Showing posts with label grad school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grad school. Show all posts
Saturday, May 12, 2007
video killed the ratio star
Check out Chris's post about the Harvard Economics Department's graduate recruitment video and associated parodies. I was maybe thirty seconds into the real video before I realized that it was not, itself, some kind of joke ("Whoa, they really found someone who looks like Ed Glaeser... Wait, that really is Ed Glaeser, you wouldn't think he would have such a spectacular ironic sense of humor... Wait, this isn't supposed to be funny.")
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
the big picture
I was sent an e-mail survey today that included the following question:
Update: Somebody e-mailed to ask, "Why would you end a post with 'Thoughts?' and then turn off comments?" I'm not sure why comments were disabled but now they are enabled. So, um, somebody comment.
What are the most important things for sociology graduate students to do during their tenure in graduate school?My answer:
1. Figure out what kind of career they want.Thoughts?
2. Develop the substantive expertise and other skills that will allow them to be effective and prosperous in that career.
3. Develop the credentials that will allow them to get a post-Ph.D. job consistent with career they want.
(The idealist in me insists on putting #2 over #3 even though the pragmatist notes that one only gets to implement #2 in an actual career if #3.)
Update: Somebody e-mailed to ask, "Why would you end a post with 'Thoughts?' and then turn off comments?" I'm not sure why comments were disabled but now they are enabled. So, um, somebody comment.
Monday, February 26, 2007
why are graduate program rankings always based on surveying the faculty?
(I actually wrote this back in May and then for some reason never posted it. A conversation I had last week when I was at Northwestern reminded me of it, and I'm putting it up now, especially as I'm presently too preoccupied with certain other matters to exhibit any original blog-oomph.)
So, consider the question: What would be the single not-that-costly thing that could be done that would do the most to improve the lot of the average sociology graduate student nationwide?
My answer: Conduct a Survey of Sociology Graduate Student Satisfaction every year. This would be a very short online survey with a link sent to all sociology graduate students, and then the results would be posted publicly.* As things are now, sociology faculty have very little knowledge about the extent to which their students are relatively happy or unhappy compared to other departments, which leads to the easy conclusion that whatever malcontented students are in a department are just the regular allotment that is inevitable for any graduate program. To be sure, I've heard people offer first- or second or n-hand characterizations of the relative happiness of graduate students in various programs, but these always seem to me like they very strongly reflect the dispositions of those making the characterizations.
Departments that ranked highly in this survey would be able to tout this fact when competing for graduate students with departments which did less well. And those departments that did not rank highly might reflect upon what they could do to change this.
(That said, one thing a department could do would be to select students who seemed less likely to provide gloomy satisfaction ratings later. Indeed, an interesting question would be whether some areas of sociology attract disproportionately more dispositionally dissatisfied people than others. Then again, if one asked a question about area on the survey, one could adjust for this.)
My second answer would involve there being a resource online that contained information about how well departments placed their students and rates of early/late attrition, median-years-to-completion, or whatever else.** Again, my guess is that if systematic information on these things was out in the open--and especially, on the web--departments would do more to attend to them.
* I like the acronym SSGSS because it is a palindrome. Online posting of results would also need to include response rates, which themselves probably would say something of the engagement of students with a department.
** Graduate students will often talk about attrition rates like they are, themselves, indicative of the quality of student life in a program. Making too much of attrition rates per se just provides an incentive for late attritions versus early attritions, which is exactly the opposite incentive for what is in the prospective students' interest. As far as I can tell, early graduate student attrition isn't an especially negative outcome at all from the student's perspective, and departmental structures that hasten students' concluding they would be happier doing something else are, I think, desirable if the student would in fact be happier doing something else.
So, consider the question: What would be the single not-that-costly thing that could be done that would do the most to improve the lot of the average sociology graduate student nationwide?
My answer: Conduct a Survey of Sociology Graduate Student Satisfaction every year. This would be a very short online survey with a link sent to all sociology graduate students, and then the results would be posted publicly.* As things are now, sociology faculty have very little knowledge about the extent to which their students are relatively happy or unhappy compared to other departments, which leads to the easy conclusion that whatever malcontented students are in a department are just the regular allotment that is inevitable for any graduate program. To be sure, I've heard people offer first- or second or n-hand characterizations of the relative happiness of graduate students in various programs, but these always seem to me like they very strongly reflect the dispositions of those making the characterizations.
Departments that ranked highly in this survey would be able to tout this fact when competing for graduate students with departments which did less well. And those departments that did not rank highly might reflect upon what they could do to change this.
(That said, one thing a department could do would be to select students who seemed less likely to provide gloomy satisfaction ratings later. Indeed, an interesting question would be whether some areas of sociology attract disproportionately more dispositionally dissatisfied people than others. Then again, if one asked a question about area on the survey, one could adjust for this.)
