This site is designed to make it easy for those seeking Ph.D. programs in political science to compare various departments in terms of both cohort and placement statistics. The goal is to provide comparable and transparent information so that people can make better decisions.
Please click on the departments listed to get their information. They are responsible for the information provided, and for updating that information, but it is provided in a relatively standardized manner.
If you are interested in a department not on this list please contact the relevant DGS for the comparable information, and please ask them to link that information to this page.
Site here. Thus far Duke, Emory, NYU, Stanford, and WashU have posted.
Co-creator Neal Beck writes in a POLMETH message:
If the inititative looks interesting to you and you would like your department to join in (and they should; we ask for outcomes data everywhere else in the world!)
a) if you have power, contact me and I can tell you how to join
b) if your power is indirect, use it to push the people who can make decisions.People may ask “what is in it for my department?” First thing is that information transparancy is good. Second, prospective graduate students should be asking for this data anyway, so you might as just send them to the centralized site. Third, do you really want prospective students asking why your department is on this list. Fourth, compiling the data is a very useful exercise for your own department. Fifth is that it is the right thing to do, though that was first also.
One Response
In economics, openness from below is already prevalent. There is a forum at/called Testmagic where applicants post profiles and results and prospective and current students give advice about schools. Profiles are aggregated by school by a user, and used to estimate a ranking of selectivity of schools and summary info about each school can be viewed in scatter plots (here is the school with the most applicants posted, Yale). Also, a wiki at bluwiki keeps track of newly minted econ PhD job outcomes, which are also aggregated by school for rough rankings of flyouts, here.
In my opinion, as bad/good of a job as US News and World Reports does ranking graduate schools collecting this information in a closed process, I doubt that an top-down open process will soon be wildly successful, but I certainly hope it will!