Do you care about placements?

[representative_agent]

Hey guys! I know that these questions have already come up in some other threads. But I think they are important and worth being discussed in a separate thread:

 

Do placements matter for you?

Does a good placement record imply good training?

Do you rather care about the top placements or the median?

Isn't there a strong sample selection bias that makes it difficult to compare placements?

What about the lag?

[bojangles42124]

This is a great thread!

 

I think placements do matter, however, as you mentioned, the sample selection bias does make it incredibly difficult to compare placements. However, my understanding is that if you have an advisor who is high profile, (s)he can use his or her connections to help you get a good placement. Since high profile professors make good departments, I believe that there is at least some merit to looking at placements - especially at schools that are not considered top tier.

 

 

Top placements imply that if a person is really good, coming from such a school can possibly get you to such a top placement, but, such a placement may not be typical. For schools ranked below the top 15, median placements aren't ever too impressive (the median placement at UMD, for example, is not NYU), but since everyone is expecting to be the star (as it seems to me), the top placements matter more. However, median placements at these schools should (and do) matter. If the median graduate is unemployed, it will surely raise red flags. In other words, while the top placement can help a department in the student's eyes, the median placement can only hurt it (e.g. like the GRE for adcoms - having a perfect score only keeps you in the game, but a quantitative score below the 90th percentile will hurt severely).

 

This is how I view department placements. Does anyone agree? Disagree?

[DismalScientist]

Isn't all this hard work for good (or at least decent) placements?

[YoungEconomist]

Isn't all this hard work for good (or at least decent) placements?

 

Yeah, that does seem to have a lot to do with it.

 

but since everyone is expecting to be the star (as it seems to me), the top placements matter more.

 

I don't know if everyone is expecting to be a star. The way I see it, I have no idea how I'll compare to my classmates. And since I won't be going to a top 10 school, placing outside of the top couple students seems to greatly diminish your chances of getting a solid academic job. That's why I always have a backup plan in consulting, because it might be difficult to land a good academic job depending on where I go and how well I compare to my classmates.

[bojangles42124]

And since I won't be going to a top 10 school, placing outside of the top couple students seems to greatly diminish your chances of getting a solid academic job.

 

That's true... but in the long run, I think (and hope) that as long as you have solid training, your last placement will only be dependent upon the quality and originality of your research. If you're not coming from one of the top 5 schools or so, I believe that it may take a bit of time for you to reach your 'maximum' faculty appointment...

 

I think the reason why we see the majority of these top 5 schools having senior faculty from mostly these same top five schools is because of self selection bias. I suspect that the difference of added value, in terms of training, of going to a top 10 school versus a school ranked fifty is very VERY small... but you gotta be good to get into Harvard, and when you graduate, you'll still be good, even without the Harvard pedigree.

 

At least I hope this is the case.

[representative_agent]

Isn't all this hard work for good (or at least decent) placements?

 

Of course I want to have a good placement in five years. But the question is, to what extent a school's past placement record is a good indicator for your own future placement.

 

At one flyout, professors talked a lot about their school's performance on the job market compared to other schools. But they couldn't really tell me what makes their program better than others. Did they just have excellent students who would have done well at any school? Or do they provide real value-added? And if they do provide value-added: Is it through a good training or through phone calls to the right people at the right time?

 

Another school gave a lot of information about the way they are training their students. But somehow this does not show in their placement record. They said that they didn't have enough money to attract good students in the past (now they have).

[jeeves0923]

One reason why I'd like to go to a top 10 is not necessarily for a top 10 placement. I'd be happy with a competitive LAC placement.

 

I'd like to go to a top 10 so I can be exposed to some of these world famous economists. I'd like to be among the students and get a greater understanding of what it takes to reach the "pinnacle" of the profession. I feel as though I will have a lot more to share with students and a lot more I can do to help them down the road. Not to mention, it is a really good training that will (hopefully) nurture my creativity in research while enhancing the technical aspects of it.

 

Also, I feel as though from a top 10 institution, if one wants to go down a tier or two for placement, one would probably have more options than from a 20-40 ranked school, and therefore be more picky about location, etc.

