The National Academy of Sciences came out with their first rankings of Ph.D. programs in over a decade. It was a huge task, I'm sure, to make these assessments. And while I'm not inclined to value rankings, if I did rank schools in a serious way (ignoring my jokey rankyourcollege.com web site), I'd do much the same thing as the NAS. I'd come up with a bunch of metrics by asking experts what they felt was important. Then I'd run Monte Carlo simulations where I randomly changed the weight of each metric to come up with a range of rankings.
No you don't get a single number from such an approach. But you do get some interesting information about the relative merits of each school. The folks who did this work for the NAS should be commended for producing something of value rather than some statistically meaningless ordering of departments.
There are some 5000 Ph.D. departments examined in the NAS report across over 200 universities. That's a tremendous number of Ph.D. programs and as the report notes, there are more Ph.D. programs now than ever before. Ph.D. programs are like that plant in the Little Shop of Horrors. They keep growing in number. And they are a menace. They keep devouring smart young students who are being deluded into believing that there will be jobs for them after their seven years or so of study. For most, those jobs aren't there.
How many of these Ph.D. programs are necessary? I'm going to make a very crude stab at answering this question by examining a field of Ph.D. study that I know well, Earth and Environmental Sciences. Over my years as an academic, I graduated four Ph.D. students. That's not a whole lot, but I consciously kept the number low because I didn't want to contribute to a glut of unemployed Ph.D.'s. Two of my students ended up with tenure track academic jobs at good schools, which in this day and age is a miracle. One was working for Exxon last I checked and Exxon loved her last I checked. The other was working for the federal government in a good paying job last I heard. OK, let's get away from the personal and onto the general.
The NAS ranked 140 Ph.D programs in the earth and environmental sciences. Which of them are really worthwhile? To examine this question, I want to look at what I view as the most important aspect of quality in a graduate program, the research impact of its professorate. In a good department, almost all professors should be publishing. Their papers should be well cited. And since awards for intellectual prowess are handed out easily by professional organizations, professors should have received awards.
I'm going to make the following ad hoc cut off based on the assumption that a good department should have on average professors with significantly but not grossly less impact than I had when I was an academic. My cutoffs for a good department are: 1) faculty should on average publish 2 or more peer reviewed articles a year; 2) their papers should be cited on average at least two times a year; 3) about half the faculty should have a real award from a professional organization attesting to their intellectual contributions.
Out of the 140 departments evaluated in the earth and environmental sciences, less than 20 meet this criterion for a good department:
Caltech ES&T
Caltech Geochemistry
Caltech Geology
Caltech Geophysics
Caltech Planetary Science
Columbia Earth & Environmental Sciences
Georgia Tech Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Harvard Earth & Planetary Sciences
MIT Geology, Geochemistry & Geophysics
Princeton Geosciences
Stanford Geophysics
UC Berkeley Earth & Planetary Sciences
UCLA Geology
UCLA Geophysics
UC Santa Cruz
U Michigan Geology
That's it. The rest in my estimation just don't cut it. Their faculty members are on average not very good. Less than 12 percent of the Ph.D. departments ranked are truly of intellectual value if you believe my assessment.
Now my cutoffs, while they seem reasonable to me, are probably a bit too tough. There are another 16 or so programs that come close to the ones above. But beyond 30 or so programs there's really not much meat there. You could easily shut down 100 Ph.D. programs in the earth and environmental sciences and the world wouldn't even notice.
What should those 100 departments of little distinction do? There is a need for M.S. students in many aspects of the earth and environmental sciences. I graduated about a dozen M.S. students and all of them easily found good jobs. I imagine another 30 to 40 schools that currently have Ph.D. programs could serve the demand for earth and environmental science M.S. students in government and industry.
As for the rest, they really have no reason for being at the M.S. or Ph.D. level. They are producing students with dim employment prospects. I can't tell you how strongly I feel that professors that accept students when they damn well know there are no jobs for them are scoundrels.
Now I'll make an even bolder step (or more absurd step depending on your view). I'll scale my crude analysis to all of the NAS schools and programs examined. I'm going to assume that my numbers apply to every field of study examined.
Given that only 25 percent of all earth and environmental science Ph.D programs are of any intellectual value (according to me at any rate), it's probably a decent guess that only about 1200 of the 5000 or so Ph.D. programs really need to be in existence. The rest are there to satisfy the egos of the professorate and their associated schools. They are, like vanity presses, vanity Ph.D. programs. In a world free of vanity, they would likely for good reason, all be shut down.
4 comments:
Wow. I don't know about your third criterion, awards from professional organizations, because I've never paid any attention to that kind of thing. However, the other two set the bar pretty low. Even I clear them over the eight years since my first publication, despite my generally refusing to publish ticky-tacky papers (I'm a coauthor of one such paper) and my lack of students or postdocs doing work I put my name on ex officio. Any department that can't clear this bar is truly lame.
I've thought of making a bumper sticker for college towns: "Spay or neuter your Ph.D. advisor - there aren't enough homes for them all!"
Every field should likely have its own cutoffs. The number of citations depends partly on the size of the community and the earth and environmental science community is way smaller than many aspects of the biological sciences. Also, the papers tend to come from a year or two of collection of data in the field, so professors aren't as prolific as in some other fields. I imagine for certain aspects of the biological sciences, those cutoffs should be significantly higher.
But the bottom line is that I really do believe that we have about three to four times more Ph.D. programs than we need.
True, in some fields, lower cutoffs would be appropriate. Math should probably be at the low end. Biology, especially lab or theoretical rather than field work, should definitely be at the high end.
Of course, even as I say this, I wish people would publish fewer but more substantial papers.
Thank you for the info. It sounds pretty user friendly. I guess I’ll pick one up for fun. thank u
PhD Environmental Science
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