Blog CCXVIII (218): What to Do with the "Systematic Inequality" Findings

This essay is from the better-late-never department.  This essay was intended as a follow up to Blog CLXXIX, where I basically endorsed the findings of the article "Systematic Inequality."  I am going to explain a bit more on why in this essay, and offer some advice on who various groups should react to the study.  I should note, though, I have some reservations about the findings of the article, and in this essay, I am going to develop more on those misgivings.

I should first explain that I think that this study was an inventive way to measure something that is very difficult to measure: prestige.  Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore--to use the words of Arbesome--"developed a new ranking methodology based on a simple idea: a school’s prestige (and rank) is determined by where its graduates go. If a school is good, then lots of other schools will want to hire its graduates."  They have hit on something very important here: the major coin of the realm in academia is reputation.  Where a school places its graduates is exceptionally important.  In my Ph.D. program, getting students through their qualifying exams and on the job market was something the faculty stressed and stressed and stressed.

Some of the findings were a bit surprising.  That there is a hierarchy in academia is not news.  That it is so damn steep is another thing altogether.  These findings, though, simply repeat for the profession a general conclusion that was made in a cover story in the January 24, 2015 issue of The Economist on American education.  The basic thrust of the news magazine was that the United States was developing an aristocracy based on education.  The quality of education of is the key to wealth and power in the nation, and if you have wealth, you can begin investing in your children's schooling at a very early age.  They, as a result, get into the best schools, not because they are the children of the wealthy and powerful, but because they are better qualified than their peers because of the educational preparation, which their parents paid for. As I said in Blog II, the rich get richer and the poor don't get so much.  

Some of the rankings of various departments were surprising.  That Brandeis was part of the "Magic Eight" was a bit of a shock.  I was also surprised to see UC, Davis and UC, San Diego finish in the top twenty.  Davis is not exactly considered one of the better locals in the state of California, but a quick visit to the web page of the UC, Davis history department reveals that their faculty have two Pulitzer Prizes, a Bancroft Prize and an AHA president among their numbers.

There are problems with this study, though.  The first big one is that it is focused on Ph.D. placement at other Ph.D. granting institutions.  As a result, some pretty prestigious schools that lack Ph.D. programs will not be found in this ranking: Dartmouth, BYU, West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, and Villanova.  More importantly, placement at these schools does not count.  Some Ph.D. granting institutions are also absent: Baylor, Oregon State, and SMU.  Another problem, is that the study fails to account for the rise and fall of a department.  It is altogether possible that USC might have had a bad decade in the 1980s when it came to placing their grads.  On the other hand, a school like the University of Rochesther might have had a strong program in the 1980s and 1990s that it could not sustain in the 2000s and the 2010s.  Departments rise and fall and the study fails to capture that dynamic.

Another bigger problem is that subfields are a key part of a department's strength.  If you want to study U.S. diplomatic history, then Yale is a great place to study.  If you want to write a dissertation about Scandinavian history, then it really is the wrong place to be.

With all these points in mind, this study is important to some groups more than others.  To be more specific:

• Undergraduate History Majors: ignore the study. It is all about Ph.D. program placement. If you are majoring in history at a good school a bit down the rankings, like TCU or Alabama, do not worry. The quality of teaching and instruction is quite good across the boards. In fact, both of those schools had history professors listed in the compilation The 300 Best Professors In The Country that the Princeton Review put together. 

• Students Shopping About for a Ph.D. Program: you are the ones that need to take heed most of this study. This next statement has some important qualifications, but here goes—you need to get yourself into the highest ranked program on this list as is possible.  The reason is simple--you want to give yourself as much of an edge as possible in a hyper competitive job market. The key qualification is the subfield you want to study. If you can get into Stanford, good for you, but if you want to study maritime history and they have no one that covers that topic, it is the wrong school for you, end of story. When you find a school that has specialists in the topic you want to study, you need to make sure that the individual professors are willing to take on grad students. 

• Grad Students at the “Magic Eight”: Congratulations. You have a real advantage of your peers at some really good schools. It will help you. But be warned—it does not make you bullet proof. Clauset and his team noted that many graduates of these schools end up at lower tier schools. I should also note that many graduates from these schools and their faculty have a sense of entitlement; that the name of their school will be enough to get them a job. I have seen this more than once and from more than one of these schools. You might be the front runner for a job before you even apply, but you still need to work at the interview process. History is littered with front runners that ended up not winning. Do you really want to be the person that loses out to a graduate from one of the universities ranked in the twenties?

