There’s a new study out in the July 2007 issue (Vol.XL, No.3) of PS: Political Science & Politics, published by the American Political Science Association (APSA). It purports to rank universities by the quantity of quality job placements of the Ph.D.s graduating from their political science departments.
86 schools that awarded at least 30 Ph.D.s over the 15 year period from 1990-2004 were ranked; those that didn’t, weren’t. Included in the weighting system are the following criteria: percentage of Ph.D. recipients placed in tenure-track faculty positions; prominence of the schools at which they are placed; corrected for the size of the department, in terms of number of faculty, from which the Ph.D. recipient graduated; corrected for the size of the department, in terms of student graduates, from which the Ph.D. recipient graduated (with a per-capita measurement derived by dividing each row of the matrix by the number of Ph.D.s granted by the institution). Not all of us get tenure-track jobs, or university jobs at all for that matter – shocking and horrifying, I know.
Where does LSU come out on this ranking system? 52 out of the 86…of the universities that met the criterion noted in the first sentence of the above paragraph. There are probably a lot of universities not ranked at all because they don’t meet this criterion. LSU ranked close behind Vanderbilt, UC – Davis, and Penn State. It ranked ahead of, in descending order, Arizona State; U. of Florida; SUNY, Binghamton; Notre Dame; George Washington; SUNY, Buffalo; UC – Santa Barbara; Washington State; Georgetown; Purdue; Claremont Grad.; Hawaii; Fordham; Catholic University; U. of Nebraska; Temple; and Texas Tech, among others. This is not bad news for me…I think.
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the