Tracking Placement of Graduates
erzuliefreda:
This story sounds fascinating: Historians Face New Pressures to Track Ph.D.'s
I know that most doctoral programs in the humanities have long blurred placement data by selectively ignoring folks who drop out, those who never apply for FT positions, etc., and simply reporting on a few of their most successful graduates. Is the tide turning?
[Free link added. -moderator]
weathered:
Can we request CHE to release (open up) this article to public? I don't want to pay $40 to read one article!
watermarkup:
It's a good article (that I read through an institutional license), and I hope the mods provide a free link.
Best quote, from a Rutgers history professor:
Quote
"History faculty, along with the humanities generally, always resist controls over whether what they are doing is worth anything," says Mr. Bell. "If you look at some of the numbers published on department Web sites, they range from dishonest to incompetent."
And remember, part of the recent NRC rankings of grad programs was based on these self-reported dishonest and/or incompetent numbers. It's too easy to leave out of the equation John, who went back to his own country and hasn't been heard from since, and Anna, who was geographically constrained and found a good staff job at the university, and Larry, who was already working in the software industry when he defended, and Tina, who adjuncted somewhere but who hasn't been heard from for a while. Except for them (and dozens more just like them), we have a perfect placement rate!
At least the historians are talking about this. My MLA discipline lost its only semi-accurate listing of completed dissertations a few years ago, with nothing to replace it yet, and our annual "Faculty in Etruscan Studies" list is horribly inaccurate in reporting new hires. The grad programs have no incentive to make their placement rates public or transparent, and the disciplinary organizations have no interest in it, either.
Octoprof's comment on the article is pretty good. Hopefully she'll repeat it here.
Does anyone know if it's possible to search within the "Survey of Earned Doctorates" data to see, for example, who completed a dissertation in Basketweaving in 2007, or at least how many people did? I've tried to do that before, but never been able to figure out how. Do you have to pay for access to the data?
weathered:
Thanks for the summary!
larryc:
I have requested a free link and it will probably be along shortly.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page