Question about ranking of UVA.

[gbea]

I have noticed that UVAs ranking varies a lot between sources. econphd has it ranked in the 50s, where as NRC ranks it 24th. I have noticed this sort of thing with some other schools, but I hypothesized that some of those discrepancies came from small department size, which doesn't seem to apply in this case. Does anybody have any insight into this?

[mission_phoenix]

It's natural that different methodologies produce different results. I'd say in general UVA is somewhere between top 30 and top 40. It, however, depends a lot on a specific field. For example, UVA is good in applied micro or empirical/computational macro but not in, say, econometrics. Don't read too much into rankings. In the end, we care about them because of placements and UVA has been doing fairly well in terms of that.

[walt526]

Couple of thoughts:

Faculty publish in more non-Economics journals than normal (it's the only way that I can think of to explain the difference between EconPhD.net's literature ranking and others versus Grijalva and Nowell, which cast a much wider net, and ranked it 20th among US programs).

I think that UVA used to be well within the Top 30, but is now more in the Top 30-40ish range. Related to that, its placements seem more variable from year-to-year than a typical Top 20ish school.

Some regard the reputation of its graduate program as superior to its literature productivity. Although an increase in unfunded offers is possibly a contributing factor to its ranking slipping.