My second answer would involve there being a resource online that contained information about how well departments placed their students and rates of early/late attrition, median-years-to-completion, or whatever else.** Again, my guess is that if systematic information on these things was out in the open--and especially, on the web--departments would do more to attend to them.
* I like the acronym SSGSS because it is a palindrome. Online posting of results would also need to include response rates, which themselves probably would say something of the engagement of students with a department.
** Graduate students will often talk about attrition rates like they are, themselves, indicative of the quality of student life in a program. Making too much of attrition rates per se just provides an incentive for late attritions versus early attritions, which is exactly the opposite incentive for what is in the prospective students' interest. As far as I can tell, early graduate student attrition isn't an especially negative outcome at all from the student's perspective, and departmental structures that hasten students' concluding they would be happier doing something else are, I think, desirable if the student would in fact be happier doing something else.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
with or without you
Okay, so keep in mind that the NRC ranking survey I posted about a few days ago not only doesn't allow you to include faculty size as a criterion for department quality, but also presumably the measures of faculty quality used will be based on averages. Averages are only fair, right? Otherwise, small departments would be at a disadvantage, and that's unfair because, well, it's, well, um, unfair.
The trouble with averages in a measure of department quality is simple: to use averages is to imply that half the members of a department do not merely contribute less to the quality of a department than their more productive/cited/grants-getting colleagues, but that they actively harm it. Take any department, fire the lesser half according to whatever the quality measure is, and you've instantly created a better department. You can even repeat the step and create an still better department, until you have a one-faculty member graduate program.*
I'm not sure how many faculty members are actively bad for the programs that employ them, in the sense that the program would better if they immediately disappeared and took their hiring line with them.** I feel confident, though, in my sense that this number is quite a bit less than half at most places. If you are in academia, think about your own department, and don't just single out the worst person, but think of somebody you think would probably be a little below the dividing line. Do you really think your department would be better if that person just vanished? They really hurt more than they help? Maybe so: but, if that's really true for half your department, I hope you aren't surprised by my response that your department must suck.
Average measures also imply that if you take a department and add to it by hiring everyone's structural equivalent, you haven't improved the department at all. Think graduate students are better off having four people in their specialty area rather than two? Average-based measures of quality imply no. In sociology, faculty size has always seemed to me especially an issue to attend to insofar as the discipline is sparsely populated even at the largest departments and many graduate students change their mind about the area they want to work in after they begin (or come in not knowing what they want to study). The smaller the department, the more likely a graduate student is to suffer from a change of interest, a falling out with their advisor, or their advisor leaving.
Not that I think faculty size should be the be-all-end-all, especially as one would expect it to be correlated with what Fabio calls programs of "benign neglect". I would rather program ratings try to measure benign neglect more directly, however. Anyway, if faculty size ends up having no weight or very little weight in the way NRC ultimately does the "objective" part of its rankings, that's just not credible.
* Half per se assumes either we are talking average in terms of the median or a measure that is symmetrically distributed. You know what I mean. My guess is there are ~40 sociologists who would be have the highest "faculty quality" of any department in the country if only they could get themselves into a department with no colleagues.
** Not that they left and someone else was rehired; there is a difference between someone being not the best use of a faculty line and being actively bad, and averages treat half the department as actively bad.
Addendum: I actually wrote this post a couple days ago, and in the interim Dan has written his own reaction to my earlier post. Incidentally, I suppose one could think it convenient that I have this strong opinion about faculty size while being a member of one of the largest sociology departments in the US. Maybe so. But it just seems intellectually galling to me that you'd have a rating system based on the idea that if there were two great small departments out there and you could somehow merge them, the result would be no better. It's one thing to say a whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, and another to say the sum is no better than the average of its parts.
The trouble with averages in a measure of department quality is simple: to use averages is to imply that half the members of a department do not merely contribute less to the quality of a department than their more productive/cited/grants-getting colleagues, but that they actively harm it. Take any department, fire the lesser half according to whatever the quality measure is, and you've instantly created a better department. You can even repeat the step and create an still better department, until you have a one-faculty member graduate program.*
I'm not sure how many faculty members are actively bad for the programs that employ them, in the sense that the program would better if they immediately disappeared and took their hiring line with them.** I feel confident, though, in my sense that this number is quite a bit less than half at most places. If you are in academia, think about your own department, and don't just single out the worst person, but think of somebody you think would probably be a little below the dividing line. Do you really think your department would be better if that person just vanished? They really hurt more than they help? Maybe so: but, if that's really true for half your department, I hope you aren't surprised by my response that your department must suck.
Average measures also imply that if you take a department and add to it by hiring everyone's structural equivalent, you haven't improved the department at all. Think graduate students are better off having four people in their specialty area rather than two? Average-based measures of quality imply no. In sociology, faculty size has always seemed to me especially an issue to attend to insofar as the discipline is sparsely populated even at the largest departments and many graduate students change their mind about the area they want to work in after they begin (or come in not knowing what they want to study). The smaller the department, the more likely a graduate student is to suffer from a change of interest, a falling out with their advisor, or their advisor leaving.
