BFB

Thanks. It means a lot to me, actually: we've put significant time and effort into making our website as informative as it can be. I was thrilled when you linked to our Time to Completion page... I wrote it (and made the graphic) myself.

It definitely doesn't mean that we don't care. In our case, it generally means that the student didn't win a fellowship in the Grad School competition, which we have no control over, and some rule precluded us from using the discretionary funds we have to cover the student in question. In our case, the Grad School creates strict requirements (3.6 GPA, 75% average verbal/quant GRE) and only gives us two waivers to use for students who don't meet those criteria. The specifics about funding are here. The upshot, though, is that we don't accept people we don't want to come. Period. If you were accepted, we want you here. If you weren't funded, that's not our ideal outcome—at all. And it doesn't necessarily reflect priority: the Graduate School might very well give funding to a low-priority candidate without leaving us enough waivers to cover all of our medium- or high-priority candidates. I realize it's a frustrating process for all of you. Believe me, it can be absolutely maddening for us.

The short answer is that, in a lot of Universities, the DGS has less control over outcomes than you might think. Some Departments get a pot of money from their Graduate Schools and can decide on admission and allocation simultaneously. Others, like ours, can make decisions about admissions but only have a limited ability to control funding allocations. In our case, we enter every one of our applicants to an internal, Graduate School-wide fellowship competition, and we have precisely zero control over who wins how much. We have a bit of funding to even out the gaps, but surprisingly little. When we allocate the funding that we have, we have to make sure that we haven't overlooked one of the Graduate School's rules for how it can be allocated and to whom. The finer points are really, really tedious. But the upshot is that what you see as an intentional decision to notify some people at one time and other people at another time may or may not be intentional. In my experience, it's more likely to be the result of a tangled bureaucracy, or of overworked people who can only devote sporadic attention to finalizing admissions decisions, or both. Unfortunately, that cuts both ways: I can't really take credit for being humane, since the Graduate School sends out the admissions letters and the funding letters in two simultaneous waves.

It can be, though some random piece of information (say, subfield) narrows things down pretty quickly, and GradCafé has this handy option that strings together your posts on a single page for anyone to read. Not on my account, I hope. I'm really not sure what benefit you get from hiding admissions info from us—or, conversely, what benefit we get from hiding much of anything from you. I'm hardly shocked, or wounded, to discover that you've been applying to other schools, and if you get into one that's a better fit for your interests than we are, it's not useful for either of us to pretend otherwise.

Bingo, on the signature blocks. Some people might Facebook stalk you, I suppose. I don't. Hadn't occurred to me, to be honest. None of my business what you do in your spare time, for one thing, and for another, I really doubt there's much correspondence between personal habits and professional aptitude.

Speaking only for myself, I'm very impressed, actually. Seeing you all congratulate one another on your successes and commiserate on your setbacks is really pretty great. Mmm, to a degree. It makes sense to try to see what other departments are doing wrong—after the drubbing Princeton received in the Results section for mixing up fonts in their letters, I'll be double-checking anything of mine that goes out!—as well as what they're doing right. But a lot of information that's available here isn't really as useful as people probably think it is. Guessing who's who can be good entertainment for a slow afternoon, and it might give us a little information about which schools we're competing with, but we find out a lot more by simply asking our applicants. Some of you even send updates (which we appreciate).

It did, didn't it? Sorry. I meant to lend some perspective, not cut off discussion. I'm not sure what sort of bravery is required, though? I've got tenure, so about the worst I have to fear from all of you is harsh language. If I've earned that, I'd rather know about it, even anonymously, so I can try to set things straight. By outing myself, I'm letting you know that you're dealing with someone who's honest enough to admit that he reads these forums. For your part, you have the opportunity to learn more about the admissions process than you could from your peers, or just get some perspective. Seems like a win-win to me.

Perhaps they're even among us.

You can't really draw many conclusions about your case from these aggregate numbers, though. A top department might have better placement, on average, than a somewhat lower-ranked department, but there will be a lot of variance in placements for each. What you need to figure out is how your placement would differ based on the program you choose. My take is that, while letterhead matters for getting your job file read in the first place, your dissertation determines whether you make the short list, and fit has a huge impact on the quality of your dissertation. You need professors who do what you do, and who are willing to work with you, far more than you need letterhead from an institution that's a few notches higher up on the USNews scale. It's true that, on average, the higher-ranked departments are going to do a better job of preparing you for the job market... but that may not hold in your specific case. So, getting hung up on T10 vs. not-T10 is a much worse use of your time than reading the cvs of the professors you'd be working with, asking them what sort of work they have in progress, and asking how they plan to turn you into the best candidate you can possibly be. Just my $0.02.