Ph.D.s Conferred Per Tenured Faculty

I’m interested in comparing departments within the college based on metrics of productivity. There are various ways to do this of course but here I examined the number of Ph.D.s conferred. Departments with more faculty are expected to produce more Ph.D.s. Also since early-career faculty require some time to graduate a Ph.D. student, I divide the number of Ph.D.s conferred by the total number of tenured faculty. With the help of Audrey Nichols I obtain annual counts of faculty by rank for the six departments. With the help of Nancy Marcus I obtain annual counts of Ph.D.s conferred. Then using the following code I plot the annual number per year (2005-2014) and the rank of the department per year.

Number of Faculty

Order from left to right is: ECO, PA, PS, SOC, URP, GEO

AllFac = read.csv(file = "FacultyNumbers.csv", header = TRUE)
JunFac = read.csv(file = "JuniorFacultyNumbers.csv", header = TRUE)
SenFac = AllFac - JunFac
SenFac$Year = AllFac$Year

PhDs Conferred

Wide = read.csv(file = "PhDsConferred.csv", header = TRUE)
names(Wide) = c("Year", "Economics", 
                "Public Administration", "Political Science", 
                "Sociology", "Urban and Regional Planning", 
                "Geography")

Wide2 = Wide/SenFac
Wide2$Year = Wide$Year

Wide to long

library("tidyr")
library("ggplot2")
library("ggthemes")
Long = gather(Wide, Department, PhDs, 2:7)

Long2 = gather(Wide2, Department, PPF, 2:7)
ggplot(Long2, aes(x = Year, y = PPF, color = Department)) +
  geom_line(size = 2) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = 2005:2014) +
  ylab("PhDs Conferred Per Tenured Faculty") +
  theme_economist() +
  ggtitle("PhDs Per Tenured Faculty") +
  scale_color_few(palette = "medium")

Rankings

library("dplyr")

## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'
## 
## The following object is masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter
## 
## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
## 
##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

library("ggthemes")
Ranks = Long2 %>%
  group_by(Year) %>%
  mutate(Rank = rank(-PPF, ties.method = "random"))
ggplot(Ranks, aes(x = Year, y = Rank, color = Department)) +
  geom_point(size = 10, shape = 15) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = 2005:2014) +
  scale_y_reverse(breaks = 1:6) +
  ylab("Rank") +
  theme_economist() +
  ggtitle("Departmental Rank\nBased on PhDs Conferred Per Tenured Faculty") +
  scale_color_few(palette = "medium")

Public Administration stands out as the most productive department in terms of efficiently producing Ph.D.s ahead of Political Science, Geography, and Sociology. By rank Public Administration, Sociology, Political Science, and Geography take turns being the most productive for a given year. The data and code are available on github.