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.
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