Not that I think faculty size should be the be-all-end-all, especially as one would expect it to be correlated with what Fabio calls programs of "benign neglect". I would rather program ratings try to measure benign neglect more directly, however. Anyway, if faculty size ends up having no weight or very little weight in the way NRC ultimately does the "objective" part of its rankings, that's just not credible.
* Half per se assumes either we are talking average in terms of the median or a measure that is symmetrically distributed. You know what I mean. My guess is there are ~40 sociologists who would be have the highest "faculty quality" of any department in the country if only they could get themselves into a department with no colleagues.
** Not that they left and someone else was rehired; there is a difference between someone being not the best use of a faculty line and being actively bad, and averages treat half the department as actively bad.
Addendum: I actually wrote this post a couple days ago, and in the interim Dan has written his own reaction to my earlier post. Incidentally, I suppose one could think it convenient that I have this strong opinion about faculty size while being a member of one of the largest sociology departments in the US. Maybe so. But it just seems intellectually galling to me that you'd have a rating system based on the idea that if there were two great small departments out there and you could somehow merge them, the result would be no better. It's one thing to say a whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, and another to say the sum is no better than the average of its parts.
Monday, January 29, 2007
what makes graduate programs great?
I just did the general National Research Council survey of faculty for the sociology department rankings they are putting together. This survey asks questions about your own record (you also attach your vita), and then it also asks you questions about what you think are the criteria by which a graduate program should be judged. I thought these latter questions were interesting, and so saved them to repost here. There are separate questions about criteria for assessing (1) the quality of faculty, (2) the quality of students, and (3) general characteristics of programs, and then you are asked separately to provide the % by which you would weight each of those three categories toward a global rating.
For each category, you are asked to selected up to four categories you think are "important" and then the two you think are most important. I will italicize the two I selected as most important, but restrain myself from more discussion. Assessing graduate program quality is a matter about which I have many wheelbarrows full of thoughts, but I have way too much to do so I don't even want to get into that here.
BTW, I was surprised by the absence of faculty size as a criterion. I feel like small departments must have won some political/rhetorical battle for that to be something not even available as an alternative someone doing the ratings could choose.
BTW-BTW, if NRC conducted a survey of graduate student satisfaction/happiness, I would have selected this as a criterion that should be used. I have thought that ASA should organize an online survey on that as a service to the future of the profession. My experience is that when sociology faculty see unhappy graduate students in their midst, their response is first to remove their sociology thinking caps and then to say "there are unhappy graduate students everywhere," a statement that is no doubt true but doesn't really note the relevant and important possibility that the proportion of unhappy students may vary from place to place and perhaps some of this variation has to do with details of their program.
For each category, you are asked to selected up to four categories you think are "important" and then the two you think are most important. I will italicize the two I selected as most important, but restrain myself from more discussion. Assessing graduate program quality is a matter about which I have many wheelbarrows full of thoughts, but I have way too much to do so I don't even want to get into that here.
Regarding the quality of the program's faculty:Anyway, I'd be interested in how you would have answered these questions (or, if you're also faculty and have done the survey, how you did answer them). One of the things I kept thinking about as I did the survey is how I would have answered the questions if I'd done this survey as a graduate student vs. how I answered them now.
a. Number of publications (books, articles, etc.) per faculty member
b. Number of citations per faculty member
c. Receipt of extramural grants for research
d. Involvement in interdisciplinary work
e. Racial/ethnic diversity of the program faculty
f. Gender diversity of the program faculty
g. Reception by peers of a faculty member's work as measured by honors and awards
Regarding the quality of the program's students:
a. Median GRE scores of entering students
b. Percentage of students receiving full financial support
c. Percentage of students with portable fellowships
d. Number of student publications and presentations
e. Racial/ethnic diversity of the student population
f. Gender diversity of the student population
g. A high percentage of international students
Regarding the program:
a. Average number of Ph.D.s granted over the last five years
b. Percentage of entering students who complete a doctoral degree
c. Time to degree
d. Placement of students after graduation
e. Percentage of students with individual work space
f. Percentage of health insurance premiums covered by the institution or program
g. Number of student support activities provided at either the institutional or program level
BTW, I was surprised by the absence of faculty size as a criterion. I feel like small departments must have won some political/rhetorical battle for that to be something not even available as an alternative someone doing the ratings could choose.
BTW-BTW, if NRC conducted a survey of graduate student satisfaction/happiness, I would have selected this as a criterion that should be used. I have thought that ASA should organize an online survey on that as a service to the future of the profession. My experience is that when sociology faculty see unhappy graduate students in their midst, their response is first to remove their sociology thinking caps and then to say "there are unhappy graduate students everywhere," a statement that is no doubt true but doesn't really note the relevant and important possibility that the proportion of unhappy students may vary from place to place and perhaps some of this variation has to do with details of their program.
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