2015-2016 Placement Rankings Averages « Sociology Job Market Rumors

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OP: 30 Goods vs 6 No Goods
Thread: 1978 Goods vs 864 No Goods

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2015-2016 Placement Rankings Averages

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Sociologist
21f6

6 years is not possible if you are doing ethnographic fieldwork on top of your PhD and you don't already have a fieldsite. 8 years is probably the minimum.

It is certainly possible to do it in less than 8 years. Torres did it in 7 at NYU. 4 years of fieldwork and got a book contract with UC Press, UC President's Fellowship, and a lined-up job at Albany. Murphy did it in 6 at Princeton, got RWJ and is now at an AP Michigan. Jerolmack did it in 7 at CUNY, and they are even less well-funded than Berkeley. I just don't buy this notion that Berkeley students are taking 10 years to graduate because they are all ethnographers (they aren't). It's an issue both funding and mentoring and less with kinds of projects they are actually doing.

1 year ago # QUOTE 7 GOOD 4 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
c4e4

denominator for Cornell is too high.
Denominator is too high for most of the programs. PhD programs have shrunk since 08.
Last 4 Arizona cohorts have averaged 6 students, and many programs have followed suit.

That said, this denominator was from the NRC rankings from some time ago, it's certainly off, but it's the best we have until the next NRC comes out.

1 year ago # QUOTE 1 GOOD 5 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
62de

denominator for Cornell is too high.
Denominator is too high for most of the programs. PhD programs have shrunk since 08.
Last 4 Arizona cohorts have averaged 6 students, and many programs have followed suit.
That said, this denominator was from the NRC rankings from some time ago, it's certainly off, but it's the best we have until the next NRC comes out.

The denominator is a graduate student body control for size. It was a count of all students on department websites divided by 5. It looks like the OP averaged both years, which makes sense. Most departments remained about the same for both years. It's not perfect, but it's better and more accurate than NRC and it's supposed to account for students going on the soft market and overcount a bit to account for postdocs and VAP's who are often not listed on department websites, but which also count as placements. It's literally done to all departments, so no one department is treated differently. It's been discussed at length in the previous ranking threads.

1 year ago # QUOTE 8 GOOD 3 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
c4e4

^ah, my mistake

1 year ago # QUOTE 3 GOOD 2 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
2376

It is true that funding and mentoring slow all sorts of people down, regardless of project type. On the other hand your counterexamples don't prove that everyone can do it in six years. Some ethnographies take longer than others. It took 2-3 years for several Berkeley ethnographers just to gain access to their fieldsites and can take 2-3 years to master a foreign language (which Jerolmack didn't bother to do).

1 year ago # QUOTE 3 GOOD 5 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
21f6

It is true that funding and mentoring slow all sorts of people down, regardless of project type. On the other hand your counterexamples don't prove that everyone can do it in six years. Some ethnographies take longer than others. It took 2-3 years for several Berkeley ethnographers just to gain access to their fieldsites and can take 2-3 years to master a foreign language (which Jerolmack didn't bother to do).

I'm not arguing that it does take some students longer, but I am making the case that it is possible and even common at many departments for ethnographers to finish in less than 8 years, be productive, publish, and land top jobs. All I am saying is that departments like Berkeley can get students to finish faster, especially since not all of them are doing an internationally comparative ethnography that takes them 10+ years, as your stereotype of their average grad student seems to imply.

1 year ago # QUOTE 5 GOOD 2 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
7fa6

I can't find it, but there's a guy who graduated from Chicago a couple years ago who...I'll let the thread speak for itself.
http://www.socjobrumors.com/topic/is-26-the-world-record-for-sociology-graduate-student-publications
In any case, he came back a year later with some advice for people who are in "Chicago-style departments," meaning you're in a department that admits you and then ignores you while you do the PhD yourself. It's the best example of a department with no advising at all. In his post, he actually mentions cold-calling anyone who graduated from Chicago and got a tenure-track job to ask for advice, and also struck up a very good relationship with a few other prominent people (Wuthnow, Wildeman). It sounds like whoever his advisor was, they gave him about as much advice as Wuthnow and Wildeman did.
Occasionally we get Chicago grad students dropping by saying that JLM, Schilt, Clemens, and others have been working to reform the advising/mentoring process. If that's true, the reforms weren't far back enough that it affected the people on the market the last year or two. I think most people would suggest that you not go to Chicago over other top programs until someone can actually confirm that they actually bother advising their students.
I'm actually considering Chicago and I was certainly not impressed with the lackluster placement lately nor rumors of their poor training, but I did not know students had to actually outsource advising. That's unacceptable. Do you have a link to that post or thread?

Wow, I knew things at Chicago were bad, but not this bad. How can a department think it's ok to reduce their students to cold emailing faculty at other departments for help because they are too lazy to do so themselves? Simply ridiculous and embarrassing behavior from faculty at a supposedly top department.

