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does anyone have the nrc book yet?

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1. inside higher ed has a ranking of the top3 by each methodology … http://insidehighered.com/content/download/367660/4465647/version/1/file/Copy+of+NRC+rankings.xls

   sd

   September 28, 2010 at 5:46 pm
2. The bloggers over at The Monkey Cage seem to have a copy of the political science rankings at least. You might try them.

   Trey

   September 28, 2010 at 5:59 pm
3. Apparently PhDs.org got he data in advance. Here it is using the NRC “regression-based” method

   http://theswitchman.blogspot.com/2010/09/nrc-rankings-released.html

   ChrisBail

   September 28, 2010 at 6:05 pm
4. PS– you can apparently download the rankings in an excel file from the NRC website if you click on “Free downloads”– it is a HUGE file, however. Took 25 minutes to download (probably because of traffic). I am currently trying to verify whether they are the same data that Phds.org has.

   ChrisBail

   September 28, 2010 at 6:12 pm
5. The Excel data are up on the website.

   Here’s the top 25 using the fifth percentile scores for each of the two major criteria.

   5th Percentile S Scores
   1 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
   3 HARVARD UNIVERSITY
   3 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
   3 PENN STATE UNIVERSITY (go PSU!)
   4 DUKE UNIVERSITY
   5 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
   6 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN-ANN ARBOR
   6 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SAN FRANCISCO
   6 UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA – LINCOLN
   7 UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
   8 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
   8 UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
   10 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
   11 OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY MAIN CAMPUS
   13 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
   14 UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
   15 BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY
   16 BROWN UNIVERSITY
   16 CORNELL UNIVERSITY
   18 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
   19 UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
   20 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
   20 INDIANA UNIVERSITY AT BLOOMINGTON
   21 UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
   21 UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND COLLEGE PARK
   25 BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

   5th Percentile R Scores
   1 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
   1 HARVARD UNIVERSITY
   2 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
   3 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY
   4 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
   5 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
   5 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN-ANN ARBOR
   6 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
   6 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
   8 UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
   8 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES
   8 UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
   9 TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
   10 UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
   12 DUKE UNIVERSITY
   12 RUTGERS THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY
   13 INDIANA UNIVERSITY AT BLOOMINGTON
   13 PENN STATE UNIVERSITY
   13 UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
   14 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
   15 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
   15 STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT ALBANY
   15 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SAN FRANCISCO
   15 UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
   17 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
   18 YALE UNIVERSITY
   20 OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY MAIN CAMPUS
   21 UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
   22 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SANTA BARBARA
   22 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
   25 BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
   25 BROWN UNIVERSITY
   25 UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

   ed walker

   September 28, 2010 at 6:14 pm
6. Thanks Ed– do those ranks include social policy schools? The fifth column of the excel file seems to break down departments within the sociology rankings by a number of different subfields. Does this explain why Miami is so high?

   ChrisBail

   September 28, 2010 at 6:21 pm
7. I don’t want to read the actual report. Can someone tell me what the difference is between the S and R scores? Based on face validity alone, I think I’d be more likely to trust the S scores….

   brayden king

   September 28, 2010 at 6:31 pm
8. The S scores are survey based and the R scores are regression based. You are free to pick the one that confirms your own reality, though both of them look a little depressing from my end

   Trey

   September 28, 2010 at 6:34 pm
9. According to the key in the excel file,

   S Rankings (for survey-based rankings) are based on how faculty weighted—or assigned importance to—20 characteristics that the study committee determined to be factors contributing to program quality. The weights of characteristics vary by field based on faculty survey responses in each of those fields. Programs in a field rank higher if they demonstrate strength in the characteristics carrying greater weights.

   R Rankings (for regression-based rankings) depend on the weights calculated from faculty ratings of a sample of programs in their field. These ratings were related, through a multiple regression and principal components analysis, to the 20 characteristics that the committee had determined to be factors of program quality. The resulting weights were then applied to data corresponding to those characteristics for each of the programs in the field.

   ChrisBail

   September 28, 2010 at 6:35 pm
10. I expected Wisconsin – Madison to score higher on both counts. And the obligated question: Columbia no. 1?

    Guillermo

    September 28, 2010 at 6:50 pm
11. University of Miami #5?! I’ve never heard of anybody on their faculty

    huh

    September 28, 2010 at 6:56 pm
12. “University of Miami #5?! I’ve never heard of anybody on their faculty”

    It seems to be a very specialized department. Maybe this is why the names don’t sound familiar.

    Guillermo

    September 28, 2010 at 7:09 pm
13. [...] Posted on September 28, 2010 by joshmccabe| Leave a comment Sociology is here. Discussion over at orgtheory. This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged grad school. Bookmark the permalink. [...]

    New NRC Rankings | The Sociological Imagination

    September 28, 2010 at 7:19 pm
14. While many other flaws in these rankings might be noted, using the 5th percentile ranking conflates the ranking itself with the standard error. This is especially noticeable with Temple, whose R interval is [9,41]

    Jeremy

    September 28, 2010 at 7:42 pm
15. The points made herein cannot be said enough times, IMO.

    Elizabeth

    September 28, 2010 at 7:43 pm
16. (p.s. The “PGR” referred to in the page I just linked is the annual philosophy rankings, organized by philosopher Brian Leiter, based on surveying professional philosophers about their assessment of departments’ quality.)

    Elizabeth

    September 28, 2010 at 7:47 pm
17. The University of Washington’s Computer Science department has the following to say:

    The NRC assessment of UW Computer Science & Engineering is based on clearly erroneous data. The assessment is meaningless, and in no way representative of the accomplishments of UW CSE. Errors in the data affect (at least) UW CSE, many other computer science programs nationally, and many programs in other fields at the University of Washington.

