NRC Makes Further Corrections to Its Doctoral Rankings

Art historians, take note: The National Research Council on Friday released an updated version of its spreadsheet of data about American doctoral programs, following the substantially revised version released on April 21. The April 21 version contained erroneous data about completion rates and time-to-degree in art-history programs.  (The University of Iowa’s program, for example, was said to have a median time-to-degree of 0.05 years, which works out to 18 days and six hours.) The R- and S-rankings for art-history programs have not changed. In Friday’s revisions, the NRC also removed data about the proportion of Harvard University faculty members who are tenured, at the university’s request. The tenure variable was never part of the NRC’s rankings calculations, so programs’ R- and S-rankings are unaffected by that change. The NRC is maintaining a “corrections log” that documents recent changes in its report. The Chronicle has updated its interactive data tool to reflect Friday’s changes, but its summary tables for each academic field have not yet been updated with any of the recent revisions. That will happen this week.