Where do all the Ph.D.s go?
February 20, 2009 10:44 PM   Subscribe

Is there a website or other source that lists graduate student placements across universities?

I am looking specifically for faculty placements of graduate students in economics in the United States. Many universities seem to have such lists (for instance, Yale), but I am looking for a single source for all listings. Is there such a thing?
posted by lionelhutz5 to Education (2 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Lingua Franca magazine used to do this (categorized by discipline). It died in 2001 though. So the best you'll get is historical data there.

You could DIY if you had the time and motivation. Every (good) department should have such a list like the Yale one since it's the way they keep score as it were. They should be willing to share assuming you had a good reason to ask. You could also look at old copies of the Chronicle of Higher Education (or wherever) for job ads in the field, and then contact the departments in question to ask who they hired and where they're from.
posted by drmarcj at 7:09 PM on February 21, 2009


You could also look at old copies of the Chronicle of Higher Education (or wherever) for job ads in the field, and then contact the departments in question to ask who they hired and where they're from.

Most departments publish lists of their faculty on their websites, typically detailing each person's qualifications including where they got their degrees and in what year. Browsing these pages would be a marginally faster way of assembling the data than phoning or emailing each department, but it would still be a huge, slow task. There are thousands of colleges and universities in the United States.

Neither this method of data-gathering nor, as I recall, the old Lingua Franca lists would answer the question of how many graduates from a given program failed to find faculty placement at all (or chose other career paths), which—depending on the purpose of lionelhutz5's research—may be a more crucial question. In my experience, this is very difficult information to find out. Departments are happy to hand out a list saying "last year we placed Abby at Harvard, Ben at Western Michigan, and Consuelo at Conn College." But they won't volunteer the fact that Dave, Emily, and Frederic were also searching and wiped out.
posted by Orinda at 8:40 PM on February 21, 2009


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