Duke, Texas, and Rice are all a tier too high, tho, imo
Department rankings
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The two first tiers are very accurate. The rest is more debatable. Like in most rankings, once you get below a certain thresholds, there is no consensus. It's like journals
Time was, you could come on here and argue about obviously silly metrics in transparently self-serving ways....just talk about rankings. like going to the neighborhood bar and shootin the breeze about the greatest knuckleballers of all time.
Now? Largely nonsense.
So here it is. The true ranking. Prioritizing grad student quality, a lagging indicator of faculty quality but easier to measure imo. (*)'s if it's weird or boutique or something.
S tier
Harvard
Princeton
Stanford
A tier
Berkeley
Columbia
Michigan
MIT (*)
NYU
Stanford GSB (*)
UCSD
Yale
B tier
Chicago
Duke
Rochester (*)
UCLA
WashU
C tier
Cornell
Emory
Penn
Rice
Texas
UNC
Vanderbilt
Wisconsin
D tier
Davis
Georgetown
GW
Northwestern
Ohio State
Penn State
Stony Brook
Texas A&M
UVA
and then the abyss -
Can we do the same for non-US countries? Obviously, their placement are all much lower than in the US. Also, they don't have coursework so placement is much more dependent on the supervisor.
That said, we still try to have a separate ranking. Some places do place people every year, whereas others only place exceptionally when there is a random good PhD student. So it's all about the frequency of placement, which tells something about the place (more about the quality of supervisor and overall prestige of the institution, but that matters):
Tier 1 (non-US)
EUI
LSE
Oxford
ZurichTier 2 (non US)
Essex
Konstanz
Mannheim
UCL -
Lol, I am a theorist from a school not on this list. I got a job. Does that make me special?
No theorists are special. look, I'm sorry that we're in the same discipline...I really am, it's an historical accident.
but you need to understand that no one caresAnd by historical accident, you mean theory is the foundation of your shi.tty numerism.
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I’m not sure about Mannheim, but I’ve never seen Amsterdam placing a PhD student outside of an internal recruitment (or at least outdid the Netherlands). Am I missing something? Do you have examples?
Agreed. UCL has great faculty, but no decent PhD student (except LB, now postdoc at Bocconi).
Tier 1 (non-US)
EUI
LSE
Oxford
Zurich
Tier 2 (non US)
Essex
Konstanz
Mannheim
UCLMannheim is Tier 1, laughable to place them below EUI or Oxford. Aarhus and Amsterdam should be in Tier 2, UCL should not be on this list
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Quants are obsessed with rankings -- journals, departments, publishers -- because they have no ideas and their work is nothing more than busy work.
Maybe quants just understand the rankings correlate heavily with jobs.
It's nice to know you theorists do it for the pure unadulterated love of learning though. I like that you're not part of the pool of competitors.