<p>I think these figures tell us something about a school’s culture, specifically how much it’s “purely academic” and how much “pre-professional.” And while my own tastes run more toward the purely academic, I’m not convinced that a ranking of schools by percentage of their graduates who go on to earn Ph.D.s tells us all that much about academic quality. For that, I’d want to know how many of those Ph.D.s are coming from the top dozen or so graduate programs in each candidate’s respective field. Many fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are glutted with unemployed or underemployed Ph.D.s trying to eke out a living at the margins of academia. Many of these newly minted Ph.D.s are coming out of second- and third-tier graduate programs whose graduates realistically stand little chance of securing high quality tenure-track academic jobs in today’s market. A high level of Ph.D. production could just as easily signal that an institution lacks the imagination, contacts, and grip on reality to steer its students toward fields with better employment prospects. On the other hand, if a school’s grads are getting into HYPSM-level Ph.D. programs and from there move on to attractive tenure-track positions, I would take that as a genuine mark of distinction. But we can’t tell that from this data.</p>