The Monkey Cage

I was having a related conversation with my wife (who just graduated last week with a Columbia MPH in Epidemiology) recently — is there any short term quantitative measure of an academic and/or researcher at all? Citations came up, but that seems too long term to be very useful in judging whether someone in your cohort or faculty is a high-achiever.

If we assume that the quality of these new applicants (in other words, the folks who wouldn’t normally have applied had the economy been performing better) is distributed in a roughly similar manner to the quality of regular applicants (in other words, those who would have applied regardless of the state of the economy), then it should be possible to fill Ph.D. programs with higher quality students (simply because there will be more of them in the applicant pool).

Is this a fair assumption? My impression is that people who come into a graduate program because of a recession are more likely to leave when the economy recovers. There’s a high rate of attrition in many graduate programs. Someone who’s in the third year struggling with exams and a thesis topic might find a good-paying non-academic job highly alluring, particularly if his/her old friends and colleagues are telling him/her how great the non-academic job market has become. Those of us who were never particularly interested or good at making money in the first place would probably be less tempted.

Following Seth, if the recession attracts a lot of people looking to grad school as a place to ride out the downturn, the quality of political science might go down, since these students will crowd out others who are really committed to the discipline.

Of course, the fact that I entered grad school at the height of the boom has nothing to do with me offering this theory.

This ignores all other influences on the political science economy.

Perhaps the economy affects funding levels at universities (fewer donations, more financial aid…) and this decreases the quality or level of output of political science programs.

For instance, universities may rely more heavily on adjunct professors, or they could increase class sizes.

There would also presumably be less money to pay for studies, or at least pressure to downsize or cut corners.

Nothing’s in a vacuum.

No, no, NO, NOOOOOOO!
A bad economy and the collapse of the finance “industry” leads to massive lay-offs and disgruntlement among quantitatively-inclined workers … leading some of those students who would normally be drawn to finance to consider academia. A few drift into political science where one sorry SOB devises the new algorithm that allows game theorists to predict all future electoral outcomes on the basis of the most recent election. It proves accurate during the next election cycle, forcing all political scientists to specialize in the new technique/field of quantum-polling … just in time for the bubble to burst.

I just hope it leads to better economics…

I would think the switch from Republican to Democratic domination of politics would have a larger effect.

There are many more young Democrats than Republicans and now that their party is in power they have a much better chance of parlaying a degree into a non-academic job.

The best one can hope for is that a downturn in the economy forces young minds to realize the inherent boom/bust mentality that prevails in the non-academic world. Having awareness/memory of highly compensated individuals with no work will allow some people to stay in graduate school during boom periods and turn down more alluring jobs.

That said, the effect is likely to be minor. A more powerful force is the crowding out effect mentioned above coupled with a higher attrition rate along the way.

My guess is that the downturn will lead to brighter morons, until PS matches econ in the bright moron category.

The chance that anyone in econ or PS will learn anything from the collapse of the world economy is zero. Understanding what just happened is not what academia is for.

Present company included, except for soullite.

What a bunch of fucking morons, with apologies to the moron-American community, which does not deserve comparison to the like of you at all.

Next up: will the Black Plague good for the monk biz? Most signs say Yes, but you might have to revise your message.

Jesus fucking Christ, guys. When I look at the future, I ask who will hurt (with special reference to six adult members of my family) and what the political outcomes will be.

You motherfuckers, experts in politics, ask what the effect will be on recruiting for your departments. Because, you know, PS isn’t about reality. It’s about PS.

I laughed pretty hard at John Emerson’s completely accurate point about political science and reality.

For non-specialists: I don’t know who John Emerson is (a Google search for “John Emerson political science” yielded nothing useful) but he knows nothing about political science, or social science more generally. Research involves investigating the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable. The state of the economy is a perfectly valid, even common, IV to analyze. The quality of PS research is an unusual DV, but hardly out of the realm of reality when it comes to topics of study. Joshua’s proposal is a sound one.

Isn’t the model assuming that poli sci departments can do a good job selecting the “good” applicants, i.e., applicants who will become productive and interesting political scientists, out of the pool?

As other commenters have suggested, there is a lot of attrition in grad school, and many highly recruited students don’t finish, or even if they finish, they don’t make the transition to productive scholar. (We could all come up with examples, I’m sure.)

My sense is that recruiting is pretty much a crap shoot. Academic poli sci is not what many applicants are expecting—more math, less politics. The more math-inclined applicants have a different set of pathologies; I would summarize by saying generating research questions is much harder when you don’t have broader interests than methods.

Now, the crap shoot is probably a constant; departments are no better or no worse at picking the applicants who will become productive scholars, regardless of the pool size. But if that’s the case, and assuming that the proportion of the pool made up of [theoretically] better applicants is not larger in a downturn (i.e., the pool is inflated by all quality of applicants in a downturn), then is there really reason to think that departments will recruit better applicants?

I guess I would say that the way the question is framed in the post assumes that the problem departments have in recruiting is the lack of quality applicants. Is that a safe assumption to make?

Emery:
Your point is well taken. However, if yo’re willing to assume that the correlation between the “true” quality of an aplicant and the “judged” quality of the applicant is positive and non-zero (that is, that it’s neither negative nor totally random), then no matter how small the correlation is, I think it follows in this part of Josh’s chain of logic that expanding the pool should produce a higher-quality set of enrollees. The assumption seems reasonable to me; I’m not sure that the correlation is high enough to matter a great deal, but at the very least I’m willing to grant that it’s neither negative or 0.

Lee:
Good point, but if the correlation is not very high, then the effect will be at the margin, at best, no? And any measure of quality will have slack in it—e.g., how to count specialty journals versus ‘major’ journals, how to count co-authored pieces, articles versus monographs, etc. Not to mention the metrics for quality are always on the move.

I’m just not sure that there’s a testable proposition in there. I may, as always, be wrong.

Ah, but what about part (iii) of John’s point #2? If economic downturns lead to people going to graduate school who aren’t as well suited to it, then that graduate school population is made weaker, and graduate education suffers.

The question is: does the average of the graduate population matter, or is it more about exposure to the superlatives? If the latter, then the increased pool could likely only help, as Lee’s positive correlation argument would suggest. However, if the average is what matters, then I tend to be pessimistic.