turnaround

I knew that AER compensated their editors, but I didn’t realize they also paid their reviewers.  From the American Economic Review webpage:

The AER pays $100.00 for timely reports. Payment is by check only. Checks are issued four times a year, approximately six weeks after the end of each calendar quarter.

Of course, I don’t know if they actually do anything about the “timely” part.  Maybe it’s calculated vagueness.  Last thing an editor would want to do is tell reviewers they get $100 if they get their reviews back in 30 days, and then deal with people agreeing to review and then declining on Day 31.

fairness and high-risk, high-reward

I have heard recently two concerns about training for job markets that might be called high-risk, high-reward jobs. The implication is that such training programs are unfair because they aim too high for students’ likely job prospects.

academic caste system 2013

Recent discussions about department rankings and picking a department for grad school had me wondering how my own department is doing in placing our graduate students in top departments (Spoiler: Pretty good.) I had my undergraduate RA look at the faculty listing web pages for all the sociology departments with a rank of 20 or better in the current US News & World Report rankings. For each of the assistant professors, we noted where they went to graduate school and what year they earned their PhD.

I’ll say up front that this measure is not perfect for determining placement in top departments over the last six or so years (the period I consider). For example, if you earned tenure early, you aren’t in the dataset. I’m also not 100% sure all the people received their PhDs from a sociology department. Because of the small number of graduates from each department, these errors can have a substantive impact on the placement rank of individual departments, so I’m not going to assign ranks to all the departments. Regardless of these caveats, I’m pretty sure that the data capture the big picture of placement in top 20 departments, but feel free to argue that point.

Anyway, here’s what I found:

The 2013/14 US News Rankings

This morning, US News and World Reports published their graduate school rankings. However, rather than report rankings based on the data they collected last fall, they decided (for the first time in history) to average data collected in 2008 and 2012 to generate many of the lists, including sociology.