Category: Maryland

Robert J. Gordon calculated his own ranking of the top 18 economics departments in the United States and provided a description of his methodology in 1981. His motivation was to sell Northwestern’s program to prospective graduate students.

In an earlier post we encounter a couple of earlier attempts at departmental rankings.

____________________________

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Robert J. Gordon
Professor of Economics

Department of Economics
Evanston, Illinois 60201
Telephone (312) 492-3616

May 18, 1981

Professor E. Cary Brown
Department of Economics
E52-373A
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA  02139

Dear Cary:

As you may know, for several years I have attempted to provide an independent rating of the quality of faculty at the top 20 U.S. economics departments.  I am writing to you to obtain the information needed to update the last quality ranking that I did two years ago.

Because the questionnaire form for the Boddy survey has just been distributed, you may rightly ask why an additional department ranking is necessary or desirable.  The strength of the Boddy survey is its wide coverage and large sample of respondents, but its weakness is that no information is provided to respondents to inform them accurately of the current members of the faculties of the departments on the list.  The average respondent may be several years out of date in knowing that Professor A has migrated from Department B to Department C, and in the case of many departments may have no information at all.  Also, there is no standard criterion on which to judge contributions of younger versus older faculty members, and contributions of economists in other parts of the university, e.g., business schools.

My own rating system is a complement to, not a substitute for, the Boddy survey.  As described in the attached sheet, the strengths of the system are that it includes only tenured faculty, is based on actual faculty lists, and provides a uniform treatment of economists in business schools and other outside departments.  The assignment of quality scores to individuals obviously must contain a subjective element, but is based as much as possible on objective criteria, e.g., prizes, awards, outside job offers, and citations.

I hope you will help me provide the information I need about your department.  This consists of:

1. 1. Your faculty list for 1981-82. If this is not yet typed, please send a list for 1980-81 and pencil in any changes that involve tenured faculty members.  Indicate any members who are on leaves of two years or more in government or administrative jobs.
   2. Just as important, please provide a list, which can be handwritten, of tenured economists in other departments (Business School, Law School, etc.) who make a significant contribution to the life of economics graduate students by (a) giving courses taken by substantial numbers of economics graduate students, (b) regularly attending seminars in economics, (c) serving on dissertation committees, etc.

Originally this rating system was used to provide information to prospective Northwestern graduate students (even though Northwestern has never ranked higher than eighth).  Now the results have taken on a life of their own, so I would appreciate any improvements in the methodology that you would like to suggest (so long as it does not involve rating non-tenured faculty members, which I think is basically impossible).

Sincerely,
[signature: Bob]
Robert J. Gordon

Enclosure

RJG/JR

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

EXPLANATION OF METHOD USED TO COMPILE
1979-80 “GORDON QUALITY SCORE”

As a partial substitute I have compiled a quality ranking for each of the top 18 departments in the United States.  In consultation with several highly regarded economists, all permanent (tenured) faculty members in the top 18 U.S. departments have been rated with a “quality score” ranging from one (low) to 10 (superman).  Then the total scores in each department of faculty members rated “6” or above have been added up.  While my score is obviously subjective, whereas the Boddy score is based on a large sample, nevertheless there are two primary advantages to my method.  (1) The ratings are current, taking account of the movements in Summer 1979 of J. Stiglitz from England to Princeton and in Summer 1978 of K. Arrow from Harvard to Stanford, R. Hall from M.I.T. to Stanford, T. Bewley from Harvard to Northwestern, and D. McFadden from Berkeley to M.I.T.  (2) The ratings are based on a great deal more information than was available to most if not all of the Boddy respondents — I obtained complete faculty listings from all 18 departments in May, 1978, and have consulted with a wide variety of individuals and other sources of information in making the individual faculty rankings.

Because many economists have expressed an interest in the methods used in establishing the ranking, a few details are included here for the record:

1. Only tenure members are included, reflecting the risk that nontenure members may depart a department before new graduate students can benefit from them, as well as the difficulty of rating young professors who are not yet widely known or cited.
2. Heavy weight is given to objective evidence in establishing the rankings–winners of the Nobel Prize and the A.E.A.’s John Bates Clark award are all awarded scores in the “9” or “10” category, as are several close contenders for those prizes.Another useful piece of information is the list of Fellows of the Econometric Society, perhaps the only honor in economics in which the selection is made annually by a worldwide electorate of distinguished economists.  Other honors, including selection to the NSF advisory panel and the editorial boards of leading journals, are taken into account as well.
3. Some account is taken of recent productivity, reflecting the fact that a faculty member who is currently working on the frontier is likely to be more useful to a graduate student than an established “star” whose main achievements date back to the 1940s or 1950s. A helpful and objective guide is the comprehensive Social Science Citations Index.^1/
4. The ranking of each department is not limited to the tenure economists who happen to be on the premises with full-time appointments in the economics department.Quality scores are allocated, and a weight of one-half given, to (a) economists in closely related departments (usually business schools, but also law schools, statistics departments, and schools of public administration); (b) economists who now have a full-time job in the university administration; and (c) economists who are on a multi-year leave in Washington and who may be unavailable to graduate students for several years.

^1/These criteria have offsetting biases.  For instance, young mathematical economists tend to be elected relatively easily to the Fellowship of the Econometric Society but do not tend to be cited often in the Citations Index.

The results are:

			1975 Boddy Ranking
Rank	Department	1979-80 Gordon Quality Score	Quality of Graduate Faculty	Effectiveness of Graduate Program
1.	Harvard	179	1 (tie)	5 (tie)
2.	Yale	155	4	2 (tie)
3.	M.I.T.	148	1 (tie)	1
4.	Princeton	141	7	5 (tie)
5.	Chicago	140	1 (tie)	2 (tie)
6.	Stanford	136	5 (tie)	4
7.	Pennsylvania	130	8	10 (tie)
8.	Northwestern	128	9 (tie)	8 (tie)
9.	Berkeley	100	5 (tie)	7
10.	U.C.L.A.	97	12 (tie)	14 (tie)
11.	Minnesota	96	9 (tie)	8 (tie)
12.	Wisconsin	90	9 (tie)	10 (tie)
13.	Michigan	67	13 (tie)	10 (tie)
14.	Columbia	60	13 (tie)	17
15.	Maryland	57	(Below 20)	(Below 20)
16.	Rochester	56	13 (tie)	13
17.	Carnegie-Mellon	37	17	14 (tie)
18.	Brown	33	18 (tie)	18

Source: M.I.T. Institute Archives and Special Collections. MIT. Department of Economics. Records. Box 3, Folder “Quality Rankings”.

Image Source: Robert J. Gordon at First Bank of Japan Monetary Conference, June 1983. Detail from picture with James Tobin.