The USNWR methodology is not secret - here is how they did their 2018 rankings. As I wrote over a decade ago, it's a survey. That's all. No detailed metrics about publications or research impact or funding or awards or graduate rates or post-graduation employment. It's purely a reputational survey of department chairs/heads and "deans, other administrators and/or senior faculty at schools and programs of Ph.D. Physics programs", to quote the email I received earlier this month. (It would be nice to know who gets the emails besides chairs - greater transparency would be appreciated.)
This year for physics, they appear to have sent the survey to 188 departments (the ones in the US that granted PhDs in the last five years), and historically the response rate is about 22%. This implies that the opinions of a distressingly small number of people are driving these rankings, which are going to have a non-perturbative effect on graduate recruiting (for example) for the next several years. I wish people would keep that in mind when they look at these numbers as if they are holy writ.
(You also have to be careful about rough analytics-based approaches. If you ranked departments based purely on publications-per-faculty-member, for example, you would select for departments that are largely made up of particle physics experimentalists. Also, as the NRC found out the last time they did their decadal rankings, the quality of data entry is incredibly important.)
My advice to students: Don't place too much emphasis on any particular ranking scheme, and actually look closely at department and research group websites when considering programs.
As someone who chose to attend Rutgers over other, more highly ranked places when selecting a graduate school (and as someone who doesn't regret that decision one bit), I almost completely agree with this advice. However, there is a caveat.
ReplyDeleteLike it or not, prestige and name recognition as quantified by the US News rankings counts a lot when you are looking for a job, particularly in academia. I know that at my undergraduate alma mater, for quite a long time, the physics department would rarely even interview a faculty candidate who didn't get their PhD from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, Berkeley, Chicago or Cornell - maybe once in a blue moon they would invite someone from UCSB. And it's not as if talented people from other schools didn't apply. Fortunately, in recent years they have started to recruit more broadly, a change I suspect relates to the rise in proportion of younger faculty. I sincerely hope that this is an indication of a broader trend away from elitist hiring practices, but it's too early for me to tell.
So my slightly modified version of your advice to potential graduate students would be to look holistically at all the features of a program (as you say), but that, ALL OTHER THINGS EQUAL, the more prestigious the program the better. In my case, I chose Rutgers because the fit in terms of my research interests (both at the time I was deciding and after I eventually switched dissertation fields), environment, etc... outweighed the slight decrease in prestige. I don't for a moment think I received a sub-par education at all, and now that I am fortunate enough to be a tenure-track professor, I use the lessons I learned from interacting with the Rutgers physics faculty on a regular basis. But I do believe that getting this faculty position was a lot harder than it would have been had I had gone to a higher ranked program.
Everything is great. The best online websites in Australia. The withdrawal is instant. Thank you for the pleasant pastime. Thanks to. Good project. Things are going well on the project. There is a license and it is safe from hacking. I am very pleasantly surprised by its simplicity this gambling site with a good welcome bonus. Cool casino I really liked a lot of time playing and fails.
ReplyDelete