My blogging buddy, Jon Lackman of the Art History Newsletter, has a little list that he’s extrapolated by crunching the numbers from the National Research Council’s just released database assessing U.S. doctoral programs in 62 academic fields.
Jon has listed 51 schools in order of their purported rank for art-history PhD programs.
Here are his Top 10:
1. UC-Berkeley
2. Columbia
3. Chicago
4. Princeton
5. Yale
6. Harvard
7. NYU
8. MIT (same score as NYU)
9. Northwestern
10. University of Pennsylvania
Lackman comments:
The [National Research Council’s] data is from 2005-2006, fatally outdated say some critics….
The NRC…refuses to produce authoritative rankings of its own, arguing that this
would be misleading, since there are no universally agreed-upon
objective criteria and uncertainties inherent in the data collection and
analysis. I’m no statistician but this seems like a big cop-out….I’m going to do something that would surely make the NRC cringe and just
compute for each art-history program the average of the high and low
rankings from both [of NRC’s] methods, to produce a simple, ranked
list.
Let the debate (“My school’s better than your school.”) begin.