On Rankings

[YaSvoboden]

Rankings are a very common topic around here. Rankings PhD programs in any business discipline is very difficult and I would actually say it is impossible to create a set of rankings that could be completely relied upon by any external user. I have been thinking about jotting down a few thoughts on rankings for awhile now, so I will put them here and open up a discussion.

 

First off XanthuARES did a post some time ago about what we generally mean when talking about top 20 schools or something like that. It is here http://www.www.urch.com/forums/entry.php?b=358

He also did a recent post on the same topic: http://www.www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=159321&p=1011812&highlight=#post1011812

 

Also, there are a few different sites that are useful to create guidelines for rankings.

 

Note: Do not use MBA rankings. These will give you a very rough idea of school prestige, but are not based on things that are relevant to you as a prospective PhD candidate. Most don't take research and publications into account. Those that do give it something like 20% of the weight and use a list of 45 or so journals, 5 of which should matter to you. The UT Dallas site below will give you better guidelines if you know the top 3-5 journals in your field.

 

Accounting rankings including subdisciplines - http://www.byuaccounting.net/rankings/univrank/rankings.php

Rankings by business journals - http://jindal.utdallas.edu/the-utd-top-100-business-school-research-rankings/

Finance rankings - http://apps.wpcarey.asu.edu/fin-rankings/rankings/results.cfm

 

There may be others, but I am an accounting PhD student, so I know things more relevant to me. I can add useful sites from other disciplines.

 

Why these rankings aren't perfect:

 

1. The rankings that I listed above are about faculty productivity. If the faculty produces more research, then the school will rank higher on these lists. This gives you a decent idea of schools where people know how to publish work in top journals, but it doesn't tell you how well they train people. Obviously, it is necessary for faculty to publish in top journals in order to teach you how to publish in top journals, but it doesn't mean that they will. The best summary statistic that tells you how faculty interact with their students is placement of graduates. This also doesn't weight by department size. A large department will have more active researchers and publish more. More active researchers is a good thing for you as a PhD student, so I don't think it should be scaled by department size, but a school like UT Austin will have an advantage in these rankings over a place like Yale with a relatively smaller business school even if they both have several good people capable of chairing dissertations (they do).

 

2. Timing. You can choose to look over certain periods of time within these rankings, but there is no clear "ideal" time to look at. You want faculty that are still research active and publishing, but if a department is full of Assistants that are really productive with no senior people, it will be hard to choose a good advisor and chair. On the other hand, some of the most respected people in the profession publish a little more slowly nowadays because they don't have the pressure for tenure and would rather work on bigger more interesting problems, or they have other responsibilities like being editors at top journals.

 

3. Besides the BYU ones for accounting, there is no breakdown within disciplines. Even the BYU rankings don't get extremely granular. This means that if you are in marketing and want to look at how product placement affects consumer buying decisions, there is no way to know from these rankings which school you should apply to. The best researcher in some fields may be at a top 20 school or even somewhere lower down the ranks because they want to be close to home.

 

 

As I said earlier, the best summary statistic for a PhD program is their recent placements. This is definitely something that you should look at, but it can drastically mislead you. For example, Rice didn't have a program until a few years ago and didn't have any historical placements. Their first accounting student came out and got a job at Chicago. Similarly, Boston College is starting a new program and they won't have placements for a few years but they have great faculty. Also, Placements are fairly old data if you are looking at which schools to apply to. The students that just placed are 6 years ahead of you and to get any meaningful sample size you have to go a few years back and look at placements from several years ago. This is 10 or more years old. Faculty move around and retire in that amount of time fairly often. No one on my committee was at this school 10 years ago. The BYU rankings for accounting (which are the best rankings system I have seen) also include PhD rankings. These are for publications of graduates in 3 or 6 years after they graduated. This makes the data necessarily old for you. There is also a smaller issue that some schools will put students on projects early on to try and get them some publications, while other schools make you struggle a little more and force you to be more proactive in working with faculty. These will lead to different publication rates by graduates.

 

What to do?

 

As a PhD applicant your goal is to come up with a list of schools that you want to go to that will have some probability of wanting you to go there too. Most people recommend something like 10-20 applications with a few "reach" schools, a few "target" schools, and a few "safety" schools. I am also going to fall within these guidelines as well, but I hope that you will end up with a list of the 10-20 schools that you most want to attend, rather than breaking them up into categories of schools.

