Interesting article in today’s Inside Higher Ed:  A Ranking That Would Matter, by Scott Jaschik:

As graduate students work their way through courses, dissertations and defenses, many have an ideal goal for the end: a job at a research university. But when would-be graduate students decide which programs to apply to, or which to enroll in, they often base their decisions on a program’s general reputation, or the reputation of the university as a whole. In theory, programs with good reputations would have good job placement records. Maybe not.

The journal PS: Political Science & Politics has just published an analysis [Ranking Doctoral Programs by Placement: A New Method, by Benjamin M. Schmidt (Princeton University) & Matthew M. Chingos (Harvard University)] that suggests that there is not a direct relationship between the general reputation of a department and its success at placing new Ph.D.’s; some programs far exceed their reputation when it comes to placing new Ph.D.’s while others lag. The analysis may provide new evidence for the “halo effect” in which many experts worry that general (and sometimes outdated) institutional reputations cloud the judgment of those asked to fill out surveys on departmental quality. And while the analysis was prepared about political science, its authors believe the same approach could be used in other fields in the humanities and social sciences, with the method more problematic in other areas because fewer Ph.D. students aspire to academic careers.

Here are the Top 20 Political Science Departments ranked by their success in placing their Ph.D. students in teaching jobs at Ph.D.-granting programs, compared with their rank in the National Research Council’s reputational survey:

1. Harvard (1)
2. Stanford (5)
3. Michigan (3)
4. Rochester (11)
5. Chicago (6)
6. California-Berkeley (2)
7. Duke (14)
8. California-Los Angeles (8)
9. Northwestern (22)
10. California-San Diego (9)
11. MIT (12)
12. Yale (3)
13. Princeton (7)
14. Cornell (15)
15. Columbia (16)
16. Washington-St. Louis (24)
17. Michigan State (26)
18. Ohio State (17)
19. Emory (36)
20. North Carolina (18)