APDA Update

A few weeks ago I posted some details about a new project: Academic Placement Data and Analysis (APDA) here. Readers may be interested in some updates to that project. Note: We are sending out emails to program representatives over the next few hours with much of this information, including an extended collection goal date of July 22nd, 2015. The original blogpost is quoted below.

1) Total Placement Records

"There are approximately 2300 total entries, with several categories of data."

As of noon on July 13th, we had 3078 placement records for 2444 people--that is 573 more placed candidates than we had in the database on June 23rd. (In comparison, PhilJobs, the next most comprehensive database, had 2307 placement records for junior hires at that same time.)

2) Custom Links

"Over the next 24 hours we will send emails to representatives of 169 philosophy departments (using 291 unique email addresses) that provide a custom link to a page with the data that we have for that department so far together with the option to edit those entries and to add new entries."

The links that we sent on June 23rd have been improved in several ways: we added the ability to delete records, to add non-academic placements, to list graduates who have not found placement, to choose from a higher number of job types (i.e. new subcategories of "permanent" and "temporary"), to select "unknown" or "expected" for year of graduation/placement, and to add notes about the placement record. Each of these changes is based on feedback that we received over the past weeks, together with discussion among the project members. In order to make these changes, we received an update to our IRB approval on July 9th. 

3) Project Members

"The current project members include myself, Patrice Cobb (psychology, UC Merced), Angelo Kyrilov (computer science, UC Merced), David Vinson (cognitive science, UC Merced), and Justin Vlasits (philosophy, UC Berkeley)."

We have added an undergraduate research assistant to the project--Evette Montes--who will be working to incorporate another round of data from PhilJobs, checking placement pages, and performing an accuracy check on a subset of the data. We are also in the process of adding another undergraduate research assistant--Cruz Franco--who will be working to add information on Carnegie Classification, among other efforts. 

4) Final Report

"We are committed to generating analyses and a placement report on this data by August 31st, 2015, which will be made publicly available on the website: placementdata.com."

For this report, we hope to have complete placement records for the years 2011-2015 for as many programs as possible. We have so far relied on self-report and the reporting of departmental officers, to whom we are very grateful for their time and effort. Out of 169 programs, 4 have said that they will not take part in this effort. One was concerned about duplication with PhilJobs, and said that they would only provide information to PhilJobs. One was concerned about privacy, and said that they would not supply the names of graduates to this project, even with the protections we have in place. Two said that they do not currently have access to this information, and do not think they will have access to this information in the next year. For the remaining 165 programs, we have links to 124 placement pages. We will do our best with the time remaining to update our database with information from these pages. Other data gathering efforts we hope to accomplish include: graduation information, Carnegie Classification, gender/race/ethnicity data, and a pilot survey. 

If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below or email them to [email protected].