Forecasting Job Placements of Economics Graduate Students

Each year, academic departments must decide which applicants to admit to their graduate program. Although departments try to maximize a complex set of objectives through their admissions process, one important consideration is the eventual job placement and professional success of their graduates. Research on predicting successful graduate students—however defined—from the pool of applicants is sparse, and in practice , economics departments are often forced to base admission decisions on ad hoc procedures, partial information, and intuition. In this article, we report on a statistical analysis of the determinants of success among more than 300 graduate students who applied for admission to one particular “top five” economics department. Graduate students’success was measured by the students’ job placement nine years after they would have begun graduate study. This is obviously a narrow and incomplete measure of the success of graduate students (e.g., it excludes their teaching contributions), but it is a quantifiable dimension that many graduate programs care about. Although our results are relevant only for the pool of applicants to this particular graduate program, the application pool consisted of many, if not most, of the applicants to top Ph.D. economics programs in the United States, so the results could possibly be generalized beyond this one school. Our main findings were that, although there is considerable uncertainty in predicting which applicants will be placed in high-ranking jobs, the math Graduate Record Examination (GRE) score, economics GRE score, and ratings of the admissions committee are useful predictors of the applicants’ subsequent job placement. Perhaps more surprising, a statistical model based on the quantifiable