1 year ago # QUOTE 7 GOOD 1 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
2376

There are plenty of ethnographic projects which take a while, not all of them international. Sometimes one fieldsite doesn't work out, even when one has invested 1 year+ gaining entree. And sometimes one has to become licensed or credentialed just to enter the fieldsite, esp. if it is a workplace. So it all depends.

1 year ago # QUOTE 5 GOOD 5 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
b7ce

It's pretty hard to do a good ethnographic dissertation and also finish in six years. You generally have to have some combination of lots of service-free funding, excellent mentoring, outstanding talent, and be very lucky. Seven years is more common, I'd expect eight.

We shouldn't let Berkeley off the hook because if your students regularly take 9 or 10 years that's pretty bad. But it's not like they'd mostly be finishing in six if they had better mentoring.

6 years is not possible if you are doing ethnographic fieldwork on top of your PhD and you don't already have a fieldsite. 8 years is probably the minimum.
It is certainly possible to do it in less than 8 years. Torres did it in 7 at NYU. 4 years of fieldwork and got a book contract with UC Press, UC President's Fellowship, and a lined-up job at Albany. Murphy did it in 6 at Princeton, got RWJ and is now at an AP Michigan. Jerolmack did it in 7 at CUNY, and they are even less well-funded than Berkeley. I just don't buy this notion that Berkeley students are taking 10 years to graduate because they are all ethnographers (they aren't). It's an issue both funding and mentoring and less with kinds of projects they are actually doing.

1 year ago # QUOTE 5 GOOD 1 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
b7ce

The denominator is actually too high for most of the programs. Berkeley has more like 20 person cohorts rather than 30, Michigan's cohorts are more like 15 than 19, and UNC's are more like 11 than 15. So Cornell is in pretty good company there.

denominator for Cornell is too high.
Denominator is too high for most of the programs. PhD programs have shrunk since 08.
Last 4 Arizona cohorts have averaged 6 students, and many programs have followed suit.
That said, this denominator was from the NRC rankings from some time ago, it's certainly off, but it's the best we have until the next NRC comes out.
The denominator is a graduate student body control for size. It was a count of all students on department websites divided by 5. It looks like the OP averaged both years, which makes sense. Most departments remained about the same for both years. It's not perfect, but it's better and more accurate than NRC and it's supposed to account for students going on the soft market and overcount a bit to account for postdocs and VAP's who are often not listed on department websites, but which also count as placements. It's literally done to all departments, so no one department is treated differently. It's been discussed at length in the previous ranking threads.

1 year ago # QUOTE 3 GOOD 1 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
62de

It's pretty hard to do a good ethnographic dissertation and also finish in six years. You generally have to have some combination of lots of service-free funding, excellent mentoring, outstanding talent, and be very lucky. Seven years is more common, I'd expect eight.
We shouldn't let Berkeley off the hook because if your students regularly take 9 or 10 years that's pretty bad. But it's not like they'd mostly be finishing in six if they had better mentoring.
6 years is not possible if you are doing ethnographic fieldwork on top of your PhD and you don't already have a fieldsite. 8 years is probably the minimum.
It is certainly possible to do it in less than 8 years. Torres did it in 7 at NYU. 4 years of fieldwork and got a book contract with UC Press, UC President's Fellowship, and a lined-up job at Albany. Murphy did it in 6 at Princeton, got RWJ and is now at an AP Michigan. Jerolmack did it in 7 at CUNY, and they are even less well-funded than Berkeley. I just don't buy this notion that Berkeley students are taking 10 years to graduate because they are all ethnographers (they aren't). It's an issue both funding and mentoring and less with kinds of projects they are actually doing.

Mentoring is one large part of the equation and departmental culture. I know at Michigan they had new push for students to finish in a as close to five years as possible. The other issue is funding. Students at Berkeley would probably finish faster if they would have been better funded, which is the case of students at NYU, Princeton, Duke, and even Michigan.

1 year ago # QUOTE 6 GOOD 1 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
b7ce

^that's fair, and Berkeley can definitely improve the mentoring if they made a committment (funding? maybe, maybe not). but keep in mind that if you're comparing based on ethnographic dissertations you're not going to find any at Duke, and not that many at Princeton (even though some high-profile people came out of there). Even the example given from NYU was a person who finished in 7 years with no publications.

There are some good reasons why Berkeley students often take longer, although there's as many reasons that point to structural flaws in the program.

1 year ago # QUOTE 3 GOOD 1 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
6c7d

Chicago here. Perfectly content with mentoring, community, resources etc. SP is great guy, hard-working scholar but doesn't capture or overlap w/ my experiences at all. Take smerge hate w/ grain of salt.

1 year ago # QUOTE 6 GOOD 9 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
21f6

^that's fair, and Berkeley can definitely improve the mentoring if they made a committment (funding? maybe, maybe not). but keep in mind that if you're comparing based on ethnographic dissertations you're not going to find any at Duke, and not that many at Princeton (even though some high-profile people came out of there). Even the example given from NYU was a person who finished in 7 years with no publications.
There are some good reasons why Berkeley students often take longer, although there's as many reasons that point to structural flaws in the program.

