Debunking Placement Rates

In a guest post over at The Edge of the American West, Michael Elliott warns prospective and current doctoral students to take departments’ placement rates with a grain of salt.

Here’s why:

To start, “placement” turns out to be harder to measure than you might think. Most people, when talking about humanities, mean it to be the percentage of people who seek tenure-track jobs and find them. But what exactly does that mean? What about those people who seek tenure-track employment but limit their search to a handful of cities — do they get included? What about the people who land a job, but only after traveling the country for years on one-year temporary contracts? Is it the number of people who get a job in any given year? Or, as my old DGS claimed, the percentage of people who eventually get them?

At a pragmatic level, until there’s some shared definition of what “placement history” means, prospective doctoral students should be wary of putting too much stock in the information that they receive. The fact is that a substantial number of PhD’s will never conduct a national search for a tenure-track position.

Of course, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t seek out employment data and push departments for more transparency, only that you must be careful about what you ask for, Elliott writes. Prospective doctoral students would be wise “to ask what percentage of graduates end up teaching in the academy, what percentage of those are on the tenure-track, and what other kinds of positions graduates hold,” he writes.

Departments, meanwhile, have a responsibility to determine how long it takes their graduates to score those jobs, on average, and offer financial resources accordingly, or, failing that, rethink their mission entirely, Elliott argues.

How can departments do a better job of reporting their placement rates?