Choosing a Graduate Program
来自Mankiw博客
Now is the time of year when prospective PhD students in economics are deciding which graduate program to attend. The decision is often hard. If you are in that position, here are a few recommendations about things to think about:
1. Start with the rankings. For some recent rankings of economics departments, click here and here and here. All ranking systems are imperfect, but other things equal, higher is probably better.
2. Talk with the graduate students who are now in the programs you are considering. Are they happy?
3. Don't make a decision based on a single faculty member. He or she may leave or turn out to be not quite as wonderful as you now presume. Look for a department that is strong overall.
4. Don't presume you know your specific research interests and focus just on faculty in that narrow area. Many students change their mind over their first few years of grad school.
5. Is the location of the school a fun place to live? Grad school is a long haul, typically 4 to 6 years, which is a significant fraction of your life. Being a PhD student is hard work, but it should not be a miserable existence.
6. Is the university overall a good place? It is always more fun being part of a great institution. Even if the economics department is perfect, if it is an island in a sea of mediocrity, being there will be less satisfying.
7. Are the undergraduates there good students? At some point as a graduate student, you will (and should) do some teaching, perhaps as a teaching assistant in an undergraduate course. If the undergraduates are an academically strong group, they will be more intellectually engaged and more rewarding to teach.
8. Don't be distressed if you did not get into your top choice. What you do in graduate school (or college) is far more important than where you go. Your personal drive matters more than the ranking of the school you attend.
Update: Readers suggest an additional criterion:
9. Look at the record of recent PhD students. What fraction who start the program complete a PhD? What kinds of jobs do they get upon completion? Are they the kinds of jobs you aspire to? The placement record will give you an indication of the caliber of students who enter the program, the value-added of the program itself, and how well the department sells its students on the job market.
下文来自ECONPHD.NET
When you have several offers, you start looking for information in earnest. Fortunately, departments will be much more responsive to enquiries when you’ve been admitted, and it’s easy to get in touch with current students. You’ll be committing something between five and seven years to the program, so the chemistry in such correspondence is a factor not to be discounted. You’ll also want to check how many students fail to complete the degree and why (because they are asked to leave? fail the exams? enter better programs? take industry jobs?). Some schools are notorious for taking in a lot more students than they plan to graduate, in order to have a large pool of budget-friendly TAs on hand. The implication is that many won’t pass the qualifying exams or, most commonly, will not continue to get funded at some point. Completion rates of about half are normalcy in many U.S. departments. Few publically report their numbers, but as a rule of thumb, programs with higher drop-out rates tend to offer fewer and / or less generous fellowships in the first year, for obvious reasons.
Another key aspect to consider is the placement track record of the program. Most departments make this information available on their website or in brochures. A historical perspective of the eventual success of PhD training is offered in a 1992 article in the Journal of Economic Education. It ranks departments by current faculty positions occupied by their PhD graduates. The sample includes virtually every academic economist at a PhD-granting school in the U.S. in 1992, making this a particularly objective effort that looks at labor market outcomes which necessarily reflect careful evaluation, since hiring institutions “put the money where the mouth is.” On the negative side, the list is biased towards long-standing and large programs, and recent developments have little influence.
Long-Term Impact Rankings:
PhD-Equivalents Produced by Faculty of the Same Doctoral Origin
1. Harvard 82.6
2. MIT 75.0
3. Chicago 52.1
4. Berkeley 45.2
5. Stanford 42.3
6. Yale 39.3
7. Princeton 33.4
8. Wisconsin 29.3
9. Minnesota 28.0
10. Columbia 27.8
11. Northwestern 24.4
12. Pennsylvania 22.1
13. Michigan 20.2
14. Rochester 16.5
15. Cornell 13.6
16. JHU 10.8
Brown 10.8
18. UCLA 10.6
19. Duke 10.2
20. Illinois 10.1
21. Virginia 9.2
22. Carnegie Mellon 8.6
23. Purdue 8.1
24. UNC 7.9
25. UCSD 6.7
26. NYU 6.6
27. Michigan State 6.5
28. U Washington 6.4
29. WUSTL 6.3
30. Rutgers 5.7
31. Iowa 5.3
32. Texas 5.0
33. Indiana 4.8
Maryland 4.8
35. Iowa State 4.5
36. Texas A&M 3.7
Ohio State 3.7
38. Cal Tech 3.5
39. Penn State 3.3
Vanderbilt 3.3
41. SUNY Buffalo 3.2
…
Explanation: PhD equivalents produced in 1992 by faculty with the same doctoral origin. For instance: the score for Harvard is, summed across all US programs, the number of PhDs granted by the program times the share of Harvard-educated faculty in the program.
Source: Pieper, Paul J.; Willis, Rachel A. “The Doctoral Origins of Economics Faculty and the Education of New Economics Doctorates,” Journal of Economic Education, Winter 1999.
All said, there is a group of U.S. departments that has for decades supplied the great majority of leading economists. The stakes are high, and the competition is accordingly – but rest satisfied that, in giving it your best effort, you’ll serve the interest of our dismal science … as if led by an invisible hand, as they say!
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