We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

Good luck getting honest reviews. Graduates and recent post-docs are dependent upon good letters of recommendation from their advisors for perhaps a decade after leaving their research groups.<p>The truly disillusioned won&#x27;t mind complaining, but those with even constructive criticism will feel constrained in their ability to speak out and be specific.<p>The graduate-student experience is deeply advisor-specific. Professor A may be exploitative, while Professor B may fight tooth-and-nail for student success. The statistics are low, too. Most professors will only graduate a few students per decade.

The problem here is that a Yelp rating system for restaurants can be consumed by anyone because everyone wants a good-tasting, cheap, pleasantly-served meal. There&#x27;s not a lot of range of desire and recipient goals.<p>Grad students on the other hand, come with a huge range of:<p>-- Motivations for doing a doctorate (say, purely for job prep, versus wanting a life of academia and intellectual fulfillment),<p>-- Skills and knowledge (some already essentially begun their doctoral work and have achievements already, versus those who will be wandering around searching for a topic for years),<p>-- Tolerance or willingness to engage in ambiguous, possibly dead-end leading places with no clear sign of success,<p>-- Need for financial reward &#x2F; subsistence and productive return for time or opportunity cost traded off.<p>Add to that in many fields, the supervising professor is the greatest variable, more than the program or university -- and any rating system will be irrelevant or worse, misguiding. One person&#x27;s paradise could be another&#x27;s hell. Unless the rating is so dumbed down to generic factors in which case what are you really informing people about?<p>To echo some advice of a contrarian grad school dean, go into grad school because you know what you want to write about, who you want to work with, and what you want to come out the other end with. Otherwise, the bulk majority of people going into grad school &quot;on autopilot&quot; or based on a Yelp rating are going to be sorely disappointed at some point.

The problem in doing this is that saying &quot;school X is great for getting a Ph.D.&quot; will never likely generally be true, because the Ph.D. process is so advisor dependent. However, doing this for each advisor is really hard too, because the sample size is small and it&#x27;s hard for the reviewer to remain anonymous.<p>All of that said, some set of general statistics (size of program, distribution of research group sizes, percentage of those who wanted a Ph.D. and then got one, etc.) plus a general satisfaction survey among graduate students might be a good complement to the usual ratings one sees in US News.

We barely need a Yelp for restaurants. I think it is time for the internet to acknowledge that the pointless drivel in star rating systems is just not helping anyone. If you’re going to start a system for rating things, give it more nuance and value.

No. We don&#x27;t need a consumer review website, because PhD students (I am one) are not the <i>consumers</i> of doctoral programs. We&#x27;re the workers. We need a union.<p>If we&#x27;re in a <i>good</i> program, we&#x27;re receiving valuable training both in our coursework (or before PhD in an MS&#x2F;MA if your country does it that way) and in our research work. Ideally, we&#x27;re building up a network of collaborations and acquaintances in the scientific community that gives us an &quot;in&quot; for the next stage of our career, while also being mentored by world-class experts in our fields.<p>In a not so good program, we&#x27;re used as TAs for a few years and then rapidly encouraged to drop out.<p>Either way, most of what we do is not like most of what an undergraduate student does. It is like what an entry-level professional does.

Doctoral programs are at least 4-5 years long and crazy emotionally challenging as well as a pretty surprising drop out rate, if someone doesn&#x27;t take time to research them deeply before they commit to something like that then I think that person needs to learn the lesson that that will teach them. Yelp is the surface level easy way. Networking and cold-calling tons of current phd and master&#x27;s students over the course of undergrad and during internships is how everyone does it.

I am not sure a Yelp-like system would work for the reasons others have mentioned.<p>I would suggest these metrics to help you evaluate a doc program from the outside:<p>Do early-stage grad students get (any) authorship credits together with professors or post docs? (Getting started)<p>Do they eventually get first author status? (Independence)<p>Do students go to conferences and read papers? Or does a prof just go and read all 10 from her institution? (Networking)<p>Do fresh doctors land post docs, tenure, or good private sector jobs? (Outcome)<p>A lot of this can be deduced by google (scholar) and scanning conference proceedings and video recordings.<p>(defended my doc in 2016 in Finland, been fairly succesful at post doc funding as well as private sector)

Any time education is discussed on HN it should come with a mandatory notice:<p>- Your experience is no necessarily indicative of others&#x27; experiences<p>- The US education system is not indicative of education systems in the rest of the world.

