appl2007

Well, you will be screwed either way but not because of the market itself but significantly more because you have already decreased your job market prospects by going to a low-ranked school like Cornell.

ted o'donoghue is excellent indeed but he is the only senior economist working on behavior economics at the econ department. it is unclear how much the new addition (dan benjamin) will stay at cornell. perhaps even more importantly, cornell's job placements are abysmal. the last two people at cornell who did behavior, one placed in santa clara, the other one went on the market twice and eventually placed in a non-academic position at cornell itself.

macroeconomicus, i agree with you. but my intuition tells me that mediocre PhD programs...like Cornell's, will fare even worse on such a ranking scheme as the one you suggest...i find it hard to believe that the market will not reward someone who actually "can produce published research" the first time...and five years down the road, on average, the research quality will look even more dismal...but be my guest if you can find any study that confirms or refutes that hypotethesis...

:-) agreed. it is not like they (the rankings) come out of thin air.

Some might be tempted to google and find older versions but the newer one has been published two months ago...which is why I provided the full reference...

well...do you really think that "people graduated since 1990, who placed in economics departments" is of much relevance in argument about placement quality? placing in an economics department of a fourth tier college is better than no placement but somehow is hardly what most academics at top institutions would perceive as successful placements....i dunno...

Since I started this argument with another Cornellian regarding the quality of Cornell's PhD placement...this should settle the issue: From Rabah Amir and Malgorzata Knauff' "Ranking Economics Departments Worldwide on the basis of PhD placement" in The Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2008, 90(1): 185–190....just produced...places Cornell outside of the top 30. I am not even going to comment on their methodology or the conclusions...just thought it might be interesting for some of you.

Let me assure you, the comments are not meant to be snide at all...I am a Cornell graduate myself of the same department (although the undergraduate population had different perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the undergraduate program)...but what's the point of hiding behind sugarcoated statements about the quality of the PhD program? You believe them or choose to ignore them, you get there and are you miserable if they turn out to be true. All that that this back-and-forth should encourage people to do is to examine the information the PhD program provides a bit more and encourage people to ask the right questions about placements, teaching and research. It is tough to be thorough in examining that info here as it ultimately relates to people and their research and due to the concerns about privacy that we've all been alerted about. But offline you can ask such questions and students can be more free to talk about these things.

Claim 6: Students at no other PhD program spend as much time online defending the quality of their program and its placements against incorrect claims by other students from the same school.

Thank you, asquare! You are correct...it is probably better if names are not mentioned. I provided several names in response to being challenged that I don't have my facts together. Econ2006 challenged me by saying that I have incorrect information about the placements and that multiple occurrences simply violate Cornell's own policy and asked me to provide examples. And so I did...

Hi hubrishedge, I am not interested in disparaging Cornell. I am, however, interested in providing details that paint the correct picture about the department to prospective students. If one person claims that a bad placement (such as the one by XX -- edited by asquare) is an isolated event, I think it would be useful for many to know that that such bad placement is not due it being n=1 but is more of a systematic occurence for Cornell's PhD graduates. Econ2006's keeps comparing Cornell to Michigan, Penn, Northwestern. This is honestly laughable. Neither the quality of Cornell's placements nor the quality of research or teaching at Cornell is at all on par with those of the institutions that Econ2006 mentions. So, my intention is not to disparage but to dispell misleading facts about Cornell and enable people to draw their own decisions based on the correct information. Even the latest post is an example of that...about Basu. Yes, Basu is a great name in development, but he works with 1-2 students at most per year (with him becoming the chair this average number will likely decrease) and the placements of these students in the past few years has been particularly bad relative to Cornell's own placements. It is surprising to me, too, but it is an indisputable fact. So, many can look at him and think that they can expect a wonderful academic career but the evidence suggests otherwise. I am not surprised you "kill the messenger when you don't like the message". Of course all the people criticizing my posts are Cornell graduate students right now. I don't care what you think about the posts, but please don't paint an erroneous picture to prospective students about what your program simply is not.

Thank you for the question but I can not entertain your attempts to make this a personal exchange and distract us from the main argument that we started in the other Cornell thread. You are free, however, to respond to the new example that I provided of yet another Cornell PhD student who appears on Cornell's job market more than once (indicative of the quality of the program) .

To follow-up, I couldn't find anyone in the alumni list with a behavior econ chair in the last 5 years. So, she very well might not only be a very good, but also an excellent (by virtue of being the only one). As a bonus of me browsing the alumni list, and to show you yet another example of a person appearing multiple times on the Cornell market, I saw someone else listed twice on the market: GK (can't list the name for privacy reasons but look her up): once in 2005 and once this year.