    Trey

    September 28, 2010 at 7:54 pm
18. While many other flaws in these rankings might be noted, using the 5th percentile ranking conflates the ranking itself with the standard error. This is especially noticeable with Temple, whose R interval is [9,41]

    No doubt. I’m sure someone will take the time to produce something like this for sociology shortly.

    ed walker

    September 28, 2010 at 8:05 pm
19. I was one of our department’s representatives allowed to see the results for UNC before the release, late last week. It’s safe to say that many UNC departments’ representatives were confused and/or skeptical of the rankings. I’ll write more about this on scatterplot sometime soon, but wanted to point out a couple of concerns off the bat:
    - for social sciences, books are counted as single publications, while in the humanities they are counted as five. For sociology, this undervalues “book scholars” and, by extension, “book departments.”
    - for our department at least, the publications-per-allocated-faculty statistic is implausibly low. It appears to be similarly implausibly low for colleagues here in several other disciplines, including political science and communication studies. We are working on replicating the count in our department and hope to have data soon.

    andrewperrin

    September 28, 2010 at 8:34 pm
20. Here’s one version: http://www.unc.edu/~pnc/pncs-quick-chart.jpg

    I don’t know the pros and cons of using the 5th, 95th, etc., so I just averaged them, then averaged the R and S. (I did that not knowing UNC does better with the average (6th) than with the 5th percentiles posted above.)

    This is totally not kosher according to NRC, because no global ranking is kosher.

    Philip Cohen

    September 28, 2010 at 9:37 pm
21. Why might it be the case that UC Berkeley is 4th under R scores but doesn’t appear under S scores?

    Nuveen

    September 29, 2010 at 12:52 am
22. Why might it be the case that UC Berkeley is 4th under R scores but doesn’t appear under S scores?

    Because, when ranked by the S weights, Berkeley is apparently no Baylor. They are below 25th.

    Jeremy

    September 29, 2010 at 1:11 am
23. There are some useful tables and graphs here:
    http://webspace.princeton.edu/users/ssussman/NRC/Social%20Sciences/

    more

    September 29, 2010 at 1:26 am
24. Maybe the raters who scaled the S weights counted Christian piety to be one of the key factors for a quality program…..

    I’m actually guessing it was actually something idiotic like commitment to teaching as a part of their mission….

    sherkat

    September 29, 2010 at 1:30 am
25. TEAM S ALL THE WAY. You Team R people can mutually backscratch yourselves all the way to irrelevance.

    Kieran

    September 29, 2010 at 1:38 am
26. This: http://chronicle.com/page/NRC-Rankings/321/ is probably a bit easier to use than the Excel spreadsheet is.

    Mikaila

    September 29, 2010 at 2:47 am
27. Kieran, weren’t you at Arizona when the data were collected? TEAM R ALL THE WAY!

    Team R

    September 29, 2010 at 11:04 am
28. If you compare UCSF to the other UCs, UCSF has the highest number of pubs per faculty of any program in the country: 1.14 per year. And 67% of their faculty had grants. Oddly, their ranking was hardly hurt by having 0% of their students complete PhDs within 8 years. That’s even lower than Berkeley (4.9%). (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

    Philip Cohen

    September 29, 2010 at 11:17 am
29. what a mess:

    ”
    - for social sciences, books are counted as single publications, while in the humanities they are counted as five. For sociology, this undervalues “book scholars” and, by extension, “book departments.”
    “

    Janice

    September 29, 2010 at 2:00 pm
30. A follow up on Elizabeth’s pointer to Leiter – do we know anything about the design about the survey of faculty? I’m most struck by where the Ivies fall. Great sociology departments, of course, but not as great, as a group, as they appear in NRC. If the survey was representative of sociology faculty – and thus most respondents were low information Rs – then what do they see as important that differs from what is expressed in expert, high information ratings of reputation?

    Team S

    September 29, 2010 at 2:48 pm
31. After a careful and exhaustive study, I’ve concluded that NRC stands for Nearly Random Coefficients, R= Ridiculous, and S=Semi-ridiculous.

    Berkeley was hurt because it falls 39th on the measure of faculty research quality. Fortunately, it is in good company with Stanford, which is similarly low on this measure.

    krippendorf

    September 29, 2010 at 3:47 pm
32. Of the 95 departments that are listed simply as “Sociology,” 27 have confidence intervals that do not overlap: I recommend that the 20 schools with lower scores on R-ranking hire expensive marketing gurus to increase their S-ranking. (Finger crossed: I think that this comment may have earned me an appointment to a university-wide sub-committee).

    Ryan

    September 29, 2010 at 4:15 pm
33. I found an error in the university-wide distributed excel spreadsheet confusing the S-ranking with R-ranking. Flip the above suggestion re: marketing gurus and move directly to a research group loosely affiliated with university-wide sub-committee. I am told there will be multiple Powerpoint presentations!

    Ryan

    September 29, 2010 at 5:12 pm
34. Our Graduate School is going with the 5th percentiles for the public, using the language, “the following UNC doctoral programs _could fall_ within the top 10 percent of programs in their field or discipline nationally…” (http://gradschool.unc.edu/policies/nrc/NRC-News-Release-9-28-10.pdf) My advice to not do that was duly noted.

    Philip Cohen

    September 29, 2010 at 7:37 pm
35. What was the time frame for calculating “completing PhD in less than 8 years”? I did my PhD at UCSF in 6 years, and graduated with 3 other students from my cohort (in 2003).

    sara

    September 30, 2010 at 12:30 am

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