[bojangles42124]

I wonder if there are any professors lurking that could comment....

 

I also wonder if Nazgul Jenish (coming from Maryland) were to have been coming from Harvard, if she would have placed better than NYU...

[eqtisadi]

Actually what bothers me the most is that I don't know whether this past-to-future inference is valid. It's like saying that since Liverpool made it to the semi-finals in the Champions League in recent years, it will also make it in 2012. I mean, some clubs persist in the top (Harvard and MIT come to mind), but others - which are most schools - go up and down. Faculty might be less dynamic than the in the average club, but PhD students never stay - so maybe the better analogy is the football academies. Still, I don't know how much one can infer one's own placements, five years from now, from recent placements.

[Antonio]

I think you are right.

My professors told me, and I agree, that once you are "inside" everything depends on your ability, your skills, your work and your creativity.

Almost all about your placement depends on your job market paper and thus on you.

It is true that pedigree matters, but only on the margin and very less than in the PhD application process.

However, for the third time in 4 years one of the Champions League semi-finals will be Chelsea-Liverpool....this is a record!

[YoungEconomist]

One reason why I'd like to go to a top 10 is not necessarily for a top 10 placement. I'd be happy with a competitive LAC placement.

 

I'd like to go to a top 10 so I can be exposed to some of these world famous economists. I'd like to be among the students and get a greater understanding of what it takes to reach the "pinnacle" of the profession. I feel as though I will have a lot more to share with students and a lot more I can do to help them down the road. Not to mention, it is a really good training that will (hopefully) nurture my creativity in research while enhancing the technical aspects of it.

 

Also, I feel as though from a top 10 institution, if one wants to go down a tier or two for placement, one would probably have more options than from a 20-40 ranked school, and therefore be more picky about location, etc.

 

I agree. In fact, some places I just wouldn't be happy living, and it'd be nice to have more options in were you want to work. I think it'd be tough living in NYC or San Fran on a professors salary, so I'd probably prefer living in Houston. On the flip side, some cities and college towns are not expensive, but I would just hate living there. For example, I'd rather live in San Fran or NYC than Pullman Washington. I guess it does bother me somewhat that as an academic it seems your choice about where to live is restricted.

[Mr.Keen]

I'd love to teach at UT Austin. That was actually the main reason I did not want to get my PhD there. Of course, a placement there is considered top.

[MooMooCow]

I think median placement matters the most. If you are a star, you will probably be a star anywhere. However, if your are just good, the connections of your advisers matter greatly.

[economicus]

If you care about placement, you should maybe check out this link ...probably they have one also for the phd level :)

Degrees of Matriculation - New York Times

[asquare]

I care about the placement I eventually get. I want to wind up in a department where I am working with colleagues who are interested in my work and who are doing interesting work of their own. I do think that there are positive externalities to working with smart, energetic, productive, and well trained peers. This might matter even more after graduate school than in graduate school, since once you are a professor, your peers are your best source of "continuing education." They are also natural and convenient co-authors, though of course it is possible to co-author with people at other universities.

 

I care about my classmates' placements in that they are my core professional network. They are my contacts; if they place well, I gain connections to their talented colleagues. (And yes, I care about how my classmates' do for their own sakes, as well -- they are my friends, too!)

 

I care about current placements because they provide a guide to what I might expect in a few years, when I am on the job market. Also, success of students from my department now sends a good signal to schools that will be hiring in a few years.

 

I cared about past placements when I was choosing a school, because the current placements were one of many indicators of the quality of the department. It's not possible to separate value added from selection just by observing outcomes. However, conditional upon my being admitted to a set of schools, choosing a school that placed students at universities where I would want a job was a better idea than choosing a school that did not. But as others have mentioned, considering the full range of placements is important. The top placements are more likely than the median to be driven by selection rather than value added, and of course are more likely to vary due to simple mean reversion.