We dont need a Yelp for doctoral programs, we need a Yelp for research labs! It&#x27;s more about the lab you join than the program itself that makes or breaks your life.<p>In fact, I have heard that minimally there&#x27;s kind of a toxic labs blacklist maintained in some Chinese message boards. At least that&#x27;s what a fellow postdoc told me when I mused why we suddenly stopped getting applicants from China to our lab!

So someone to extort colleges to remove bad reviews?

I&#x27;ve done my best to create a ranking of graduate creative writing programs by measuring the appearance of programs&#x27; graduates in the top prize anthologies. It&#x27;s been generally well received although there has been some resistance to the idea of ranking programs like this. There&#x27;s still a lot of work to be done on it, but the basic structure, at least is in place.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;creativewritingmfa.info&#x2F;rankings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;creativewritingmfa.info&#x2F;rankings&#x2F;</a>

Just want to point out that many of the complaints in the comments here are US specific. At many PhD programs in Europe for example you are considered an employee of the university and not a student, this often comes with full benefits: salary, bonuses, vacation time, pension, etc. Academia in the US in particular is falling into disrepair.

As someone who dropped out of a PhD program: the most important metric is the drop out rate for the research group you are in. If you can get it for your thesis advisor, it&#x27;s even better. There are people who see all graduate students just as cheep, highly motivated labor for boosting their academic output. I had to put my advisor on papers who he had never read and I know someone who had to &quot;ghost write&quot; for her professor. Academia is a status game, and giving someone else credit for your work won&#x27;t get you anywhere.

How are the data needs for such a doctoral and post-doctoral evaluation program different from the data needs for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov</a> ?<p>Data: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;</a><p>Data documentation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;</a>

It would be better to just contact current students at the lab and offer them coffee for a conversation.

This article really rubs me the wrong way. I don&#x27;t think I would find a Yelp very valuable, and the most important metric for a PhD program isn&#x27;t job placement numbers. The idea that job placement correlates to PhD quality is just plain wrong. Incredibly intelligent students leave PhD programs through no fault of their own, and people who get nothing out of a PhD program can get a cushy job easily. It&#x27;s a horrible metric.<p>I found that the difference between faculty members at the same institution can be immense. This is because faculty have great control over your life due to how doctoral funding works in the United States. If you wish to continue a Biology degree, you must be willing to work with this faculty member, in this area, on this specific problem. Some faculty are rigid about a specific problem, some are not.<p>Even more complicated is that some students need more guidance than others. Or some students want much less. And the student doesn&#x27;t necessarily know what they need before entering the program.<p>This is why I think it&#x27;s smarter to give doctoral students more freedom and flexibility in switching faculty. The school should be supportive of a student in this process rather than focusing on their job placement numbers.

Even if you have a terrible experience in your doctoral program, much of its outward value is in the program&#x27;s reputation. Giving a program a negative review hurts the perceived value of your own education.

Basic rule: if you&#x27;re paying for a doctorate (aside from a professional degree, like an MD or JD), it&#x27;s a bad idea.

I think Glassdoor[1] would be a better analogue.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;</a>

If you&#x27;re debating whether to go to school x and work with professor y, make sure you get a chance to talk to students who work with professor y, and ideally students who work adjacent to professor y. In my experience, bad advisors usually have students who will tell you that the advisor is bad (especially if you talk to them in person or over the phone, where there&#x27;s no written record). If the students themselves are too scared, their friends probably aren&#x27;t.<p>Any good program will have a built in process, for example an admitted students event, with this kind of interaction. Any good advisor will encourage you to talk to their students. If not, that is already a red flag.<p>Talk to current and former students! I was fortunate to have a great advisor, and I was always happy to talk to admitted students.

