I know I said I would probably be stepping away from the Cocoon for a few days for the holidays, but I came across NYU's year-by-year cohort statistics on facebook today, and thought they were worth drawing attention to. In my view, reporting these statistics should be standard practice for every PhD program. Grad school applicants should know what they are getting into, including their chances of finishing and average time-to-degree, before entering a program.
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Posted in Graduate School
7 responses to “NYU’s year-by-year cohort statistics”
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Similar statistics have recently also been posted for McGill:
https://www.mcgill.ca/philosophy/graduate/student-retention -
Here are the stats for UNC: http://philosophy.unc.edu/graduate/program-statistics/
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Here are the stats for UW-Madison: http://grad.wisc.edu/education/academicprograms/profiles/765.pdf
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Sorry, wrong link. Here are the stats for UW-Madison: http://philosophy.wisc.edu/graduate/program_statistics.php
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Note that even at NYU, given the complete years (2000-2005), only 70 % of the students completed the programme with a PhD. 22 % left, and 8 % left with a MA.
By “complete years”, I mean years in which no one is still in the program. After all, there are still half the students from the 2006 cohort still in the programme. -
I’m very glad that departments (including my own) are now publishing these statistics; I think transparency and students’ knowing “what they’re getting into” are a great idea. I wonder how applicants will interpret these numbers, though. Among other things, a well-run PhD-granting department helps students figure out whether academic philosophy is the profession they want to pursue. Many people begin a PhD program and eventually discover that they aren’t interested in being professional philosophers. This happens not just because of their chances on the market or their philosophical aptitude (whatever that may mean), but also because people find they don’t like the lifestyle, are more interested in accomplishing something else with their talents, etc. A good department helps them figure this out (preferably after not too much time), instead of trying to get everyone who comes in the door to leave with a PhD. But I have no idea how one could separate out a department succeeding at this from a department losing students for other reasons. I hope that at some point we can have a thoughtful discussion on this subject, and the general subject of what we think PhD-granting departments should be trying to achieve. In the meantime, I hope applicants to various departments will realize that completion statistics are sometimes more difficult to interpret than tea leaves.
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Georgia State info:
http://philosophy.gsu.edu/retention-graduation/
plus placement:
http://philosophy.gsu.edu/graduate/placement-record/
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