Ranking Political Science Doctoral Programs By Placement – “Let’s Get Ready to Ruuumble!”

Benjamin Schmidt and Matthew Chingos have recently published an article on such a ranking in PS. The article ranks programs by how their graduates from 1990 to 2004 have placed. It compares these scores with the (rather old) NRC rankings. If you’re very interested in the mechanics of the measure then you should read the article, but I’ll post some results here. Drum roll please ….

Top 25 Political Science Programs Based on Placement of Graduates (Table 1; per capita weighted influence score)

1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Michigan
4. Rochester
5. Chicago
6. California, Berkeley
7. Duke
8. UCLA
9. Northwestern
10. California, SD
11. MIT
12. Yale
13. Princeton
14. Cornell
15. Columbia
16. Washington University
17. Michigan State
18. Ohio State
19. Emory
20. UNC
21. Penn
22. Florida State
23. Johns Hopkins
24. Brandeis
25. University of Washington

There are certainly some surprises here (at least for me), and I’m guessing that a number of people will have a problem this method of assessing a program’s quality/prominence/merit. By the way, notice how I extended the list to “top 25″ so as to encompass my alma mater

Jeff