 

The first thing to do is find every program that you may be interested in applying to. This likely means identifying every AACSB accredited school that has a PhD program with the focus that you want. You then need to do some big cuts. For example, if you have 3.2 GPA, 650 GMAT, and no research experience, there are certain schools that you simply won't get into. Realizing this will help you to focus your resources on places that will give you the best chance of admissions into a great school. On the other hand, if you have stellar credentials, a good idea of the research that you want to do, and know that you want to go to an R1 school after graduating. You can probably narrow your search down to 30 or so programs that commonly place into R1 universities. You should be aware that there are possibly programs down the ranks that can place just as well if you are in a certain niche. A broad cut on schools that will help you meet your goals will probably leave you with 30-50 institutions.

 

Next, you want to cut on broad research topic and method and look at schools that do well in those areas. In accounting, if you were interested in behavioral research, or tax research, your search would essentially be done at this point. It will leave you with few enough schools that you should probably just apply to them all. However, if you were interested in general capital markets research, or not too sure, then you won't cut many off your list at this point.

 

The next step is to dig into faculty members and research at each school (you should do this even if you don't need to in order to eliminate schools). Look at what faculty members are doing currently via their SSRN pages. Look at their CV's and see what areas they would be able to advise in. Look at who has chaired dissertations and how those placements have been - this may involve looking back at previous institutions. This process should take a substantial amount of time, but it will give you a much better idea of what each school does and who you may work with there. Choose places that pique your interest and eliminate those that don't. Hopefully this narrows you down to a smaller set of schools.

 

Finally, take other considerations into account. Is there family that you want to be near? Does your spouse need to be in a place that will have jobs available? Do you have no desire to live in New York on a student's stipend? These things matter and can greatly affect your productivity in the program.

 

Now, create a ranking system based on what you know about each school. I would put in sub-categories like recent placements, research fit, personal fit, faculty publications, faculty size, how many people there could possibly chair my dissertation, etc. Come up with things that matter to you and weight them appropriately. If you still have more than 20 schools, use this to eliminate some. Do a sanity check to make sure that you ended up with a decent spread of reach, target, and safety schools. Odds are you did. You can adjust the list if needed.

 

Now apply to all of these schools. Use what you learned about them to write better personal statements. If in doubt about a particular school, apply to it. The cost of applying is very small when considering the potential benefit.

 

Hopefully you will have a few flyouts. Your rankings list still may be useful, but you should have a lot more information at this point. Deciding on where to go is a different topic.

[BrazilianPhD]

Really, really good. This should be included among the sticky threads.

 

This stage "The next step is to dig into faculty members and research at each school" is really one that will demand a lot of time and work, with hundreds of names to check, thousands of papers to check at least their general subjects. But it's also one with huge payoffs. It can change your list of schools completely, and may cause your notions of rankings to crumble. It can change your dream schools. And in the end you'll have a much improved list of schools, with lots of information to write better statements of purpose, as well as ammunition for the interviews.

 

About placements. For those who will apply to Marketing PhD programs, AMA has surveys about that available since 2003. It's called Who Went Where Survey:

 

https://www.ama.org/academics/Pages/Who-Went-Where-Survey.aspx

 

 

[XanthusARES]

This is great advice thanks YaS. I can't stress enough how important it is to go through the names of profs, read their papers and make your list based on this. That is exactly what I meant by making your own rankings.

 

For marketing Who Went Where is a good starting point for looking at placements. One thing to keep in mind is that there is going to be some bias in the survey. The people who did well are more likely to complete the survey than those who did not. This will give the survey a positive skew. This likely largely doesn't matter that much, but I wanted to put it out there just for your information.

[Xixixixixixi]

Thanks Yasvoboden. This article is really helpful, especially as I'm somewhat confused along my program research journey.

 

I still have some questions in terms of going through the names of profs and their research. I understand why this step is helpful and important, because they can help applicants get a better understanding of the research of their potential advisor, but how can this serve as a way to eliminate some schools and add in others? By research topics? However, I am not sure about what specific themes and topics that I wanna work on. Besides, I find many aspects of research interesting.

[XanthusARES]

I still have some questions in terms of going through the names of profs and their research. I understand why this step is helpful and important, because they can help applicants get a better understanding of the research of their potential advisor, but how can this serve as a way to eliminate some schools and add in others? By research topics? However, I am not sure about what specific themes and topics that I wanna work on. Besides, I find many aspects of research interesting.

 

Great question. I'm sure that a lot of applicants out there are facing the same question. There are two answers to this. First you can look at professors and see the type of research they are doing and if that is what you are looking for. For example for marketing if a department is filled with quant faculty and you're interested in CB, you can quickly discern that this is not the school for you. So research topic really means research methodology. From what I've gathered on this site and as a PhD student is that each subject has different methodologies. So while you don't need to have a specific research topic in mind when you apply, you should have a methodology. Some schools will separate out applications by methodology, so you should know what methodology you are interested in. This is the first way you can use looking at faculty research to determine fit with a program.

