<story><title>We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs</title><url>https://community.chronicle.com/news/2283-why-we-need-a-yelp-for-doctoral-programs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;The truly disillusioned won&amp;#x27;t mind complaining, but those with even constructive criticism will feel constrained in their ability to speak out and be specific.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jseliger</author><text>In many disciplines, too, the answer is &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t go to &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; program.&amp;quot; Most humanities fields, for example, have numerous essays written about why doing grad school in them is a poor life choice, like my contribution: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jakeseliger.com&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;22&amp;#x2F;what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jakeseliger.com&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;22&amp;#x2F;what-you-should-know-befo...&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;One could say the same of most social sciences.</text></comment>
<story><title>We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs</title><url>https://community.chronicle.com/news/2283-why-we-need-a-yelp-for-doctoral-programs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;The truly disillusioned won&amp;#x27;t mind complaining, but those with even constructive criticism will feel constrained in their ability to speak out and be specific.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dopu</author><text>Completely agree. I&amp;#x27;ve become increasingly convinced that we&amp;#x27;ll need a fundamental restructuring of the academy if we want to fix any of these issues. The fact that places like MIT or Stanford will hire professors simply because they output Nature papers every year, regardless of the fact that they are totally abusive to their trainees, is a perfect demonstration of it.</text></comment>