Yeah, it would be great to know if other, larger fields are less concentrated than Anthropology. My impression is that even in a big field like English there are some highly prestigious departments whose graduates probably get more of their share of available jobs… but I don’t know if this prestige would correlate with any kind of demographic dominance. Not so much, perhaps, if there are a large number of less prestigious but also demographically large programs.

Max, it is in fact the case that very many anthro phd programs are very tiny already — admitting half a dozen a year or less. All those departments who’ve produced 100 phds over the last 20 years are, clearly, producing no more than 5 per year on average. Which is a pretty small graduating class. Your comment about anthropologists having more homogeneous educational experiences is really interesting and provocative, but would have to be tested thoroughly against these “middle-sized” departments that are actually quite small, and compared also with the situation at larger departments. We can’t assume that larger departments are necessarily educationally homogeneous — there can be a lot of internal pedagogical variation within a large program. But you’re right; homogeneity could still manifest. I’m working on an essay about one of the major required courses in Chicago, right now, actually.

Ben: Yeah, unfortunately I don’t think there are national data sets on jobs received. (Even figuring out how to measure jobs received is a bit of a challenge, it turns out if you look at CIRGE’s study on anthropology phds 5 years out.) The thing about economies of scale is interesting — certainly it’s possible to centralize certain kinds of common resources (computer labs, lounges, core courses) in larger departments. On the other hand, “economy of scale” is an expression that can lead to misuse. If there are faculty who are on 50+ advising committees and they’re so busy that their advisees feel guilty about making appointments to see them (and I do know of these cases), is that an “economy of scale”? Arguably yes, from an external viewpoint, but from the inside it just looks like degradation of the personal relations of graduate education. What do you think?

Nevertheless, I think the point you make is a significant one, because even if the numbers for anthropology are merely a scaled down version of the numbers one would see in more popular fields, it doesn’t change the fact that the educational experiences of anthropologists will tend to be more homogeneous as a result of there being fewer of them.

I guess my observation bears more on the possibility that the popularity of an academic field will directly influence–to a measurable extent, at least–how centralized it is. Of course, that’s predicated on my admittedly unscientific, probably haphazard guess standing up to scrutiny.