In the comments on my old post on Placement rates for philosophy departments, Richard Heck notes that the success rates of departments listed don’t correlate very well with Leiter rankings. It’s nice work, and another piece of data for incoming grad students to consider.
Just to be clear (and this is feeling a bit pro forma by now) my highlighting some critical posts Richard has made does not mean I endorse all of his criticisms of the PGR. I’m inclined to think that the PGR on the whole is a very good thing, especially for students who are not from highly ranked departments to start with. (I’d like to do some long defence of the PGR using the Condorcet Jury Theorem here, noting the probability that hundreds of philosophers will provide better net advice than Professor X at college Y who hasn’t read any journals since 1990 and doesn’t know how much difference Rutgers recent hires make to their quality since he hasn’t heard of any of the people they hire. But I don’t know enough about Condorcet to do that, and it’s late, and it might turn into a rant.)
More information the better, I say.
But that means I also think that critical studies of the quality of the PGR, and constructive criticisms of its methodology, are similarly valuable, because they can be just as informative. My position is that choosing where to go to grad school is a very big decision, and hence students making that decision should really find out all they about the school they are going to, and about the schools they are choosing not to go to. The PGR helps them acquire that information, as do constructive critics who point out how much other information they should acquire, and (ideally) make some suggestions about how to acquire it. If it isn’t obvious, contacting current and recent grad students of a department and asking about the things you’re most concerned (faculty availability, teaching quality, etc) about is probably a good idea. Many people will be more than happy to spout advice.