MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 3
I've started to look a bit more at the data from the new placement analysis (commissioned and paid for by the APA no less), and there were plainly some peculiar choices made in how to frame the data. As David Chalmers points out, post-docs are lumped in with fixed term appointments, adjuncting, and VAPs, i.e., as simply "not permanent appointments." That's extraordinary, given that some who take them postpone tenure-track jobs to do so, and many use them to launch into highly competitive tenure-track positions. Even more curious was the decision to create a "placement ranking" based on "permanent placement" without regard to school quality. Three of the schools in this "top ten" for permament placement--University of Virginia, University of Florida, and University of Tennessee--also have 0% of their graduates placed into PhD-granting programs. (I'll have more to say about their permanent placements, below.) By contrast, taking the report's data at face value (I can not represent that this is safe to do, but let's assume it is), here's how a ranking of U.S. programs by placement of graduates into PhD-granting programs (i.e., research universities and departments) would look (for schools with at least 20% placement into PhD programs):
1. University of California, Berkeley (59%)
2. University of Pittsburgh (HPS) (43%)
3. Rutgers University, New Brunswick (36%)
3. Princeton University (36%)
5. Massachussetts Institute of Technology (35%)
6. Carnegie-Mellon University (33%)
7. Harvard University (31%)
7. New York University (31%)
7. University of California, Irvine (Logic & Philosophy of Science) (31%)
10. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (26%)
11. University of Pennsylvania (25%)
12. University of Chicago (24%)
12. Yale University (24%)
14. Columbia University (23%)
15. Stanford University (21%)
15. University of Arizona (21%)
17. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (20%)
17. University of Southern California (20%)
Of course, this list looks a lot more like the PGR, especially when you factor in the specialty rankings which capture the niches of excellence at places like Irvine's LPS and Carnegie-Mellon.
Now what about NYU, which ranks a mere 33rd in permanent placement according to the report, with "only" 50% of graduates in permanent posts. Let's just start with the NYU permanent posts: University of California, Los Angeles; Princeton University; University of Pittsburgh; University of Pittsburgh; National University of Singapore; University of Cape Town; University of San Diego. One might think that's a rather appealing list of permanent placements, but perhaps that's just me.
And what about those who failed to get "permanent" placements yet, what are those poor souls doing? Only one is in a temporary teaching position (at Dartmouth College); the others hold a 2-year Mellon Postdoc at Rutgers; a 3-year postdoc at Uppsala University in Sweden; a 5-year postdoc at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (one of the best postdoc gigs in the world); a 3-year Mellon Postdoc at Stanford; and a postdoc at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris, among others.
It seems to me it's highly misleading, given the preceding, to rank UVA 3rd in placement and NYU 33rd. Only strange choices produce such a result, and one must wonder what could motivate them. As the above makes clear, one could have organized the same data differently and gotten a very different rank ordering based on "placement."
Comments are open if anyone cares to run a similar exercise with other programs in the study.