Recalling my active days in the rat race of academia, a cold shiver runs down my spine at the thought of departmental rankings in the hands of a Dean contemplating budgeting and merit raise pools or second-guessing departmental hiring decisions.
But let a half-century go by and now, reborn as a historian of economics, I appreciate having the aggregated opinions of yore to constrain our interpretive structures of what mattered when to whomever.
Research tip: sign up for a free account at archive.org to be able to borrow items still subject to copyright protection for an hour at a time. Sort of like being in the old reserve book room of your brick-and-mortar college library. This is needed if you wish to use the links for the Keniston, Carter, and Roose/Andersen publications linked in this post.
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1925 Rankings
R. M. Hughes. A Study of the Graduate Schools of America (Presented before the Association of American Colleges, January, 1925). Published by Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. (See earlier post that provides the economics ranking from the Hughes’ study)
1957 Rankings
Hayward Keniston. Graduate Study and Research in the Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania (January 1959), pp. 115-119,129.
Tables from Keniston transcribed here at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror:
https://www.irwincollier.com/economics-departments-and-university-rankings-by-chairmen-hughes-1925-and-keniston-1957/
1964 Rankings
Allan M. Cartter, An Assessment of Quality in Graduate Education Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1966.
1969 Rankings
Kenneth D. Roose and Charles J. Andersen, A Rating of Graduate Programs. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1970.
Tables transcribed below.
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Graduate Programs in Economics
(1957, 1964, 1969)
| Percentage of Raters Who Indicate: | |||||||
| Rankings | “Quality of Graduate Faculty” Is: | ||||||
| 1957 | 1964 | 1969 | Institution | Distiguish- ed and strong |
Good and adequate | All other | Insufficient Information |
| Nineteen institutions with scores in the 3.0 to 5.0 range, in rank order | |||||||
| 1 | 1* | 1* | Harvard | 97 | – | – | 3 |
| not ranked | 1* | 1* | M.I.T. | 91 | – | – | 9 |
| 2 | 3* | 3 | Chicago | 95 | – | – | 5 |
| 3 | 3* | 4 | Yale | 90 | 3 | – | 7 |
| 5* | 5 | 5 | Berkeley | 86 | 9 | – | 5 |
| 7 | 7 | 6 | Princeton | 82 | 9 | – | 10 |
| 9 | 8* | 7* | Michigan | 66 | 22 | – | 11 |
| 10 | 11 | 7* | Minnesota | 65 | 19 | – | 15 |
| 14 | 14* | 7* | Pennsylvania | 62 | 22 | – | 15 |
| 5* | 6 | 7* | Stanford | 64 | 25 | – | 11 |
| 13 | 8* | 11 | Wisconsin | 63 | 26 | – | 11 |
| 4 | 8* | 12* | Columbia | 50 | 37 | – | 13 |
| 11 | 12* | 12* | Northwestern | 52 | 32 | – | 16 |
| 16 | 16 | 14* | UCLA | 41 | 38 | – | 21 |
| not ranked | 12* | 14* | Carnegie-Mellon Carnegie-Tech (1964) | 39 | 35 | – | 26 |
| not ranked | not ranked | 16 | Rochester** | 31 | 39 | 1 | 29 |
| 8 | 14* | 17 | Johns Hopkins | 31 | 56 | – | 13 |
| not ranked | not ranked | 18* | Brown** | 20 | 52 | 1 | 27 |
| 15 | 17 | 18* | Cornell** | 21 | 56 | 2 | 21 |
| *Score and rank are shared with another institution. | |||||||
| **Institution’s 1969 score is in a higher range than ist 1964 score. | |||||||
| Ten institutions with scores in the 2.5 to 2.9 range, in alphabetical order (1969) |
||
| Duke | ||
| Illinois | ||
| Iowa State (Ames) | ||
| Michigan State | ||
| North Carolina | ||
| Purdue | ||
| Vanderbilt | ||
| Virginia | ||
| Washington (St. Louis) | ||
| Washington (Seattle) | ||
| Sixteen institutions with scores in the 2.0 to 2.4 range, in alphabetical order (1969) |
||
| Buffalo* | ||
| Claremont | ||
| Indiana | ||
| Iowa (Iowa City) | ||
| Kansas | ||
| Maryland | ||
| N.Y.U. | ||
| North Carolina State* | ||
| Ohio State | ||
| Oregon | ||
| Penn State | ||
| Pittsburgh | ||
| Rice* | ||
| Texas | ||
| Texas A&M | ||
| Virginia Polytech.* | ||
| * Not included in the 1964 survey of economics | ||