armedwithamind

Thanks for the reality check (no sarcasm)! Im going to begin to study for the GRE and my hopes are to hit, at the very least, a 163 Verbal and 150 (ideally 155) on the quantitative. I think the biggest reason I wanted to bypass the masters was not wanting to incur much (if any) debt. I enjoy administrative functions but ultimately I want to be in higher education policy/teaching higher education. I live in Virginia and there are a number of schools with masters in Higher Education (UVA, William and Mary, Va Tech, ODU). The best of these, IMO, is UVA. Since finances are a major concern of mine, I'm interested in knowing what Masters programs provide the best funding for accepted masters applicants. Any suggestions? Given my strong interest in Development/Advancement/Philosophy I am particularly interested in Michigan.

Hello all, I'm new to gradcafe and am in the preliminary stages of planning to apply for Phd programs for higher education. I principally want to gain a realistic expectation of what my chances are for Phd programs. A bit of background, I started my undergraduate career at a community college at which I had a GPA of around 3.4. I then transferred to a quality (though not well known) state university and graduated in 2012 with a double major in Public Policy & Administration and History with a minor in Classical Studies. My GPA was 3.1 at this institution. I took the GRE in February of 2012 with absolutely no studying and scored the following: 163 verbal 146 quantitative 4.5 writing I am confident with studying I can raise my quantitative to around 155 and possibly bump my writing up to 5. Despite my low quantitative score on the GRE I have fairly decent statistical abilities and am capable of using software such as SPSS Statistics for research. I currently am a financial aid administrator at a top 3 public university and have been in this position for 9 months. Before that, as a student, I worked part time as a prospect research assistant and had an internship with a community development office at a local government. I am working on narrowing down my research interests but some of the more broad interests I have are: -Higher education development/philanthropy/endowment policy -Financial aid policy/access issues -Higher education infrastructure -Student/alumni engagement strategies -Greater public policy's interaction with higher education policy. Again, these are just some broad interests I have and would, to the best of my ability, involve them in application materials. As previously mentioned I'm trying to gauge my chances at admission to Phd programs. Do I have a realistic shot at any of the top tier universities (Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, Vanderbilt, Penn etc) or should I set my sights lower? Should I gain a few more years of work experience before I bother applying? Any advice/suggestions would be much appreciated. Also, not that I don't intend to dig through countless professor bios and scholarly articles, but if anyone has any suggestions for universities that have professors that have considerable research in my fields of interest (in particular higher education philanthropy and financial aid policy) I would appreciate being pointed in the right direction. Thanks in advance.