I've been catching up on old posts in my blogroll, and FSP's post here about post grad school jobs caught my eye.
I don't have any information on my grad department's placement rates. My department had a fair number of masters students, so we had a relatively low number of students intending to go into academia.
I have a better sense of how my advisor's research group did. Keeping in mind that my cohort graduated just as the economy tanked, I think we did pretty well. Nobody dropped out while I was there. My PhD friend and co-conference buddy (we were working on the different aspects of the same problem, so we ended up rooming together everywhere) is now an adjunct professor. Most of the other students were getting their masters only (my advisor was starting to wind down his career) and ended up either in consulting (industry) or government, with minimal post-graduate unemployment periods.
I agree that the measure of success for a grad program should be based on the percentage of grads placed into their intended career, not just the percentage of grads placed into academia. Hard as it can be for academic types to accept, not all of us want to be tenure-track professors.
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When I was at Berkeley (Civil Engineering), the Geology department was strongly oriented towards the petroleum business and academic/research geology. While they didn't expect their grad students to all become tenure-track professors, they weren't terribly useful if you were interested in a job anywhere other than the USGS, CDMG, or an oil or mining company. Environmental geology was still a young field, but the Civil Engineering department folks knew much more about what was happening than the Geology department folks.
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