School rankings (again)

[XanthusARES]

A while ago I wrote a post on here about school rankings and how when you are deciding where to apply you should come up with your own ranking list. I would cross reference that here, but I'm writing my dissertation and it feels like more wasted time to do that. It's on here, look it up.

 

The main point of that post was that any ranking system is going to be flawed and that we, as senior members on this forum, use non specific terminology to reference program rankings intentionally. There is a structure to our understanding, though, and I'm going to flush that out a bit with this post. When you are looking at what schools to apply to I'm guessing that a majority of you will go to the UTD program ranking site and do a quick search for your area. For marketing I did that right now with JCR (our top CB journal) as the search. When I did this I found that Cornell is ranked all the way down at #47. So using some simple logic I can conclude that Cornell is a worse program than say the University of Cincinnati which is ranked at #18. (Quick side note: Cincinnati is a great school with some phenomenal faculty. I'm not attempting to make a value judgement against them.) So I apply across the board including some T50 programs such as Cornell and UCLA. Feeling confident that I'll get in somewhere. But the end of the application season comes and goes and I didn't get accepted anywhere. What happened? I followed the advice on here and applied widely to a range of schools across rankings. Why didn't I get in somewhere?

 

The short answer is that the UTD rankings, like the cake, is a lie. You can use the rankings from UTD to get a good idea of general trend, but they're really bad at estimating any specific data point. How people who have been in academics for a while interpret rankings is based on who is there and, for PhD programs, where their students have been placed. If a program consistently places students in other top programs that program is a top program (i.e. Stanford, HBS, MIT, Wharton etc...). The actual rankings don't matter, as opposed to MBA programs where the difference between number 15 and number 16 is a huge deal.

 

It's more about buckets. T10 programs are the top programs and there are probably about 15 schools in there. T25 schools include about 30 programs and again there is little difference between a theoretically ranked number 25 and a theoretically ranked number 11. They're both about the same, will give you comparable training, and place you in a similar program afterwards. I'm going to reference my previous work here on what I specifically mean by the buckets.

 

1. T10 programs are programs no one questions as top 10. If there is a doubt in your mind about whether a school is top 10, it's not.

 

2. T25 has some more leeway. These are big name schools. Everyone knows them and they place consistently well (meaning place their students in a top 50 program). They are all publishing well in top journals and have 1 or 2 star profs that everyone in the academy knows the name of.

 

3. T50 is a little fuzzier. 1 or 2 research active faculty publishing in A to B journals. AACSB accredited. Less likely that your Aunt Sally has heard of them. These PhD programs place their students, generally, in teaching schools.

 

So when we mention Twhatever what we are really saying is what bucket we think your application fits into. If you have specific school questions, please come and ask us. We all have a general idea about our area and, based on who we know and what "famous" means in our field, can to a certain degree "rank" any school for you. There has been and will continue to be disagreements about specifics (i.e. is Wharton or Stanford really number 1), but there is not a lot of disagreements about buckets.

 

A few final thoughts. We are not judging you for not knowing this. When we all started we did the exact same things that you are doing. We go to ranking sites and see things like Yale is outside of the top 25. We get excited because we think that means that we have a really good shot at Yale. The rankings, however, don't take into account things such as brand name. Don't feel bad when we tell you that you're aiming too high when you spent months carefully crafting your list of schools based on UTD rankings. Trust us when we tell you that these schools are mislabeled and are really T10 programs. Our advice is meant to keep you from not getting into a program because you shot too high. We have the collective scars of aiming too high and getting rejected all over this board. We're not trying to be mean, but we are trying to be realistic.

 

 

I completely understand that we are all academics and we want a quantifiable ranking that is consistent and true. It would make our system so much easier and the application process more straightforward. If you have X,Y and Z stats you apply to programs 5-18 and you'll get in to at least 3 of them. That would be great for everyone. (This is especially true as I look to the job market next summer) The unfortunate fact is that this doesn't exist and UTD rankings, more often than not, does a poor job at estimating rankings. It sets us up for failure. That's not fair to you guys trying to decide where to apply. For my part, I will no longer be suggesting that you start your school selection from UTD. Instead start at AACSB to find all programs in your area that are accredited. This will give you a meaningful reasonable length list from which to start looking at each school individually.