I would agree with chauchau regarding going to Cornell for development or behavior. I explained my reasoning in another thread. In fact one of the examples of a specific individual (identifying information removed by moderator) is perhaps the best example of a recent behavior econ product of Cornell whose placement is well...not so stellar... For development it is much better but the development economists are primarily (with the exception of 2) at AEM and make sure that your research interests are aligned with theirs when you go there to do development.

the type of work on national security marty feldstein does, too.

I haven't looked at the study but I'd be very very surprised if these statistics are the same by tier of the program. Also, I'd imagine a continuous definition of mathematics background (# undergraduate math courses taken) as definitely supporting the view "more is better" for top 10 programs. Which would be harder to glean from a "degree or not" definition for math background.

You are right. I doubt this exchange is all that informative anymore. When such back-and-forth conversations occur I suppose they reflect badly on both parties but at least I am not spending hours defending the quality of my program...if the current student spends hours being defensive about his program it could signal just one type of thing: insecurity. So, that's the piece of information to glean from this discussion.

The strongest faculty members with the exception of Basu in terms of publications are in ILR, AEM and PAM...not in the Economics Department. You can talk about the Field instead of the Department but that fact remains true no matter what. See the citations reference provided earlier for the specific names. It is that simple, like it or not... I simply wanted to point to an example of at least one person (but there are many others) within the Econ dept who was pointing to problems with placements, problems with teaching, problems with advising from day one to an extent that he thought did not exist elsewhere. His blog had other anon student contributors who were also quite critical. You could have just brushed it off. But instead you decided to be malicious about him. It's just malicious bringing out something about him and his performance that has little to do with why I brought his name here. Are you trying to imply he wasn't smart enough instead of focusing on the issue at hand (the quality of your program)...hey man....first being defensive, now insulting one of your own peers...

smile. i didn't even say anything and you are already anticipating questions regarding flaws within your example. good for you, man.

PAM, ILR, AEM and JGSM intersect with the field of Economics but not everyone, including economists in these departments, is in the field of Economics for the PhD program. I suppose there is no point to argue...if having 5 posts in a row is not a sign of defensiveness...I don't know what is. If students in your PhD program are so happy, I doubt you would have had bloggers complaining about it more than studying...like Shane Murphy...not sure about the spelling.

No! ILR Cornell is great! The professors at ILR are actually better (in terms of their visibility, productivity and citations) than Cornell Econ. My point was that a person who was funded through an ILR RAship and then went on to work as an RA for a labor economist (basically the equivalent of ILR) close to his advisor at Oxford is not the stellar academic placement you describe. There was a Russian guy, who was a TA for 313...Nodilov or Adilov. I forget his name. He himself said that he was on the market one year unsuccessfully, became a "post-doc" (informally through his advisor) when he couldn't get a job and then reappeared on the market next year. You are correct, there is no restriction on what jobs you can look for after relisting. The problem is...and your DGS will tell you this better than I ever can....that all the private sector placements of the PhD candidates are basically the result of these candidates inability to get a decent academic job (the result of their institution and the quality of their research). All the stuff about their interest being in the private sector in the first place is BS. I want to see you pull that argument off in front of your DGS. PhD programs (unless it is a Business School or a Public Policy or Applied Econ one) are designed to train academic people. I am not so sure if students are so happy with their placements. Wasn't there a blogger, a Cornell student, Shane something last year that mentioned in his blog a meeting between the students with the DGS exactly about Cornell students' placements? He himself was quite negative about many aspects of Cornell's program. Do you know who I am talking about? Cornell undergrads do quite well...thank you....which is why they don't go to the Cornell PhD program...

Have you noticed anything about how much he works with other Cornell faculty members?

ILR RA positions is the way about 1/4th of the Cornell Econ students are admitted and funded (CISER, CHERI...). Do you honestly not know that? The merits of claims made by biased current students might be useful to prospective students considering it. It is better to have more information before you decide on a program than get that inside information once you are there and regret your decision. I think picking a PhD program is a big commitment...but that could be a personal opinion.

Go to Tapan Mitra's office hours and ask him why ODonogue left and came back to Cornell. And report here what he tells you.

So, you are saying Coate is going to Princeton or Yale and the rest to NWU and WUSTL, correct? Or...just interviewed... O'Donoghue moved to CMU because he is a behavior econ guy, the only one doing it at Cornell at the time, without a tenure...why do you think he would do that?