<p>[The</a> Philosophical Gourmet Report 2009 :: Overall Rankings](<a href=“http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/overall.asp]The”>http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/overall.asp)</p>
<p>In the field these seem to rule. Much more up to date than NRC stuff which is almost a decade old when published.</p>
<p>I called it sobering because many believe that you get another bite of the admissions apple when going to grad school. Maybe not so much.</p>
<p>Nope. The new National Research Council report is 2010. It is the Philosophical Gourmet that is out of date. Their latest rankings are earlier than that, and these are solely faculty ranking each other (which is always a methodology that feeds on reputations that may be been established a decade earlier.) </p>
<p>As it turns out, though, the rankings are not very different.</p>
<p>This is likely very field specific. Some fields are already more concentrated in some schools so they hold a smaller subset in higher regard than others. Looks the case for philosophy.</p>
<p>But also the study looking at history? To use the term 'elitism and “100” seems a bit silly. At that rate, yes, my field is also very selective, looking at maybe just the top 100 schools on our radar. </p>
<p>I absolutely have not found- and most of my colleagues would say the same - differences between students based on where they did their undergrad. There may indeed be average differences between whole student bodies at different tiers of schools, but we find fabulous grad students from all kinds of institutions! If they worked with great people, really stood out in their environment, and got excellent letters and strong test scores, we don’t care too much about what the school was called. </p>
<p>I’m working on a study now, just for fun, to examine where the top cited scholars in my field did their undergrad education. Anecdotally, sitting around a bar at a conference with colleagues, we started listing people we knew who were most published/famous…most attended large state public schools, not top privates.</p>
<p>Keep in mind too that over the course of a generation, rankings do change. Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in college, Yale was THE school for philosophy. Then the department imploded and for a while there it wasn’t in the top 30. So, if you were looking at older faculty who got their Ph.D.s in the 1960s or first half of the '70s, you’d expect to find some who got Ph.D.s at Yale. If you were looking in the second half of the '80s, they’d be rare. This is a pretty accurate summary. <a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/01/philosophies-past-and-phuture-pheature-story/[/url]”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/01/philosophies-past-and-phuture-pheature-story/</a></p>
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I’ve been saying this for several years now, as have other posters like molliebatmit. I’m glad to see data supporting my own experiences. I’m a PhD student straddling two departments – of the new students this year, all but two came from top 30ish colleges, and both of the exceptions have master’s degrees (one from Cambridge, one from Toronto). I’ve seen a similar pattern in years past. </p>
<p>Humanities programs are extraordinarily selective. History programs are, as the article notes, large relative to the typical humanities program, but even the top history programs can have as many as 45 applicants for every spot. Art history students at Harvard have access to top-notch faculty, museums like the Fogg and Sackler, undergrad research $$, etc. Should we be surprised that Harvard has a better success rate than Northwest Mississippi Rural State U? That’s not even going into course offerings like languages – many students are completely locked out from good grad programs in Celtic studies, Assyriology, Central Asian studies, etc. because most of the schools offering Old Irish, Akkadian, Tibetan, etc. are a handful of elite colleges. (Admittedly, this affects, what, two or three hundred students out of 1.5 million each year?)</p>
<p>I do think parts of the article were off base. GPA is highly overrated when it comes to graduate admissions, I think, at least in my field. As long as your GPA is decent (3.0-3.3+ overall, 3.5+ major), things like research experience, writing samples, course/language preparation, etc. seem to be FAR more important. I was particularly amused by the naive students complaining about “being rejected despite great scores on the Graduate Record Examination” – the GRE is probably the least important factor in admissions (again, above a fairly low cut-off point).</p>
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<p>No, that’s not right. The 2010 NRC report is based on data collected in the Fall of 2006 and the Spring of 2007. The 2009 Philosophical Gourmet ranking is based on a survey conducted in December, 2008 and January, 2009. So the PG ranking is based on data that are more recent than NRC by roughly two years. </p>
<p>There is a difference in methodology. The Philosophical Gourmet ranking just reflects the raw opinions of faculty in the field who responded to the survey. The NRC report is largely based on faculty surveys, but those raw data are then tweaked and massaged and modified (or compromised) by additional data on such factors as percent of international students and degree of gender parity on the faculty. It took them forever to fight over and construct the formula; that’s why it came out so long after the data were collected. I’m all for international students and gender equality, mind you, but I’m not sure factors like that have much to do with the strength of a graduate program. </p>
<p>I also beg to differ on the question of lagging faculty reputations. The Philosophical Gourmet survey didn’t target all philosophy faculty–it solicited 450 people currently active in producing serious philosophical work, not the faculty deadwood, and got responses from 300 of them. These people are by and large pretty keenly attuned to who’s currently doing what, who are the “hot” people in the field, who’s just moved from school X to school Y, which school landed the hottest entry-level hires, etc. If anything, the bias of this group would be toward exaggerating the importance of au courant trends in the field.</p>
<p>In any event, in philosophy there’s (for the most part) a fairly close correspondence between the Philosophical Gourmet ranking and the NRC ranking:</p>
<p>PG ranking / school / NRC ranking</p>
<ol>
<li>NYU (10)</li>
<li>Rutgers (3)</li>
<li>Princeton (1)</li>
<li>Pittsburgh (15) (NRC ranking is for History & Philosophy of Science)</li>
<li>Michigan (6)</li>
<li>Harvard (23)</li>
<li>MIT (9)</li>
<li>Yale (47)</li>
<li>Stanford (7)</li>
<li>UC Berkeley (8)</li>
<li>UCLA (28)</li>
<li>UNC Chapel Hill (22)</li>
<li>Columbia (5)</li>
<li>Arizona (19)</li>
<li>CUNY Graduate Center (77)</li>
<li>Notre Dame (18)</li>
<li>Brown (16)</li>
<li>Cornell (35)</li>
<li>USC (61)</li>
<li>Texas (29)</li>
<li>UC San Diego (12)</li>
<li>Chicago (2)</li>
<li>Indiana (42)</li>
<li>UC Irvine (64)</li>
<li>Wisconsin (33)</li>
</ol>
<p>Some of the discrepancies may be the result of retirements, lateral moves by top figures in the field, or the emergence of new stars between the earlier 2006-07 NRC survey period and the later 2008-09 PG survey. For example, I believe there were some major defections from Columbia to NYU around this time. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the strong showing of the CUNY Graduate Center in the Philosophical Gourmet ranking is the result of one giant figure, Saul Kripke, having left Princeton and relocated to CUNY; but most of the other factors in the NRC ranking wouldn’t change with that single seismic move, at least not overnight, and Kripke’s 2003 move may not have caught up to a lot of people by the time of the 2006-07 NRC data collection period.</p>
<p>What is surprising to me is how poorly Harvard and Yale fared in the NRC ranking. I think they’ve both been aggressively rebuilding their philosophy departments, but those are huge differences in rankings, especially for Yale.</p>
<p>The PG rankings seem to dominate in their world–so much that vicious attacks are common.</p>
<p><a href=“http://web.missouri.edu/~ernstz/Home_files/emperor-1.pdf[/url]”>http://web.missouri.edu/~ernstz/Home_files/emperor-1.pdf</a></p>