What Were You Told When You Applied?

Many academic departments would get a failing grade if they were evaluated on how much information they provided to prospective graduate students on job placement. In The Chronicle’s informal survey on the topic, we asked, “When you applied to graduate programs, what sort of information, if any, did departments offer you on their job-placement rates?”

More than 1,200 Ph.D.'s responded to the survey, but large numbers had little to report on that question. Here is a representative sampling of the answers from 15 consecutive respondents:

• “None.”
• “I don’t recall ever hearing a number for a department’s job-placement rate.”
• “None.”
• “Anecdotal evidence of recent placement and a general history of ‘good’ placements were offered on occasion.”
• “None.”
• “None.”
• “Little to none.”
• “I remember seeing a list of alumni and ‘where they are now’ on the department’s Web site. Other than that, the department didn’t actively offer any information about job-placement rates/outcomes.”
• “None.”
• “None.”
• “None, and I didn’t think to ask.”
• “Anecdotal, almost universally positive spin.”
• “None.”
• “None.”
• “None, but I didn’t know to ask.”

Respondents who had received some information from departments about their placement rates said the quality of it varied from the helpful (“they published a list of departmental Ph.D. recipients along with the positions they had received”) to the vague (“they said they had a high placement rate” and “good students get good jobs”) to the wildly exaggerated (“we were told that the department had a 100-percent placement rate” and “everyone gets a job”).

Much of the placement information they had received, respondents said, came in the form of “scattered anecdotes,” like these:

• “The only ‘data’ that was offered to us (or that I remember, anyway) was in our dissertation seminar. Someone hesitatingly asked our senior faculty member what the job-placement rate was for our program. He blithely waved his hand and said, ‘Oh, these days, 50 percent of new Ph.D.'s will land tenure-track jobs. So you just have to be better than half of the applicants in the pool.’ I highly doubt that was true then, and it’s certainly not true now.”
• “I don’t recall asking. However, once I realized I didn’t want to be a psychology professor, I looked at the Web site and found the information on placement very sparse. Anecdotally I noticed that the only people who still got talked about were people who went on to postdocs or faculty jobs. The others just vanished, as though they had gone on Rumspringa and never returned.”
• “The Web page of the department listed recent graduates and their current employment, but it wasn’t comprehensive (only listed those with academic jobs).”

Some respondents said more placement information became available after they were enrolled: “I don’t remember any during the application and decision process,” a survey participant wrote, “but after being there we got quite a bit.” Others said the most accurate data came from their advisers: “For me it was more important to know where my adviser’s students ended up going after graduate school, which I gathered through personal communication.”

But many respondents said detailed data about an entire program’s placement record would have been helpful. Said one: