Blog CLXXX (180): The Numbers

In their reactions to the "Systematic Inequality" article, a number of people of have focused on the rankings of the various departments.  Some of them have objected to the practice, and I understand their position, a department that has a program in diplomatic history or Medieval history is going to carry a lot of weight in those fields, but not in Asian history if it has no people in that field, no matter its ranking.  I think it is silly to try and say you are only going to apply to schools in the top ten.  History departments are not exactly law schools or a MBA program.  

On the other hand, the rankings that Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore provide are an effort to measure prestige based on who is getting hired and where.  As I have said before, the ability to get a job with your degree is the acid test of a program.  As a result, I thought I would look not at the rankings, but at the total number of Ph.D.s that a school managed to place. If you look at the raw numbers of people placed at other Ph.D. granting schools, the advantage of the “Magic Eight” becomes very clear.  

It is worth noting that these rankings are not just based on sheer number of graduates employed.  Since Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore were trying to measure prestige, getting a Ph.D. placed at certain schools counts more than others.  (If you have reservations about the math, you should consult the original article.)  For now, I give your the number of placed Ph.D.s in the top 30 departments.  The totals are available for all 144, but I figured these statistics get the basic message across. They numbers are:

1 Harvard University	324
2 Yale University	307
3 University of California, Berkeley	246
4 Princeton University	184
5 Stanford University	172
6 University of Chicago	240
7 Columbia University	253
8 Brandeis University	43
9 The Johns Hopkins University	108
10 University of Pennsylvania	128
11 University of Wisconsin	180
12 University of Michigan	173
13 University of California, Los Angeles	162
14 Northwestern University	62
15 Cornell University	74
16 Brown University	58
17 University of California, Davis	25
18 University of Rochester	20
19 New York University	62
20 University of California, San Diego	35
21 Duke University	49
22 University of Minnesota	52
23 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey	61
24 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	66
25 University of Virginia	69
26 University of Southern California	10
27 University of Washington	25
28 Massachusetts Institute of Technology	10
29 University of Texas	61
30 Emory University	30