dr. t

This is, quite frankly, shit advice, given by someone who has obviously not begun to experience the consequences of their decisions. As I have said at length elsewhere, a poor funding package is not simply a temporary inconvenience without future repercussions. Nor are these repercussions "merely" financial; a poor funding package will adversely affect your scholarship. If you're instructor of record for a course every semester, and your colleague at an Ivy* has to simply TA for 3 years, which of you do you think will have a better dissertation? When you have to scramble, beg, and borrow to get to your regional conference, your Ivy colleague has a $3k pot of money they can simply ask for every year, is spending every summer at their archives, and is also at that conference. Because they make a livable stipend, they can afford to drop $50 on the conference dinner for your specialist subfield, and thus schmooze with all the senior professors in that field. If you do not have the same benefits, you are at a massive structural disadvantage. If you are not offered (1) a livable stipend for 5 years, with health care and a clear means of obtaining 6th year funding, (2) reliable, regular, and easily identified internal avenues for research, conference, and travel funding, and (3) a package with a moderate to light teaching load, like TA-ships with a sabbatical year, do not attend that program, even if it means not going to grad school. *NB: "Ivy" here is shorthand for "highly regarded and well funded program". I recognize there are many of these that are not technically Ivies.

That's a good feeling. Listen to your feelings.

Fellowships are one thing, but easy access to regular pots of funding are vital.

PB is gross.

Honestly, pick up a work-study. You're not going to have nearly the time you did as an undergraduate.

Anything worth thinking is worth over-thinking.

Surely you mean Old Church Slavonic.

This is absolutely not a good thing. Yes, you need teaching experience to land a job. Yes, you need to be good at teaching. And yes, some SLACs value teaching very highly. But the "look at all this great teaching experience" is how a lot of programs convince their graduate students that they're not being screwed. On the job market, teaching is a check box - the applicant needs to show that they can do it, and that people seem to like them doing it. But being an occasional TA is enough to demonstrate competence. The expectation is usually that the applicant has enough training to learn the rest on the job. If you're putting even a fraction of the necessary work to be IOR on a course every semester, your research agenda is suffering for it. That doesn't mean you can't still turn out good work, but the competition is relative, not absolute. A student at Harvard, for example, doesn't have nearly such a demand on their time to distract them from their dissertation, and so they have the time not only to craft a better dissertation, but to go on research trips, and to present and network at conferences. If you think that even the most pedagogically-minded SLAC would value a couple courses as IOR over this, you simply do not have any sort of a grasp on the realities of the job market. These are the criteria that make a good program, in no particular order: Well-regarded professors to sit on your committee who are close enough to your interests to be able to provide competent guidance. A livable stipend, granted for at least 5 years, including health care. Bonus points if there are easy mechanisms to acquire 6-7yr funding. Reliable, regular, and easily identified internal avenues for research, conference, and travel funding. I can wrangle ~$3k a year from internal grants, which means I get at least one conference per year and two weeks in Europe (for archival work) in the summer. Manageable teaching load. Preferably TA ships, but opportunities to be IOR as you're finishing up are good. My university has a program through which you are made a VAP in your final semester (if you finish your diss the semester before). Good programs will also give you fellowship years (for me, years 1 and 4) to concentrate on your research. Solid placement rate. Though really, this follows from all the other points. It's not that the top schools have the brightest students, it's that they have the resources to provide the structure with the best guarantee of success. The list of schools that fit this criteria is very short. Depending on field, it can be as few as 3 and as many as 20, many of which are obvious (Ivies), but not necessarily so. If you do not get into one of them, it is very much my advice that you should not go for your PhD elsewhere.

What constitutes "least securely funded", quantitatively? Having a precise match on your adviser is much less important than having a funding package that will allow you to produce high-quality research, and so land a job.

I second @TMP's excellent advice. Apply to the places that excite you. It is better to not go than it is to settle for a program.

I don't quite agree that any of the comments, directed at you or otherwise, were intended be hurtful. But the ability to absorb helpful advice regardless of the packaging is also a valuable skill in academia.

This forum generally skews older and towards the non-traditional, and so what you don't get is that a lot more of us have been in the same boat than you seem to think. The advice still applies, because you'll be in the exact same place when your daughter's 12 and you're on the job market. And again, if you're lucky, when she's 14 after your first postdoc. And then when she's about to head off for college and you're up for tenure.

I fell off my bike. Yeah, for all 8 of them. No, not all at once - these two are still healing!

I'm going to cry.

Are you really OK with being labeled a Terrierist? (Another vote for HDS from an alumnus)

Yes! I had a bit in my original about self-selection among applicants, but it seems I edited it out somewhere. It definitely takes a certain level of self-confidence/arrogance to apply to Princeton in the first place. In addition to the phenomena you describe, ideas about "safety" and "reach" schools - ideas not particularly suited to PhD apps - still have strong currency.

No, absolutely. There's even some studies floating around on academic hiring practices that suggest the same conclusions.

Yes, exactly. They are better at achieving the very things they, by virtue of their social position, are able to construct as desirable. The claim of superiority has no objective grounding (really, what does?), but that doesn't mean you can ignore it.

I never suggested that this wasn't the case. I suggest you re-read what I've written. Difference does not mean superiority. Are they socially constructed? Yes. Reinforcing current power structures? Yes. Biased? Yes. Bad? Yes. There's no objective basis that establishes the system. That doesn't mean that there isn't a logic internal to that system. Recognizing that logic is the first step in manipulating it. This is a forum for applying to grad school, not overthrowing the neoliberal hegemony, as appealing as that might be. The differences within the top three programs? I don't think there is anything substantial. The differences between, say, the top three programs and, say ranks 20-50 (however you do that)? Funding, scope of inquiry, teaching vs. research expectations, the role the professors themselves see in guiding the discipline, the self-selection of applicants, and the networks which privilege and legitimize the scholarship such programs produce. I'm a firm believer in the idea that intelligence, particularly the sort of intelligence necessary for success in academia, is a learned trait, and upper-tier programs provide the template to which others mold themselves. But the ultimate point is that there's no objective ground for "superior scholarship". The top-tier programs produce the criteria on which scholarship is deemed "superior". To put it another way, when I say there are real differences between hypothetical candidates to the two programs above, I mean that the person who gets into Princeton has a better command of the socio-cultural performance (in the technical sense, not in terms of grades, etc.) expected of them.

I would caution against putting too much weight here. Yes, it's absolutely true that there's a large amount of noise in the system, and that the system doesn't actually simply place the best candidates at the best schools on some platonic level. But there is rhyme and reason here, and rejections from all schools, or from all schools of a certain tier, absolutely points to some underlying problem in an application. An applicant has no "objective value as a scholar", and of course a university's criteria for candidates are political constructs (nature is a political construct too, but I digress). But the political constructs Princeton uses to select its candidates correlate to the political constructs that underwrite what we view as scholarly success. There are real differences between candidates who get into Princeton and those who get into Missouri State - there are real differences between the applicants to those two programs - and it's not wise to gloss over that fact. I say this not to be cruel - the application is not coterminous with the applicant - but to encourage the self-reflection and evaluation necessary for success.

In many universities, you cannot work while receiving a grad stipend. It's quite possible your advisers hands are tied. Figure this out first.

Don't beat yourself up over it. You have until April 15th. Don't rush it. How many people Harvard takes from the waitlist is EXTREMELY variable.