 

Anyway this was longer than I wanted it to be. Please feel free to ask any questions about rankings or school choices that you want and we will attempt to answer them, with one huge caveat. We will not answer the question, "What schools should I apply to?" It's up to you to do the research to find schools with good research interests. We can help you decide if those schools are good choices and fit for your package.

 

Good luck!

[Cliffs]

Thanks Xanthus, it was a great read!

 

In general, how do European and other non-US schools fit into this system of bucketing? Are there any fields you see in which a European school might comfortably fit into T10, or are they still generally considered lower rung?

[XanthusARES]

In general, how do European and other non-US schools fit into this system of bucketing? Are there any fields you see in which a European school might comfortably fit into T10, or are they still generally considered lower rung?

 

Great question. It's hard to say broadly about Europe as a whole. In a lot of ways Europe is very similar to the US in terms of rankings. There are a handful of schools in Europe (as well as Asia) that I would definitely consider T10 programs. It comes down to who is there and what they are studying.

 

There is a perception that non-US schools are lower rung than US business schools, but in my experience it's really a case by case basis. I know that some European schools don't have as strict of requirements on where you publish as some of the top US schools do. But that's also true of some of the US schools which aren't T10.

 

To be completely honest, there is a bias towards US schools when it comes to hiring in the US. A T25 US program graduate will almost always beat out a T25 non-US graduate for a position. However, that being said, a T10 non-US graduate will almost always beat out a T25 US graduate (at least in my opinion based on what I've seen).

 

What it really comes down to is where people want to study afterwards. If you want to be in Europe you should definitely consider a European PhD, there are a lot of positives to the general way they do PhD's. If you want to be in the US and your application package does not fit a T10 program, your best bet is to do your PhD in the US.

 

Note: none of these statements are meant as a value judgement on any PhD program. Different does not mean better or worse, it's just different.

[Xixixixixixi]

Thanks Xanthus. I've learnt a lot from your post.

 

Honestly, what you said here is exactly how I feel for the past 2 month. I am applying for Accounting programs (I'm more interested in Financial Archival research) so I use the BYU ranking instead of UTD, but the ranking still looks weird with Yale ranked at #70. And I always have the feeling that I probably miss a lot of schools if I follow this BYU ranking because there're quite some good schools that fall behind. It's actually quite frustrating when I've done research about 70 programs on the list just to find out that the list is not accountable. Plus there's not much time left. file://localhost/Users/xixixiao/Library/Group%20Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/msoclip1/01/clip_image001.png

 

Another thing I'm confused about is how to choose from programs. I got to say that I find several schools in the same "bucket" similar to a very large extent, at least to me, because the info from the website about curriculum and collaboration opportunities are pretty much alike. And I don't put locations as a priority. Thus, to me, if I wanna select 3 buckets of programs I wanna try, namely the hard-to-reach, risk-moderate, and somewhat-safe, I probably have a list of 60 programs and that would be a problem I guess. I've also read about YaSvoboden's post about ranking and I believe you guys think applicants should research specific professor and their work of each school, but I don't know how this can serve as a technique to build a school list since I don't have a strong preference within topics, though I do understand it's a significant process for building a better understanding of research and potential advisors.

 

Any advice on this would be much appreciated!

[Xixixixixixi]

This reply is the same as the last one. I posted it the other day and they are finally released out. Edited October 7, 2017 by Xixixixixixi

[jebediahjones]

For Accounting, the BYU rankings have been a tremendous help alleviating the focus on Top 3 publication records. Having said that, they are still quite limiting as they focus mainly on US journals under mainstream topics and methodologies.

 

I will contest part of point 3., however. A T50 school that is research active to a point where they have a doctoral program is going to have more than 1-2 active research faculty and depending on the quality of the program, will place in balanced universities (although high quality graduates can land in high research universities).