A good mental model for graduate school is that it is a feudal system. There is essentially no oversight of professors by a larger executive branch. I mean, they can&#x27;t literally murder you, but they can drive you to suicide. (Jason Altom)<p>If you get lucky, you get a professor that believes in you (this can be one of the most rewarding experiences I know of).<p>If you aren&#x27;t lucky, then things will get really rough. I&#x27;ve seen professors: - Spike their student&#x27;s candidicy at the last minute (meaning the student had to switch groups in their last year, essentially having to redo their PhD in another group) - Spike student papers - finding out where their former student was applying for jobs, calling and spiking their job application (talking shit) - various abuses (yelling at student for not working on Christmas, humiliating student for years in public, sexual harassment)<p>I could go on. If you haven&#x27;t been through grad school, you might ask &quot;why not leave&#x2F;vote with your feet?&quot;<p>But understand the power dynamic: in really broad strokes, the student works towards a reward (being a Dr&#x2F;PhD) that will take, on average, 5-6 years. Getting that reward is completely up to your supervisor&#x27;s discretion. It&#x27;s like if you worked at a startup for six years for minimum wage, but if your boss agrees to it, you will get a million dollar payout (also, your boss can&#x27;t be fired, ever.) And that&#x27;s just a minimum-- success in academia is dependent on getting full throated letters of rec from your supervisor, so they also have to really like you.<p>So your professional success is completely up to one person: if they decide to fuck you over, that can be 4 years of work down the drain.<p>When I was in graduate school, I never saw the faculty&#x2F;department intervene in any of the abusive situations. The only thing that protects students are soft processes, like knowing which professors are really bad. The Yelp idea is good, simply because it increases that ability.<p>And those abuses I talked about? A majority of my cohort dealt with that (at a large, well known University), it&#x27;s not isolated to a few bad apples.

The last time I tried to interact with Iowa State University ECprE, a professor who I won&#x27;t name asked me for a $20,000 bribe to do research with their lab. Confirmed their culture is just as toxic as it was a decade ago.

A PhD is a monastic experience, I remember reading that on a blog somewhere. Couldn&#x27;t agree more.<p>It comes with all the same features (it&#x27;s even baked into the history of education being baked in to the Church).

There&#x27;s a simple objective metric that could capture most of what you&#x27;d want to know about any school and put USNews&#x27;s rankings out of business: graduates&#x27; achievement. How much are graduates making 10 years later? How many have prestigious jobs or other accomplishments such as research grants or awards? Universities do track these kinds of metrics as part of their alumni fundraising efforts but they&#x27;re rarely publicly disclosed.

The variation among thesis advisors within a given doctoral program is sufficiently great that it should be<p>We need a Yelp for doctoral thesis advisors.<p>I think the author was reluctant to “go there.”

A decent review site would be awesome.<p>I have been looking at WGU for an online MBA degree. Reviews are just scattered everywhere from Reddit to affiliates websites.

There was a news article about this in Science two years ago, which a couple such efforts: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencemag.org&#x2F;careers&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;crowdsourcing-goes-academic-platforms-reviewing-advisers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencemag.org&#x2F;careers&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;crowdsourcing-goe...</a>

Forget about yelp and ranking and rating. Ithink the folks realize there is not a single US website that lists all the graduate schools and the courses details. We are talking about solving the next step of the problem when basic aggregation is missing.

Not a fan of Yelp, but I see a need for a Yelp-like lookup for landlords and superintendents.

I was thinking the other day that I need a Yelp-like experience for technical tutorials and creators of educational content online.<p>I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the one who ran into so many shitty tutorials&#x2F;how-to guides&#x2F;videos through the years.

For real.<p>But the title itself is something worth a moment of reflection.<p>Doctoral programs are supposed to be scarce, selective and of high profile. Now they are being treated as a service that can be requested and compared against.

The problem isn’t that we’ve locked opinion inside communities. It’s that doctoral programs are so poorly run. That universities are waiting for quantitative data to instill action is more sign of dysfunction.<p>Here’s yelp for grad programs. Write down the name of the program you’re looking at and make an asterisk. One star — it’s already more accurate than Yelp on restaurants.

collegescorecard measures the outcome. In the post, Profesor Leonard talks about doctoral programs being rated based on research outcomes.

ejmr exists