to know the subfield in question. But I lean toward assuming research-obsessed professors take that trait into other aspects of their job.

When I was selecting a PhD program, one of my rec writers, whose work is on the Civil War, race, gender and medicine, knew exactly who my potential advisers were and helped me choose between them (I do Cold War foreign policy). Like I said, this is all my subjective experience, but I'm often surprised by how well some (most?) of the professors in a given department have a sense of what's what outside of their subfield.