<p>Sigh.</p>
<p>I think PhD-productivity rankings are a useful tool for finding schools where students are likely to be interested in research and scholarship. For people who like learning for learning’s sake and plan on going to grad school, that is a measure of academic quality. For people who don’t want to spend their lives interacting with hungover undergraduates and writing articles nobody wants to read, the PhD statistic is, if not meaningless, then significantly less relevant.</p>
<p>I do think a high PhD-production rate is likely to correlate with some contributing factor to a good undergraduate education–a student body that is, on the whole, more intellectually curious than the student bodies of some less academically oriented schools, or livelier, more involved class discussions–but who knows. If such a correlation exists, then it’s an indirect one.</p>
<p>What I’m trying to say is that this statistic is meaningful, but not definitive. It is important if you’re serious about getting a PhD in the future, and unimportant if you’re not. Likewise, if you see going to college solely as a way to maximize your earning potential, then finding information about the average salaries of college grads will be important to you. If you don’t care whether your starting salary is $45,000 or $55,000 as long as you get to work as a, say, marine zoologist, then choosing a school based on its alumni’s average starting salary makes no sense.</p>
<p>If you want to become a petroleum engineer, then going to the New Mexico School of Mining would indeed benefit you more than going to Yale. Does that mean the former “has higher academic quality” than the latter? For one specific, narrow definition of ‘academic quality,’ yes. In most other cases, no.</p>
<p>People seem to be ignoring the vast expanse of meaning between “PhD productivity is the only measure of academic quality that matters” and “PhD productivity is absolutely meaningless.” It’s not an either-or situation, people. PhD productivity can be a meaningful statistic without threatening the reputations of the many great schools that don’t seem to produce lots of future PhDs. “Oh no, Harvard isn’t 1st on this one list, does that mean someone is trying to tell me Earlham is a better school than HARVARD??? NO SCHOOL IS BETTER THAN HARVARD flameflameflameflameflame” is not a rational statement. Of course Harvard is a great school for (almost) every type of person and can provide a budding historian with all the support, instruction and encouragement she needs. It just so happens that out of every 100 history majors at Earlham, 10 will go on to become history professors (or unemployed history PhDs), as opposed to 9 from Harvard (which is a laughably small difference anyway). That is all. Maybe Harvard’s history concentrators are more likely to end up in law school instead, or maybe Earlham happens to have this one really inspirational history teacher on its faculty, or maybe Earlham is just so damn small that subtracting one future history professor from its total would have changed its history-professors-per-capita number to 4/100. Big deal.</p>
<p>My point is: Statistics are useful if you know how to interpret them, can do it critically, and are actually interested in what they’re telling you. Which is why ranking schools based on some arbitrary criteria I care nothing about, like alumni giving rates and high-school counselors’ opinions, means nothing to me. Now, if I were highly interested in finding a school that would be guaranteed to impress guidance counselors across the US…</p>
<p>I’m not saying these rankings are useless; I’m saying they’s irrelevant to me, the same way PhD productivity can be irrelevant to someone else.</p>
<p>So people, chill. Nobody is suggesting that Kalamazoo is cooler than Harvard, like, on a cosmic scale. There are no absolutes, no definitive way to compare schools and rank them in order of absolute academic quality. There are only ways to isolate specific functions and byproducts of academic quality, and measuring PhD productivity can be one of them, if you associate academic quality with intellectual curiosity and academic zeal (or whatever qualities you think college professors possess). How important PhD productivity ends up being depends on how interested you are in getting a PhD.</p>
), and Reed indeed tries to find those few by promoting its best features. The result is barely 3,000 apps per year. This issue is just not relevant to most kids, and it’s a measure of quality to few.</p>