Torres had several OP-eds including one at the NY Times and a top press book contract, which is what most competitive ethnographers go on the market with. Murphy had publications, and Jerolmack had an ASR. NYU has a lot qualitative researchers and none take 10 years. Cohen who landed at Penn this year took 8. Again, people who take a long time at Berkeley are not just ethnographers. That is a stereotype that is being used now to let the department off the hook. Taking ten years for a dissertation is not normal anymore and it is not leading to good outcomes at Berkeley or anywhere else.

1 year ago # QUOTE 6 GOOD 5 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
657c

I can't find it, but there's a guy who graduated from Chicago a couple years ago who...I'll let the thread speak for itself.
http://www.socjobrumors.com/topic/is-26-the-world-record-for-sociology-graduate-student-publications
In any case, he came back a year later with some advice for people who are in "Chicago-style departments," meaning you're in a department that admits you and then ignores you while you do the PhD yourself. It's the best example of a department with no advising at all. In his post, he actually mentions cold-calling anyone who graduated from Chicago and got a tenure-track job to ask for advice, and also struck up a very good relationship with a few other prominent people (Wuthnow, Wildeman). It sounds like whoever his advisor was, they gave him about as much advice as Wuthnow and Wildeman did.
Occasionally we get Chicago grad students dropping by saying that JLM, Schilt, Clemens, and others have been working to reform the advising/mentoring process. If that's true, the reforms weren't far back enough that it affected the people on the market the last year or two. I think most people would suggest that you not go to Chicago over other top programs until someone can actually confirm that they actually bother advising their students.
I'm actually considering Chicago and I was certainly not impressed with the lackluster placement lately nor rumors of their poor training, but I did not know students had to actually outsource advising. That's unacceptable. Do you have a link to that post or thread?
Wow, I knew things at Chicago were bad, but not this bad. How can a department think it's ok to reduce their students to cold emailing faculty at other departments for help because they are too lazy to do so themselves? Simply ridiculous and embarrassing behavior from faculty at a supposedly top department.

This is disgraceful. Those faculty should be ashamed of themselves. No wonder Small and Monk left.

1 year ago # QUOTE 9 GOOD 6 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
2376

There are Berkeley people just now entering the job market who have taken eight or nine years to complete the program and are landing jobs. Even non-ethnographers. And it's only very recently that people really cared about time to completion. Until 2007-8 this was really a nonissue.

1 year ago # QUOTE 1 GOOD 4 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
a524

I can't find it, but there's a guy who graduated from Chicago a couple years ago who...I'll let the thread speak for itself.
http://www.socjobrumors.com/topic/is-26-the-world-record-for-sociology-graduate-student-publications
In any case, he came back a year later with some advice for people who are in "Chicago-style departments," meaning you're in a department that admits you and then ignores you while you do the PhD yourself. It's the best example of a department with no advising at all. In his post, he actually mentions cold-calling anyone who graduated from Chicago and got a tenure-track job to ask for advice, and also struck up a very good relationship with a few other prominent people (Wuthnow, Wildeman). It sounds like whoever his advisor was, they gave him about as much advice as Wuthnow and Wildeman did.
Occasionally we get Chicago grad students dropping by saying that JLM, Schilt, Clemens, and others have been working to reform the advising/mentoring process. If that's true, the reforms weren't far back enough that it affected the people on the market the last year or two. I think most people would suggest that you not go to Chicago over other top programs until someone can actually confirm that they actually bother advising their students.
I'm actually considering Chicago and I was certainly not impressed with the lackluster placement lately nor rumors of their poor training, but I did not know students had to actually outsource advising. That's unacceptable. Do you have a link to that post or thread?
Wow, I knew things at Chicago were bad, but not this bad. How can a department think it's ok to reduce their students to cold emailing faculty at other departments for help because they are too lazy to do so themselves? Simply ridiculous and embarrassing behavior from faculty at a supposedly top department.
This is disgraceful. Those faculty should be ashamed of themselves. No wonder Small and Monk left.

Yikes! I have never seen a worst case of mentoring (or lack thereof) than this at Chicago. It is utterly embarrassing and unacceptable.

1 year ago # QUOTE 5 GOOD 1 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
ae96

Chicago's mentoring problem is compounded by all the masters students they admit to their cash cow masters program. When you add the 100 or so phd students with all the masters students and the apathetic faculty, no one will get the time of day. It's sad really.

1 year ago # QUOTE 3 GOOD 1 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
cbce

The Chicago MaPSS program isn't in sociology, and most of the MA students don't do sociology projects. There's no way that they have 100 PhD students.

The recent posts in this thread are a classic example of "garbage [data] in, garbage out," and of people claiming way more precision than the data can sustain. (Oooh, look, two significant digits, it must be real!!)

1 year ago # QUOTE 0 GOOD 6 NO GOOD !
Sociologist
ae96

They do have 100 students. Count them.

http://sociology.uchicago.edu/people/students.shtml

1 year ago # QUOTE 6 GOOD 1 NO GOOD !

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2015-2016 Placement Rankings Averages

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