PhD Placement Data

Many of you asked about this during recruitment, and an article in the Chronicle this morning had me thinking I might provide you with an update about what we're doing.

Here's the article: https://chronicle.com/article/Do-You-Know-Where-Your-PhDs/141777/

which is a spin off from the Chronicle's PhD Placement Project: https://chronicle.com/blogs/phd/

So far as I know, there's nothing done Davis wide or even HARCS wide to track PhD placement. When I started doing placement a few years back, I began generating annual reports for the department chair. This data, as I probably told you during recruitment, is thin and one would be a fool to draw conclusions from it. In a given year only like 10 people go on the market, and that's hardly a meaningful sample even over 4-5 years. So, when one year we placed 80% of our grads, that was awesome, but in the grand scheme of things, meaningless. When we have a 20 year arc to consult, maybe that will start to be statistically significant.

This summer, Levada (and I helped a little) generated a spreadsheet that contains all sorts of data from the application process (GRE scores, etc.) through to placement outcomes. We are hoping to have a grad researcher in the winter help us track down some of the students from more than 5 years ago whose outcomes we don't know.

I'm going to be asking the department graduate committee (and I'll probably want to consult the faculty too) in the spring about how to use this information as we gather it. How to disseminate it among the grads themselves is obviously a big question. We don't want to disseminate misleading information (see the meaningful stats question above), and we also don't want to disseminate privileged information (like GRE scores, etc.).