Why the NRC should just forget its outdated doctoral rankings effort.
Chronicle of Higher Education headline from 2008 “Doctoral-Program Rankings Are Near Release, Director Says…”
The Chronicle story went on to report that “The National Research Council's assessments and rankings of American doctoral programs will be released in mid-February (2009), the project's director says.”
OK… it didn’t happen and in my view it shouldn’t happen at all now… it’s just too late. To release data this point would do a disservice to everyone and would reflect a point in time long passed and now mostly irrelevant. Any data five years old (the original survey date) is ancient history and can do little if nothing for us at this point except to add more controversy as programs who don’t like where they stand rightly argue that the findings are now useless.
As head of a large and well regarded doctoral program in Communication I looked forward to the results of this study. This was the first time that Communication as a field was included in the NRC study and we at Purdue and my colleagues at other institutions took this very seriously. Our programs across the country encouraged participation and our national associations and universities held workshops and formed task forces to make sure that quality data collection occurred. The labor was quite significant. Millions of dollars were spent by the NRC and I can’t imagine how much each campus spent in terms of personnel time preparing for this event.
Sure we had problems with some of the categories and had concerns that our program quality would not be captured accurately through the assessment but we were committed and we put our energies into this venture.
Our program has evolved significantly in the last five years. We have new faculty, retirements, better students (in terms of GREs, class ranks, etc.) and we have changed our curriculum. We are not in the same place or in the same space as five years ago. I would think that most of my colleagues would think the same thing especially as we have dealt with recent unprecedented budget challenges that in some cases have radically altered our programs.
So, this is not just a plea… it’s a reasonable request from someone in the trenches and is pretty much common sense. “Give it up… call it off”. I’m not worried about where we stand in terms of our peers… We’ve got a pretty good sense of our rankings (there are other data sources) but I do think that old data cannot help us and it’s better at this point to pack it in and enjoy the summer. It’s not like we aren’t busy enough with budget cuts, furloughs, and other diversions.
The Chronicle story went on to report that “The National Research Council's assessments and rankings of American doctoral programs will be released in mid-February (2009), the project's director says.”
OK… it didn’t happen and in my view it shouldn’t happen at all now… it’s just too late. To release data this point would do a disservice to everyone and would reflect a point in time long passed and now mostly irrelevant. Any data five years old (the original survey date) is ancient history and can do little if nothing for us at this point except to add more controversy as programs who don’t like where they stand rightly argue that the findings are now useless.
As head of a large and well regarded doctoral program in Communication I looked forward to the results of this study. This was the first time that Communication as a field was included in the NRC study and we at Purdue and my colleagues at other institutions took this very seriously. Our programs across the country encouraged participation and our national associations and universities held workshops and formed task forces to make sure that quality data collection occurred. The labor was quite significant. Millions of dollars were spent by the NRC and I can’t imagine how much each campus spent in terms of personnel time preparing for this event.
Sure we had problems with some of the categories and had concerns that our program quality would not be captured accurately through the assessment but we were committed and we put our energies into this venture.
Our program has evolved significantly in the last five years. We have new faculty, retirements, better students (in terms of GREs, class ranks, etc.) and we have changed our curriculum. We are not in the same place or in the same space as five years ago. I would think that most of my colleagues would think the same thing especially as we have dealt with recent unprecedented budget challenges that in some cases have radically altered our programs.
So, this is not just a plea… it’s a reasonable request from someone in the trenches and is pretty much common sense. “Give it up… call it off”. I’m not worried about where we stand in terms of our peers… We’ve got a pretty good sense of our rankings (there are other data sources) but I do think that old data cannot help us and it’s better at this point to pack it in and enjoy the summer. It’s not like we aren’t busy enough with budget cuts, furloughs, and other diversions.
posted by hsypher at 8:30 AM
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