• Grad Students at Institutions other than the “Magic Eight”: Do not lose faith, but also be realistic. Subfields make a difference. If you are specializing in Latin American history at the University of Texas—which has one of the best programs in the world—you are going to be competitive for jobs in this field.  For that field UT is just as good as Harvard or Yale.  Another thing to consider is that this study only examined schools granting a Ph.D., some people might be very content to teach at an institution like BYU or the Air Force Academy that has a terminal BA or MA program. On the other hand, this study makes it clear that if you are attending a lower tier Ivy League school, a Pac-12 school outside of the San Francisco Bay area, an institution in the Big 10, Big XII, or the Southeastern Conference, then the grads of the “Magic Eight” have an enormous, enormous advantage over you. The AHA study The Many Careers of History PhDs also makes it clear that half of all history Ph.D.s have to find jobs outside of teaching. If you already in a program, you probably want to finish and earn the degree. You should, though, begin asking your faculty about your options. Don’t be surprised if they are not able to give you immediate guidance—many of them might be grads of the “Magic Eight” and were fortunate enough to go from grad student to professor. But you need to ask what options have previous graduates turned to in the past. Start this conversation in your department as soon as possible, it is only your future that is at stake.

Blog CXCVII (197): The Rating Game

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN—The Obama administration is backing down on its effort to rank colleges and universities. It sounded like a good idea, but the administration quickly discovered that what sounds good at first, is often quite difficult to turn into a real plan.

Ted Mitchell, the undersecretary of education, was the administration official left to explain this policy retreat to the public. He said efforts to combine many measurements of a school into one score became exceptionally complicated. The administration also wanted to avoid “a black box that would be hard for consumers to penetrate and understand and that actually would not be an advance on the state of the art.” He explained further that the supposed simplicity of a single score “would belie a lot of complexity students and families need to understand. And it would mask some very big differences among institutions.”

Mitchell is right. As a historian, what do I care about the status of the business school. There a lot of other factors. Do students interested in Harvard or Yale really care much about graduation rates for transfer students at those institutions—which probably are very few? Mitchell probably knew that this effort was a foolish one. He is a former president of Occidental College. It has a strong tradition in the liberal arts, but it is not a place you would go to an engineering degree.

Why then, did this blog like idea of ranking history departments in the Clauset, Arbesman, Larremore article, “Systematic Inequality”? The short answer is that article had a specific criteria—the employment of history Ph.D.s at other Ph.D. granting institutions. Even then it had some serious flaws. Strong departments in European history, might not be the right place for an Americanist.

There are some big problems in academia, and some real strenghts.  The main driving force behind the Obama initiative was a good one—to make the system more transparent. Maybe they should have focused on that—standardizing reporting—instead of trying to create a lot more work for a bureaucracy, or to help with the real issues in higher education.    

Blog CLXXXI (181): The Raw Numbers

One thing leads to another.

After the posting of the raw number of Ph.D.s produced was made available, the question quickly became, how many Ph.D.s has every school produced, and how do they rank by sheer numbers.  I was attempting to avoid going through all the data that way, but in the end, I surrendered.  Below is a new set of rankings according simply to numbers of Ph.D.s placed in jobs.  With these raw numbers, no effort is made to assess the prestige of various schools.  I will provide some analysis at the end of these rankings. The number in bold is the history department's ranking using the raw numbers. The number in parenthesis is the ranking according Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore.  The number on the right is the number of Ph.D.s that department has placed at other departments that award the history Ph.D.  I will provide some short analysis at the end.  The raw numbers are:

