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    How much ranking do we (and our prospective students) really need?

    By: Eric Winsberg

     

    Here's how students in other disciplines apparently choose a PhD program (h/t Bryce Huebner)

    http://www.andyfugard.info/choose-a-phd-programme

     

    This strikes me as extremely good advice, and in the modern age of the information overload, a perfectly adequate method once a prospective graduate student knows where to start.   That suggests to me that all we really need, by way of "rankings," is a list of departments that have strengths in each of the sub-disciplines in philosophy.  (And perhaps, for some subdisciplines that seem to be badly fractured, like continental philosophy, there could be a separate list for each movement within the subdiscipline.)   Such a list could either be generated by a representative panel for each sub-discipline without too much fuss.  Or it could even be a wiki where departments could list themselves in any category they like.   On the second method, it might become necessary, for some of the more highly represented areas, for a panel to cull the list down to a manageable size, or to split it into two or three tiers.    What prospective graduate students really need, it seems to me, and not much more, is help generating a list of 12-15 schools to research given a particular area of interest.   They really do not need ordinal rankings.

     

    UPDATE:  In response to comments below, I concede that the link I provided does not provide terribly useful advice (in its details!) for American prospective students.   It does seem much more tailored for the UK.    Having said that, I think my main point still stands.    In the cases in which I have advised students on finding a graduate program, the PGR has primarily played the following sort of role:  we use it to collect a list of programs that are strong in the area the student is interested in, and then I give them several "homework assignments" on how to do futher research.   I tell them to look at placement; to read papers by the people who work in the area that they are interested in; to look at citati0n metrics; I give them a list of journals and presses that I think are strong in the area that they are interested in, and I tell them to look at CVs of scholars in their area of interest and to look for those presses and journals etc.   To the extent that ordinal rankings play any role in my advice, it is mostly as a predictor of how difficult it will be to get into the program in question–but I take it that's a feature of the PGR that is mostly self-fulfilling.

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    6 responses to “How much ranking do we (and our prospective students) really need?”

    1. ck Avatar
      ck

      The question you are posing here (“Do we really need a ranking?”) seems to me a mis-formed question. Who is the “we”? Since “we” can’t decide for everyone in the profession, it seems safe to assume that some people in the profession will create some kind of ranking system in light of the vacuum left by the (current iteration of) the PGR. So while it might be interesting to imagine what the discipline would be like without a ranking, but in terms of what is actually going to happen, that seems more fantasy than possibility. (In other words, I think the usual mode of ideal theory is not going to be helpful here.)
      So a better set of questions might be: What should a ranking look like? How can we be involved? How can we develop processes that off-set the selection bias built in to any rankings? How can we build metrics that counter-weigh the biases at work in other metrics? How can we develop qualitative information to off-set the misleading effects of any metrics?
      By the way, the advice you link to is good, but certainly not sufficient. (It’s also clearly not “how students in other disciplines choose a PhD program”; what evidence is there for that?; it’s flat wrong if you mean “more than a handful of students in a handful of disciplines” though surely some students do only what you suggest.) I would especially worry that this advice will be insufficient for lots of students, but especially for someone who doesn’t come from much of a privileged background, went to a very small school or perhaps a really big school where they got lost in the crowd for their first few years, has little exposure to the way power travels in environments like academia (often these are the best graduate students once they find the right program).

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    2. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      I gotta say, though, that the specific texture of that advice works a lot better for UK-type programs than US (research seminars, frequent co-authorship?). The supervisor point is the most important thing (in the US, are there 2-3 people there you are pretty sure you’re going to enjoy working with, b/c that’s really all you need and likely most of what you’ll do). And I agree with your general gloss.
      I’d add that I don’t see a problem with an organized, centralized place to get solid information about how much of what is being done where, whether everyone listed as ‘graduate faculty’ is really actively part of the graduate program, etc. — as well as placement info and all that.

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    3. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      CK: Those are all excellent points. Eric S. has also weighed in on this over his blog*, and I agree with many of the points he makes too. The particular question I was interested in here, however, was simply: Is it true that our students NEED ordinal rankings?
      *http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/09/yes-but-we-do-need-rankings.html

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    4. Michael Kremer Avatar
      Michael Kremer

      I agree with Ed that the info you linked to (and at least in chrome the link isn’t working, btw; I had to paste it into my url bar) is not at all suited to the US philosophy setting. In fact I think it is even less suitable than Ed allows. #1 and #2 clearly assume that the applicant will be going directly to thesis writing and may finish in 3 years. In the typical American program the student is not assumed to know what he or she will work on coming in, and the potential supervisors may all be gone by the time the student comes to the dissertation stage, usually about 4 years after the point when they are considering where to apply. I would not assume that in the intervening years the student will have mainly worked with those people she could think of at the time of application; she may have taken courses with a wide variety of faculty, some of whom she would not have thought of before entering the program. I would explicitly advise my undergrads against doing anything like #1 on the list, actually. #1 and #3 both presume a lot of co-authorship, especially of supervisors and students, and that just isn’t that relevant to philosophy. And #2 just seems wrong to me — I don’t think philosophers write the kind of acknowledgments he is talking about, at least not very often. Those sorts of things get written for retirement conferences. #5 is clearly better in a geographically limited area, unless we are talking about the choice after admittance when there might be subsidized visits. (And there is the three year commitment again!) That leaves #4, which as Ed notes is also not very relevant to the US context. (At Chicago, we have a lot of area-specific workshops, which comes close, I guess. But I would not describe such a things as ESSENTIAL to a good PhD program.)
      I don’t mean that nothing like this could be written up for philosophy, but I would never direct an undergraduate student to follow these steps, and I don’t really think you would either, Eric.

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    5. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      Ok, good. Thanks for all this. I am going to add an update above.

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    6. Michel X. Avatar
      Michel X.

      The ASA has actually maintained a “graduate guide” (for North America) for years now (since at least 2007): http://www.aesthetics-online.org/graduate/guide.pdf
      As you can see, it’s pretty much just a list of programs with regular course offerings in aesthetics, a quick program description, and a list of faculty at those programs with a research interest in aesthetics. I take it this is the kind of thing that’s been under discussion here and elsewhere. I’m sure other subfields have similar roadmaps.
      It’s a pretty useful resource, on the whole, although it does suffer from some problems (it relies on self-reporting, and many of the listed faculty aren’t particularly active in aesthetics, despite being listed). Its main strength, I think, is that it offers a very broad overview of the field, as it is in NA. The PGR’s specialty rankings, by contrast, seem to get around this problem but paint a fairly narrow picture, and are kind of wonky for aesthetics (due mostly, I think, to the tiny evaluator pool).
      I don’t really know which is better (IMO they’re best in conjunction), but thought it was worth pointing out that this kind of thing does exist.

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