A reader, currently a law student, writes:
The PGR is a very useful resource for prospective philosophy graduate students. But to the best of my knowledge no other graduate discipline has a similarly detailed, transparently and fairly assessed, regularly updated, and well regarded guide to the quality of its graduate programs. Or if there are any such guides, they are not easily accessible to prospective graduate students (whose first recourse is of course Google, where they will find only the USN&WR rankings and other such lists whose value and reliability students are in no position to discern).
It would be a great service to those of us who are thinking about non-philosophy PhD programs if there were a place to accumulate a list of any such guides. Would you please provide a comment space on Leiter Reports for your readers to post about similarly reputable and reliable rankings for other graduate fields with which they are familiar?
This question has come up before, and I am still not aware of such resources in other fields, and presumably for the reasons noted back in 2009: no good deed goes unpunished, especially when it involves providing prospective students actual information about program quality! The National Research Council used to provide such a resource every decade or so, but failed in its task the last time around. The "Qurky Silliness" rankings aren't of much use for philosophy, so presumably aren't of much use in other fields. So, readers, any ideas about resources? Any thoughts on the rather sloppy reputational surveys U.S. News conducts about various fields? Are they useful? Dated? Bizarre?