1	(1)	Harvard University	324
2	(2)	Yale University	307
3	(7)	Columbia University	253
4	(3)	University of California, Berkeley	246
5	(6)	University of Chicago	240
6	(4)	Princeton University	184
7	(11)	University of Wisconsin	180
8	(12)	University of Michigan	173
9	(5)	Stanford University	172
10	(13)	University of California, Los Angeles	162
11	(10)	University of Pennsylvania	128
12	(9)	The Johns Hopkins University	108
13	(15)	Cornell University	74
14	(25)	University of Virginia	69
15	(24)	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	66
16	(14)	Northwestern University	62
	(19)	New York University	62
18	(23)	Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey	61
	(29)	University of Texas	61
20	(16)	Brown University	58
21	(31)	Indiana University	55
22	(22)	University of Minnesota	52
23	(21)	Duke University	49
24	(8)	Brandeis University	43
	(33)	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	43
26	(57)	The Ohio State University	41
27	(20)	University of California, San Diego	35
28	(30)	Emory University	30
29	(38)	University of California, Santa Barbara	29
30	(36)	Michigan State University	26
31	(17)	University of California, Davis	25
	(27)	University of Washington	25
33	(48)	University of Notre Dame	21
34	(18)	University of Rochester	20
	(41)	University of Arizona	20
36	(40)	Georgetown University	18
	(42)	University of Maryland	18
	(59)	University of Iowa	18
39	(46)	University of Pittsburgh	17
40	(35)	University of California, Riverside	15
	(37)	University of California, Irvine	15
42	(32)	Stony Brook University-State University of New York	14
43	(44)	University of Florida	13
	(52)	Boston University	13
	(56)	University of New Mexico	13
	(58)	University of Georgia	13
	(68)	University of Kansas	13
	(110)	Jewish Theological Seminary of America	13
49	(78)	University of Connecticut	12
	(63)	Boston College	12
	(64)	University of Illinois at Chicago	12
	(75)	Pennsylvania State University	12
53	(34)	Washington University in St. Louis	11
	(49)	Rice University	11
	(134)	Southern Baptist Theological Seminary	11
56	(26)	University of Southern California	10
	(28)	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	10
	(53)	Vanderbilt University	10
	(54)	George Washington University	10
	(90)	University of Missouri	10
	(99)	Kent State University	10
62	(39)	Binghamton University-State University of New York	9
	(60)	University of Massachusetts	9
	(71)	Tulane University	9
65	(47)	Tufts University	8
	(65)	Temple University	8
	(70)	Case Western Reserve University	8
	(83)	University of Delaware	8
	(94)	City University of New York Graduate Center	8
	(96)	University of Houston	8
71	(61)	Northern Illinois University	7
	(67)	Louisiana State University	7
	(69)	University of Hawaii	7
	(77)	College of William and Mary	7
75	(73)	Florida State University	6
	(78)	University of Cincinnati	6
	(86)	University of Toledo	6
	(91)	University of Utah	6
	(106)	University of Oklahoma	6
	(109)	University of Nebraska	6
	(113)	Texas Christian University	6
82	(45)	Carnegie Mellon University	5
	(50)	University at Buffalo-State University of New York	5
	(84)	University of Oregon	5
	(85)	University of Kentucky	5
	(89)	Arizona State University	5
87	(51)	University of California, Santa Cruz	4
	(62)	University of Miami	4
	(81)	University of Colorado	4
	(87)	American University	4
	(97)	Syracuse University	4
	(107)	Howard University	4
93	(76)	Princeton Theological Seminary	3
	(80)	University of Tennessee	3
	(82)	Ohio University	3
	(100)	Bowling Green State University	3
	(105)	Kansas State University	3
	(116)	Graduate Theological Union	3
	(118)	Purdue University	3
	(119)	University of South Carolina	3
	(122)	Texas A&M University	3
	(125)	West Virginia University	3
103	(43)	Catholic University	2
	(66)	Claremont McKenna College	2
	(72)	Wayne State University	2
	(79)	Florida International University	2
	(88)	Georgia State University	2
	(92)	University of New Hampshire	2
	(93)	University at Albany-State University of New York	2
	(98)	Marquette University	2
	(101)	University of Maine	2
	(102)	University of Mississippi	2
	(103)	Washington State University	2
	(104)	Miami University	2
	(114)	Auburn University	2
	(121)	Loyola University Chicago	2
	(124)	University of Northern Arizona	2
	(127)	University of Alabama	2
	(128)	University of Southern Mississippi	2
	(132)	Illinois State University	2
	(136)	Saint Louis University	2
122	(74)	Drew University	1
	(95)	Clark University	1
	(111)	Saint John's University	1
	(112)	Northeastern University	1
	(115)	Iowa State University	1
	(117)	Lehigh University	1
	(120)	University of North Texas	1
	(123)	University of Arkansas	1
	(126)	Fordham University	1
	(133)	Southern Illinois University Carbondale	1
	(140)	University of Memphis	1
	(143)	Oklahoma State University	1
134	(108)	University of Missouri—Kansas City	0
	(129)	University of Akron	0
	(130)	University of Texas at Dallas	0
	(131)	University of Nevada	0
	(135)	Western Michigan University	0
	(137)	University of Texas at Arlington	0
	(138)	University of Idaho	0
	(139)	Texas Tech University	0
	(141)	Mississippi State University	0
	(142)	George Mason University	0
	(144)	Middle Tennessee State University	0

Configuring the data according to simply the number of Ph.D.s that a department has produced and placed basically confirms the findings of Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore.  Many schools change position, but much of it was only one or two spots.  There are only a few dramatic changes: the Jewish Theological Seminary of America being the biggest example, but Ohio State and Texas made some significant movement upward.

There was also some movement at the very top levels of the rankings.  The members of the "Magic Eight" are a bit different.  The biggest difference is that Braendis dropped out of the top 20 altogether.  All in all, though, these changes strike me as quibbling.

The raw data shows that there is a steep hierarchy at work in the history business.  Even within the top eight it is clear that certain schools have far significant advantage over others.  There is a significant break between the second and third ranked schools of over 50 placements.  There is an even bigger gap between school number six and number seven.  There are two more big drops.  One is between schools 10 and 11 and the next is between number 12 and 13.

Even finishing in the top ten hides some major differences.  The number one school (Harvard in both configurations) has placed 324 of its graduates.  The number 10 school according to the raw numbers is UCLA, which has half the number of Harvard.  This step decline continues into the second ten.  At number 20, Brown has 58 placed alumni, which is only a third of the 162 UCLA Bruin Bears that have found employment.  This step decline continues in the third ten.  Michigan State has less than half of Brown's figures. 

As Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore argued and this examination of the raw numbers confirms, there is a significant gap between the elite history department—whoever they may be—and the rest.