 

Ultimately, placements were one of the many factors I considered in choosing which school to attend. To me, placements were a sort of informal, updated proxy for the rankings. In making the decision, placements were less important than depth of faculty in my intended fields and academic atmosphere, and more important than quality of life or my perceptions of the difficulty of the first year. That might not be the right weighting for everyone, but it was how I perceived things at the time, and I'm happy with the decision I made :)

[Toddgu]

Just an interesting side note. I was told by some professors that when going to interview for jobs some students did very well in there placements because of their presentation skills, ie presenting thier job paper to schools. And I got the impression that almost no schools really teach you how to do this, could be a good way to distinguish yourself.

 

Don't think this really changes the facts of what school your degree is from but sounded like it could slightly improve your job prospects. I just thought it was an interesting point made while visiting schools.

[econorama]

Just an interesting side note. I was told by some professors that when going to interview for jobs some students did very well in there placements because of their presentation skills, ie presenting thier job paper to schools. And I got the impression that almost no schools really teach you how to do this, could be a good way to distinguish yourself.

 

Every school I got into said that they do training for presentations. Now of course I won't know how useful those trainings really are until I'm going through one of them, but clearly I'll get at least some help.

[YoungEconomist]

Just an interesting side note. I was told by some professors that when going to interview for jobs some students did very well in there placements because of their presentation skills, ie presenting thier job paper to schools. And I got the impression that almost no schools really teach you how to do this, could be a good way to distinguish yourself.

 

Don't think this really changes the facts of what school your degree is from but sounded like it could slightly improve your job prospects. I just thought it was an interesting point made while visiting schools.

 

This is an interesting point.

 

No offense future economists, but economists are often bad public speakers. I look at politicians who (usually) speak very well but don't seem to have much intellectual substance to their speaches. Economists are the complete opposite as their research is usually intellectually interesting, however their speaking skills are often subpar.

 

I should probably try and find a way to sharpen my public speaking and presentation skills during grad school.:hmm:

[Golden Rule]

Presentation skills are definitely important. Now within the last couple years, my school went from having no real requirements to forcing students to present at least once per semester beginning with spring of second year, and regular attendance at least one student seminar and dept. seminar. And I'd say this is really a bare minimum too. It also helps to have a group of students to present to prior to a dept. seminar to critique you even before you get to the profs.

 

I've also heard some top schools have videotaped students prior to going on the market and had outside professionals critique their skills. Whether this was successful or not is unclear (third-hand source tells me some people just ridiculed the whole experience) but it seems like that is something that could be done effectively. One recent job market candidate recommended to me Thomson's Guide for the Young Economist which he described as being full of trite, trivial points about communication -- which he realized he immediately he wasn't following as soon as he thought back to his presentations and papers!!

 

One last thought to build on asquare's post a bit -- what I think placements have in common with rankings is their a decent broad measure of a school's success and good for narrowing down your list of possibilities, but probably they're so noisy, so lagged, so idiosyncratic, that they're probably not so good for making decisions between your top couple choices, unless it's really, really obvious one dominates the other. This is WHY I think it makes more sense to make a final decision based on the depth of active faculty whose research interests you and your impressions of quality of life and the academic atmosphere, because these are far more likely to influence your ultimate individual experience.

[486hunter]

I think asquare's take on this is well put. You want to have as many options as possible. So other people's placements are not important per se. What is important is what their options were and, to what extent, their options were a function of the department's reputation and investment in their graduate students and not extant student characteristics.

 

As someone doing a PhD in Public Policy, I have to worry about placement more than most of you do. What I have told myself is that if I get the right faculty support and do creative, convincing and relevant research, there will always be a place for me somewhere, whetehr in a policy school or in a more traditional department. For those of you pursuing the econ Phd, I think this means ensuring that a school/faculty will give you access to the support you need (research assistantships with key professors, professors who want to mentor graduate students, etc). In every department, some people are going to be more proactive (by choice) than others. Perhaps I am naive, but I think, assuming you attend a program that is reaosnably well-ranked, your destiny is more in your own hands than you think. I don't think a few years of what looks to be subpar placement should deter you -- sample sizes are small, information is imperfect and everyone has different research interests (some of which facilitate good placement more than others). There is no reason to think that the mean over the last five years will be all that informative of what your options will be.