 

Second you are correct. At this point in your PhD career you probably have a wide array of research interests. They're probably all over the map. While I suggest you try to widdle that down a bit on your application (say to one broad area of interest), even if you don't you should use the professors interests to decide where to apply. So let's say you haven't picked an topic of study yet, so you have a list of all of the AACSB accredited schools and you went through and picked out all of the schools that have faculty researching in your preferred methodology. You can then go through those faculties research and see what they are doing. Trust me a few key areas will pop out. The ones you find interesting (even marginally) you can add to the consideration set. Those who you don't find interesting you can remove from your list. Trust me, you'll quickly learn what is interesting and what is not. You can also see if the faculty member is still publishing. If they haven't published in the last 4 years (and aren't a junior faculty), there's a good chance they aren't.

 

Anyway that's how you can use looking at faculty to make your decision even if you haven't decided on a specific research topic. It's important to note that very few applicants actually have a specific research topic decided on when they apply, just a few broad ideas and enough of a research idea to talk like you have done some research. Let us know if you have any other questions, and good luck!

[Xixixixixixi]

Thank you for this detailed advice.

 

For the first point you mentioned, I guess the methodology here means sub discipline? For example, I'm applying for accounting phd programs and I am more interested in Financial accounting. Besides, considering my interest and background, I think I'm more suitable for archival research. So in my situation, do I narrow down my target programs by eliminating those programs who are not focused on financial accounting? should I also focus only on the schools better at archival research method? Although a huge amount of people work on capital market research, and almost every school with accounting programs has good faculty doing this kind of research.

 

As for the second point, can I understand it as that I can go through all the faculty research in Financial Accounting of my listed schools, and i will sooner or later be able to distinguish the ones I'm interested in and the ones i'm not. If this is the case, do I need to look up for each accounting department faculty's work in SSRN? Can I just skim (maybe the abstract, introduction and conclusion part) to get a general idea but not focus on the details? Or do I need to carefully read through the whole paper?

[Xixixixixixi]

Thanks XanthusARES!

I'm new to this forum. I actually replied to your reply to me in this thread and your post about ranking, however, my replies just won't show here.

[XanthusARES]

Yeah until you get 5 posts, all of your posts need to be approved by admin before they get posted.

[Xixixixixixi]

do you how long it probably takes? I sent out some comments to your post and feed back, and I posted a profile evaluation. And they haven't come out yet..

[Xixixixixixi]

Hi XanthusARES, my last reply don't show up so i would love to try a really short one. In my case, the methodology would be Financial accounting archival, and the key areas can be market efficiency, earning coefficients. So I use these key areas to make my own list, right?

[XanthusARES]

I'll let someone who understands what you just said answer that specifically. I don't know really anything about accounting research.

[YaSvoboden]

Hi XanthusARES, my last reply don't show up so i would love to try a really short one. In my case, the methodology would be Financial accounting archival, and the key areas can be market efficiency, earning coefficients. So I use these key areas to make my own list, right?

Archival Financial work is by far the biggest research area. Most schools with PhD programs have several professors that are actively working in the area. I would look at a ton of paper titles and abstracts to get an idea of the questions that people are answering at a particular school. Earnings Response coefficients are not something that I would look for specifically. It is just too narrow and an older line of research. Market efficiency is interesting and can be thought of more broadly. I wouldn't get too tied to a subfield though if you don't have a really good reason to. You will get exposure to lots of research during a program and will likely find several areas interesting.

[Xixixixixixi]

I agree with you that my research interest might change. Honestly, I do find market efficiency interesting but only a few weeks ago when I first started to read a survey paper of Financial archival. And that's my first time of getting to know accounting research systematically, so I can't say i know my research interest very well. I don't wanna get too tied on subfields but I do wanna use that to make a smaller school list as you guys discussed in this post. Also, I think I need to put certain subfields when writing my sop?

[Xixixixixixi]

Thanks YaSvoboden. I agree with you that my interest might change during a program, and honestly i'm not very solid about my current interest subfields because I just started to systematically know about accounting research by reading a survey paper a few weeks ago. However, I got a list of 70 schools and I do wanna use research interest to make that list shorter, and I guess i also need to state sub field interest in a sop, right?

[PoC]

Great post!

 

Since I'm in the Supply Chain and Logisitics Field maybe I can add some info that you can roll into your OP.

 

Ranking for SCM/Logistics is broken down by the kind of research the school produces. There is an empirical research list, and then an analytical one as well. Both can be found here: University Rankings - The SCM Journal List

 

This list is recognized and has support from most of the leading faculty in the field (Endorsers - The SCM Journal List)

 

This list should not be considered definitive but is a very good indication of where schools rank based on their research output.