Cornell, Anyone?

[rvalchev]

econometrics if hong is around, his students have done okay recently (indiana, upitt/rochester), but his style is `very specific'.

What do you mean if he is around? He's not at Cornell all year?

Word on the street is Cornell's underplacing its students because professors don't push them on the job market. I guess the person I was talking to was implying they are not making the all important phone calls around crunch time, but I am not sure how much stock there's in this statement. I am just relaying a rumour a caught, you guys take it for what it's worth.

[rvalchev]

To gsm33 (I saw a post addressed to me on the oxford thread, but since it deals with Cornell, I am just going to address it here )

err... sorry if i missing the point, but rvalchev, is this info not detailed enough for your purposes: <http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/graduate/alums.pdf> and <http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/graduate/placement2008.pdf>?

The alumni page you are referring to is incomplete. They are missing information for a bunch of their students, which makes the data very noisy. When I asked if blanks next to student names mean they did not get placed initially, they said it's a lack of data issue, and it does not mean non-placement. So I am kind of skeptical about the Alumni page being a good representation of their placements.

That said 2008 placement is not stellar, and I also got their 2009 placement, where the top is U of Toronto (not stellar, but okay). I understand 2009 is a poor year in general and I would not expect anybody to be doing good, but I am just saying.

[cornellec11]

What do you mean if he is around? He's not at Cornell all year?

Word on the street is Cornell's underplacing its students because professors don't push them on the job market. I guess the person I was talking to was implying they are not making the all important phone calls around crunch time, but I am not sure how much stock there's in this statement. I am just relaying a rumour a caught, you guys take it for what it's worth.

that has little to do with it even if true. even if they were placing the-all-important phone calls, cornell does not have many well-known senior professors that can help out much there. i mean, who can ani guerdikova call if you want a placement in the US? or abowd when most of his work is with the census. basically, the academic network of the senior professors is top 30, i'd say. reflective of that is the publication record in top journals.

i'd say the determinants of poor placement are many: prime among which is the poor research, not so great calibre of students and poor communication/english skills.

for example, about a 40&#37; of students are asian for whom most of the liberal arts college economics market is just pretty much closed. just see how much the Cornell TAs complain about not being able to understand their TAs on ratemyprofessor.com (or whatever the site was). if you come out with poor teaching evaluations because you can't speak english, very LACs will take you seriously becase you need to be a great teacher there more than a great researcher.

regarding the quality of research of students, it is rare that any student will ever come out on the market doing something that will interest theorists and empirical guys in top 10 research institutions. i mean just go to the current 2009 candidates. for example, there is a person on the current market listing IO as a primary research area without one theory IO paper.

the only reason why cornell economics manages to stay in the top 20 list is due to other factors that feed into the ranking that relate to the fact that cornell is cornell after all and has other resources. it is an ivy league school for a reason, it is just that cornell economics is not in the ivy league of economics.

regarding the alumni list, blank spaces, at least for 2007 and 2008 mean no job by the time the list was compiled. there is only way to interpret that...

you get to meet with the cream of the professors next week (basu, mitra, o'donoghue among others)...so you can ask them yourself why they think the placements are so poor.

[gsm33]

from cornellec11
"regarding the alumni list, blank spaces, at least for 2007 and 2008 mean no job by the time the list was compiled. there is only way to interpret that...
"
thats actually not true, a number of people don't report their placement to eric maroney, this changed a bit in 2008 when mitra actively made sure everyone did indicate where they are going, but holes don't indicate people don't have jobs 99&#37; of the cases, more that they did not tell maroney for reasons i don't really know.

i have a feeling of deja vu regarding your other comments. there was a `nasty' thread on cornell sometime back with someone called `Appl2007' on one side and another cornellian and me on the other. your words seem to echo `Appl2007'. since that thread degenerated quickly into nonsense, i'll try to avoid it as much as i can.

