Previous rankings of I-O graduate programs have often focused on “objective” criteria related to research outcomes including publication rate and conference representation. Our ranking is differentiated by ranking I-O PhD programs according to development opportunities offered to graduate students in three core areas: teaching, research, and applied practice. Current PhD students were surveyed regarding the development opportunities available to them in their respective programs. We then weighted these opportunities using ratings from current SIOP members with experience in I-O related careers. We found that, under this ranking scheme, the most highly ranked schools varied across the three development areas, suggesting that prospective students should consider their future development and career goals when assessing potential graduate programs. Further implications and limitations of our results are discussed.

In this article, we propose a new criterion for use in evaluating and ranking graduate training programs in I-O psychology: their “interdisciplinarity,” which we conceptually define as the degree to which they contribute to and influence disciplines beyond I-O psychology, defined as publications in those disciplines and citations by those disciplines, respectively. We also present rankings of programs by their interdisciplinarity using various specific operationalizations and provide a listing of the secondary field of focus for all current individual I-O psychology PhD programs.  If you want to skip the details, you can find an alternative way of looking at the summary rankings and tables below in the web app found at https://tntlab.shinyapps.io/io_programs/, which provides the same data reported here plus summaries of individual faculty member I-O and interdisciplinary publication productivity, with the ability to filter, sort, and search.

Author Note: First three authors are listed based on contribution. Remaining authors are listed based on alphabetical order. Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Yalcin Acikgoz, Department of Psychology, Appalachian State University, Box 32109, 222 Joyce Lawrence Ln., Boone, NC (28608). Email: acikgozy@appstate.edu. Phone: +1-828-262-8926

Past I-O psychology program ranking surveys have differed in a number of respects such as sample type and size (e.g., faculty, students), type of data collected (e.g., objective, subjective), and number of programs ranked, the majority focused on ranking doctoral programs based on research productivity (Beiler, Zimmerman, Doerr,  & Clark, 2014; Gibby, Reeve, Grauer, Mohr, & Zickar, 2002; Oliver, Blair, Gorman, & Woehr, 2005; Payne, Succa, Maxey, & Bolton, 2001; Winter, Healy, & Svyantek, 1995).  An exception is the research of Kraiger and Abalos (2004) who surveyed masters and doctoral students with a focus on nonresearch factors (e.g., instruction quality, faculty support, funding, class size).

In the summer of 2016, we issued a Call for Proposals to submit unique and innovative methodologies to rank I-O graduate programs. In response to this, many projects were proposed to us. After much hard work (and the broader SIOP community’s help), the five selected projects have been completed. Each of these five papers are included in the current issue of TIP. We believe each of these papers will be an important contribution to our field and will guide individuals in the future – as well as generate much thought and discussion about the state of our field and the programs that educate the future of IO Psychology. In particular, we hope that these rankings will result in graduate programs examining themselves and thinking about ways they excel, as well as areas they could improve. Additionally, we hope that future undergraduate students applying to I-O programs will use these rankings, not to determine what the “best” programs are, but which programs are the best fit for them.