Article on "Academic Dogs" from http://www.freebanking.org/2013/06/27/academic-dogs/

Academic dogs

by Kurt SchulerJune 27th, 2013  10:35 pm

A link from Marginal Revolution took me to a paper called "An Empirical Guide to Hiring Assistant Professors in Economics." It is as interesting for what it doesn't say as for what it does. It concludes that "top 30" Ph.D. programs in economics, which accept a bunch of quite bright college graduates every year, do a terrible job in making those who graduate capable of publishing work that academic economists find sufficiently worthwhile to accept for publication in academic journals. From all the top 30 programs combined, the average number of economics Ph.D.s in the period the authors studied was 460. Only 143 (31 percent) had at least one publication in any academic journal ranked by the authors six years after graduating. Even at Harvard, Chicago, or Berkeley, the bottom half of the class essentially published nothing. The paper is talking about graduates, and is excluding students who didn't complete their degrees. Another finding: for graduates who were not at the top of their Ph.D. cohort, Princeton, Rochester, and the University of California-San Diego seem to have provided the best preparation for writing publishable academic papers.. . .

Another interesting thing the paper leaves unsaid is what Ph.D.s who don't write academic journal articles do. The Dutch economist Arjo Klamer once wrote an essay called "Academic Dogs." (It is in David Colander and Reuven Brenner, editors, Educating Economists, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992; I haven't found it online to give a link.) He compared academic publishing to a dog show. Owners spend a lot of time training their dogs to run through some paces to impress the judges at the dog show, but how useful is that outside the arena? Klamer decided that both he and his dog would be happier by staying out of dog shows. It is implausible to me that more than 300 Ph.D.s a year from the top 30 programs have nothing to say. Rather, I strongly suspect many of them have decided that the dog show of academic publishing does not interest them. Some prefer teaching students to publishing. Others go work in nonacademic settings--consulting firms, central banks, government agencies, banks, think tanks, international organizations, etc.--and write for audiences other than the dozen people in the world who care about some narrow academic topic and are unable to make anything come of it in the world.
For recent or future Ph.D.'s who like the academic dog show, fine: you will probably do well at it. A few of you will even do work that is truly important, that changes the world a little bit or at least changes what teachers of economics teach their students about the world. For those who don't like the dog show, take heart: you were wise to have studied for your Ph.D. in economics, not English, and you have many ways of using your knowledge in a worthwhile way outside of academia, at a good salary.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the Vanderbilt paper:

"Going further down this table, we see that one would be better off hiring a 95th percentile graduate of a typical non-top 30 department than the 70th percentile graduate of Harvard, Chicago, U. Penn,
Stanford or Yale, or an 80th percentile graduate of Berkeley, Michigan, NYU UCLA or Columbia."

From the Vanderbilt data, average rankings plus minus standard deviation:

Department Rankings based on Graduating Cohorts' Publication Performance (1986-2000) Red is 1-4th, Green is 5-10th, Yellow is 11-15
Department	Coupe Rnk	Ranking	at	Percentile:
Percentile		99th	95th	90th	85th	80th	75th	70th	65th	60th	55th	50th	45th	40th	Av Rank	Stdev
Princeton	11	3	3	1	2	2	2	2	2	1	1	1	2	1	1.769231	0.725011
Rochester	19	10	5	3	3	1	1	1	1	2	2	3	1	2	2.692308	2.496151
MIT	5	1	1	2	1	3	3	4	4	6	6	6	6	6	3.769231	2.087816
UCSD	26	18	9	6	6	4	4	5	3	3	3	2	3	3	5.307692	4.250189
Harvard	1	2	2	4	4	5	8	6	8	8	8	8	11	11	6.538462	2.989297
CMU	30	15	12	11	7	6	5	3	5	5	5	5	5	4	6.769231	3.585941
Northwestern	7	9	6	7	5	7	6	7	7	7	7	7	7	9	7	1.080123
Yale	8	4	4	5	8	8	9	11	11	10	11	11	10	8	8.461538	2.633609
UBC	25	24	16	13	12	9	7	8	6	4	4	4	4	5	8.923077	5.978594
Stanford	4	6	10	9	10	11	11	9	9	9	9	10	9	10	9.384615	1.26085
Toronto	24	8	7	12	11	13	14	13	12	11	10	9	8	7	10.38462	2.399252
Penn	3	7	11	10	13	12	12	10	10	13	13	14	15	14	11.84615	2.192645
Chicago	2	12	8	8	9	10	10	12	13	12	15	17	12	30	12.92308	5.751254
Berkeley	6	17	15	17	16	17	16	16	16	15	14	13	14	12	15.23077	1.589227
Duke	16	25	17	16	14	15	15	15	15	14	12	12	13	19	15.53846	3.430631
Minnesota	21	13	13	14	15	14	13	14	14	16	16	18	17	26	15.61538	3.500916
Madison	15	16	18	18	18	16	17	17	17	17	17	19	16	13	16.84615	1.463224
Columbia	10	11	14	15	17	19	18	18	21	22	23	20	30	21	19.15385	4.705425
Cornell	14	22	23	22	22	21	21	19	18	19	19	15	18	18	19.76923	2.278664
Davis	23	20	22	21	20	22	20	20	19	18	18	16	20	28	20.30769	2.839736
UM	9	21	21	20	19	18	19	21	20	20	20	23	21	23	20.46154	1.450022
UCLA	12	14	19	19	21	20	22	22	22	21	22	26	26	17	20.84615	3.262058
Penn	29	29	24	24	24	23	23	25	23	23	24	22	29	16	23.76923	3.192539
Maryland	18	26	29	25	25	25	24	23	25	25	21	21	19	27	24.23077	2.681848
NYU	13	19	20	23	23	24	26	26	27	27	27	30	27	22	24.69231	3.172397
USC	27	5	30	29	27	31	28	28	28	28	30	25	31	15	25.76923	7.473886
UIUC	22	28	28	26	26	26	25	24	24	26	25	24	28	31	26.23077	2.047513
Ohio	17	31	27	30	29	29	27	27	26	24	26	28	24	25	27.15385	2.192645
Boston	28	23	26	28	28	28	30	29	29	30	31	29	22	24	27.46154	2.8465
Austin	20	30	25	27	31	27	29	31	31	31	28	27	25	20	27.84615	3.236411
Non-top	30	27	31	31	30	30	31	30	30	29	29	31	23	29	29.30769	2.213015