"Productive" Procrastination ho!: NRC releases long-awaited grad school study

Seniors, rejoice! As the economic climate continues to worsen and Princeton in Asia begins to look like an increasingly viable career move, the powers that be are making it even easier to apply to (or, at the very least, research) graduate programs.This Tuesday, the National Research Council released an exhaustive and long-awaited report comparing a number of doctoral programs in the United States, including data from over 5,000 graduate programs at 212 universities.One of our very own, Dr. Jeremiah P. Ostriker, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton, chaired the committee; though he might have been able to put in a good word for the old orange and black, it was, in all likelihood, not a very specific one.The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Dr. Ostriker as saying, "There are many different sources of uncertainty in the data...We put them together as well as we could.... That means that we can't say that this is the 10th-best program by such-and-such criteria. Instead, we can say that it's between fifth and 20th, where that range includes a 90-percent confidence level. It's a little unsatisfactory, but at least it's honest."Words to live by.To download the full report, click here.Or, if you're not in the mood to read 264 pages of pure statistical lovin', you can use this snappy tool created by the Chronicle of Higher Education to find the real world evasion module that best suits you!