I contacted Chris Matgouranis, the student who generated the "5,000 janitors with PhDs" figure cited in Richard Vedder's Chronicle piece. He helpfully pointed me to 2 Bureau of Labor Statistics sources. The first, here, gives the distribution of educational attainment in various professions. The second, here, g... read more

Those of you in Communication Research may have noticed something strange about the NRC R-rankings for the field on our site: until yesterday, the confidence intervals for programs almost all started at 1. That means that in our simulated rankings, almost all programs ended up in first place at least 25 times. Why... read more

One of the big differences between working in industry and academia is that in industry you rarely work alone. Most problems companies have to tackle are too big and complex to involve just one person. There is extensive literature on problem solving ability in individuals (IQ and the like), but much less on g... read more

SUNY Albany is cutting its programs in French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theater, reports Stanley Fish in his NY Times column today. So not only are departments not hiring in the humanities, it looks like tenured faculty might actually be laid off - something that's possible if universities are in dire econom... read more

In the wake of the new graduate school rankings, we have received a handful of emails from department chairs who are angry about alleged errors in the NRC's data. The emails by and large follow a pattern: "This specific piece of information about my program is wrong, therefore the data from the NRC are highly flawe... read more