Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fifteen Years of Research on Graduate Education in Economics: What Have we Learned?

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 45; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00220485.2014.942410

2152-4068

Wendy A. Stock, John J. Siegfried,

Corporate Finance and Governance

AbstractIn this article, the authors summarize their 15 years of research on graduate education in economics in the United States. They examine all stages of the process, from the undergraduate origins of eventual economics PhDs to their attrition and time-to-degree outcomes. For PhD completers, the authors examine job market outcomes, research accomplishments, and career paths over the first five and 10 years of their careers.Keywords: attritioneconomics job marketgraduate educationtime-to-degreeJEL code: A2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSPat Fisher and Yungben Yelvington provided research assistance. Opinions, conclusions, or recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Economic Association, Spencer Foundation, or Ford Foundation. Ronald Ehrenberg, Malcolm Getz, Jeffrey Groen, Daniel Hamermesh, W. Lee Hansen, Peter Kennedy, Maresi Nerad, Barbara Wolfe, and Jeffrey Wooldridge advised on the design of parts of the study.Notes1The American Economic Association, "Graduate Study in Economics Web Pages" at www.aeaweb.org/gradstudents lists all of the economics PhD programs in the United States.2Complete descriptions of the survey methodology, response rates, and sample representativeness for the class of 1997 and class of 2002 are available in Siegfried and Stock (Citation1999) and (2004), respectively.3The 2012 Digest of Education Statistics reports in Table 364 that there were 968 doctoral degrees awarded in economics by U.S. universities in 1996–97 and 826 awarded in 2001–2. For more information on differences in the counts of economics PhD degrees awarded as tabulated by different sources, see Finegan (Citation2014).4We also separately examined the labor market for Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics PhDs in these cohorts (Stock and Siegfried 2006b).5Information on these surveys is available in Stock and Siegfried (2006c) and (2014).6The programs include 15 of the 22 largest, plus 12 others. Each program graduates an average of at least five PhDs per year. Together, the 27 programs produced 42 percent of the PhDs issued by U.S. programs awarding at least one degree from 1998 to 2001. Higher-ranked programs are over-represented: 22 of the 27 are among the top-rated 48 programs. Because these programs recruit more qualified students, help them finish faster, and place them in better jobs, our data may understate attrition for the entire population of economics PhD-producing programs.7For more detail on the attrition and completion rates of this cohort at varying stages of their PhD education, see Stock, Finegan, and Siegfried (2006), (2009a), and (2009b), and Stock, Siegfried, and Finegan (Citation2011).8We assigned the programs in our data to tiers based on the 1993 National Research Council (NRC) ratings (Goldberger, Maher, and Flattau Citation1995). Tier 1 in the ratings consists of Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. The second tier is California-Berkeley, Columbia, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Pennsylvania, Rochester, UCLA, and Wisconsin. The third tier is the 15 programs ranked 16–30 (UC-San Diego, NYU, Cornell, Cal-Tech, Maryland, Boston University, Duke, Brown, Virginia, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Washington, Michigan State, University of Illinois-Urbana, Washington University-St. Louis, and the University of Iowa). The fourth tier programs ranked 31–48, and the fifth tier includes the remainder of the programs. The one unranked program in our study was assigned to Tier 5.9Because our study of the entering class of 2002 was focused on attrition and completion, and because the students finished their PhDs in different years, we did not formally survey that group regarding their employment outcomes.10Nominal salaries rose from an average of $53,000 for those in 9–10 month academic positions in 1997 to $71,000 for those starting similar jobs in 2002 (Siegfried and Stock 1999, 2004) to nearly $90,000 for those starting in 2010 (Deck, Jebaraj, and Currington Citation2011).11Journals among the top-50 were determined from Kalaitzidakis, Theofanis, and Stengos (Citation2001).Additional informationFundingFinancial support came from the Ford Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.