but my take on the placement is that its about 50% due to what you're saying (not very hot research for some faculty, relatively unknown / underperforming junior and sometimes senior faculty, though if you're arguing that coate / hong/ blume-easley / barrett / huang / o'hara for example are not doing work that gets published well, thats a bit odd honestly) and 50% due to what rvalchev pointed out: broadly that unlike several similar programs rochester / penn state and even duke there is very little effort into preparing students for the market and pushing them into the right schools / jobs, i mean people are pushed at chicago / mit when they have absolutely no hope, which has a knock on effect of creating the impression that cornell grads are no good. they aren't good for top 5 / 10 most of the time, but good enough for top 20/30 often, but miss out on that since there is no clarity in indicating to the market `where the person really fits'.

o'donoghue has made noises about getting things more streamlined, but i don't see it as happening soon or significantly. so things may improve slightly, but i don't see any top10 placements anytime soon. more likely an improvement in the top20/30 range with one or two extra people getting in. i repeat that wisc and duke at the moment seem to have significantly higher top 10 probability for the top student(s). for the average guy, i'd say the 3 places are the same (nb. rvalchev is clearly not an average guy )

[cornellec11]

from cornellec11
"regarding the alumni list, blank spaces, at least for 2007 and 2008 mean no job by the time the list was compiled. there is only way to interpret that...
"
thats actually not true, a number of people don't report their placement to eric maroney, this changed a bit in 2008 when mitra actively made sure everyone did indicate where they are going, but holes don't indicate people don't have jobs 99% of the cases, more that they did not tell maroney for reasons i don't really know.

i have a feeling of deja vu regarding your other comments. there was a `nasty' thread on cornell sometime back with someone called `Appl2007' on one side and another cornellian and me on the other. your words seem to echo `Appl2007'. since that thread degenerated quickly into nonsense, i'll try to avoid it as much as i can.

but my take on the placement is that its about 50% due to what you're saying (not very hot research for some faculty, relatively unknown / underperforming junior and sometimes senior faculty, though if you're arguing that coate / hong/ blume-easley / barrett / huang / o'hara for example are not doing work that gets published well, thats a bit odd honestly) and 50% due to what rvalchev pointed out: broadly that unlike several similar programs rochester / penn state and even duke there is very little effort into preparing students for the market and pushing them into the right schools / jobs, i mean people are pushed at chicago / mit when they have absolutely no hope, which has a knock on effect of creating the impression that cornell grads are no good. they aren't good for top 5 / 10 most of the time, but good enough for top 20/30 often, but miss out on that since there is no clarity in indicating to the market `where the person really fits'.

o'donoghue has made noises about getting things more streamlined, but i don't see it as happening soon or significantly. so things may improve slightly, but i don't see any top10 placements anytime soon. more likely an improvement in the top20/30 range with one or two extra people getting in. i repeat that wisc and duke at the moment seem to have significantly higher top 10 probability for the top student(s). for the average guy, i'd say the 3 places are the same (nb. rvalchev is clearly not an average guy )

"...has made noises about getting things more streamlined." i apologize but the whole response is more or less nonsensical. i am hoping someone will make more sense out of it...

[rvalchev]

for the average guy, i'd say the 3 places are the same (nb. rvalchev is clearly not an average guy )

I think you are grossly overestimating me but thanks for the compliment :P

When comparing two school's placement, I followed the advice of my professors and separated placement records in three different groups. 1) The top students , 2) the average student and 3) the bottom student (also student failing out with a Master's degree). I think looking at placements in this way is very useful. Most important is to make sure that 2) is more or less the same, and then depending on your risk aversity you can go with whatever mixture of 1) and 3) distribution you like the most. Duke is an example of more of a hit or miss school, because if you don't make it as one of their top students the downside might be considerable.

But anyway, the placement record is probably the biggest negative on Cornell's side. If their average placement is the same as other schools but they don't have their upside potential, then it doesn't make sense to go to Cornell. Go to the other school and if you are average, you wont end up worse off, if you are good things might even work out for the better.

But thanks to everyone who is contributing to this thread, it is very interesting. I hope it helps people who are planning to visit Cornell to get a good idea of what questions they might want to ask.

[gsm33]

whoops sorry, i did not mean to suggest cornellec11's message was nonsense, rather that the previous thread i alluded to degenerated very soon and i wanted to be careful to avoid that. from cornellec11's response, i guess i wasnt successful. apologies, i did not mean anything about your comment being nonsense, in fact i agree with it being part of the reason for cornell's current state.