Griswald

I think you'll be doing yourself and your department a great disservice if you go into the program making these sorts of calculations. You should take the courses that you're most interested in and in which you think you'll produce the best work. You're not going to get into a good PhD program just because you took classes with well-known professors.

Introduce yourself in an email and ask to schedule a meeting with them.

NIU offers TA-ships that pay about $11K per year. As far as I know, GSU's standard RA/TA-ship package is $5K and $10K in the first and second years, respectively. So, without factoring in cost of living, isn't NIU's funding better than GSU's?

Thanks, that's much clearer. I'm sorry if I was uncharitable before. Here's my advice. If you're certain that you'll accept the offer should you get off the wait list, and you're worried about visiting as a waitlistee, then don't visit. (Personally, I think worries about visiting as a waitlistee are mostly irrational, so I'd still visit. But that's a bit off topic.) If you're not yet certain about what you'll do should you get off the wait list, then visit. Visiting is a great way to get information about the department that is difficult to get otherwise. Plus, visits can be a lot of fun.

I'm not sure I understand your predicament. In most cases, you're supposed to accept an offer by the 15th. If you accept at school A and ask to visit, I'm sure they'd be happy to have you out, although they probably won't pay for your travel expenses at that point. If you haven't accepted A's offer, and it's past the 15th, I doubt that A would be willing to have you out for a visit that extends past the national deadline. That just makes things more difficult for everybody at A and on A's wait list. I'm especially puzzled about why you would decline an offer to visit and then ask to visit after the 15th. The reason they asked you to visit in the first place was so you could make an informed decision should you get off the wait list at the last minute. Again, I might be misunderstanding you, but I hope you don't intend to ask a department to make an exception to the national deadline so you can visit after the 15th. That strikes me as a really selfish thing to do. If you're only asking about visiting after accepting an offer, then, again, that seems totally fine.

I didn't realize that departments were allowed to do this. Did they say that your offer would be rescinded in two weeks?

There are some good points here. It's certainly true that going to Tufts does not guarantee future success. Collectively, though, these points seem to imply more pessimism than I think is warranted. If Tufts admitted you and gave you one of their most generous funding packages, you should take that as evidence that you'll succeed in the program. The adcom certainly thinks you will, and they're in a good position to predict such things. My main concern with Tufts is the cost. 80% of tuition is quite good for them (from what I've heard), but that living in Boston is quite expensive and that you'll be paying for all of your living expenses out of pocket for at least two years. You should also check on whether the tuition remission covers health insurance, school fees, and other hidden costs, as these can add up to a lot as well. Of course, finances may not be an issue for you, in which case Tufts is all the more attractive. For many people, though, the prospect of taking out loans to complete an MA in philosophy is unattractive.

Any preference yet between Harvard and Yale? (I have no horses in this race, I'm just curious.)

After the visit? How did that go?

Yeah, I would send another email to confirm that they know. Even if the department knows you're declining, it could still take awhile for it to be processed by the graduate school, which would explain why you're still getting generic emails.

It sounds like you already have an idea of what it means, then. Anyway, it's still the 15th, so try checking again at the end of the day. I think it's unlikely that you're accepted or waitlisted and they haven't told you. I get the feeling that you're hoping someone mentions that possibility.

They haven't gotten around to uploading your rejection yet, perhaps.

There's no ambiguity, but there's no guarantee that you'll receive notification by 3/15 if you've not been admitted. But, assuming the quoted text is truthful, if you're not notified by 3/15, you can infer that you're not admitted--so either rejected or on a wait list. Perhaps that's something.

With all of these variables, isn't it going to be practically impossible to analyze the raw data in a way that will be useful to future applicants?

Sorry, it wasn't obvious to me that you already had advice from your letter writers. You should just follow their advice. I don't think anyway here knows a whole lot about how wait lists typically work, let alone how they work at the particular school that you're interested in. My own uninformed view is that it can't hurt to write a short note to the department expressing your enthusiasm about the program. I wouldn't bank on it helping you much either, though.

I'd recommend talking to your advisor or one of your letter writers. Show them your wait list letter and ask how you should proceed.

I agree with MattDest. It's quite common to have outside committee members, but I think it's much less common to have your main advisor be in a different department (unless that person starts advising you at your home department and then moves before you've finished the dissertation--in that case, I think it's not uncommon for the person to continue advising you). It doesn't seem like a plan you should bank on, even as a disaster scenario.

Well, I know a few students who have done it, so it's definitely possible. I think you're right though, that you'd have to be tactful about how you go about it so as to avoid offending anyone in your department. I think you'd have to stand out as one of the department's top students in order to even consider asking.

Have you considered accepting the PhD offer with the intent to transfer later on? It's been done before, and my sense is that many departments are happy to help their students get into more prestigious programs, provided that those students are really excellent.

It's hard to answer your questions because you haven't given us a lot of important details. For example, how settled are you on your AOI? How are the placement records at both schools? Are your POIs taking new students? How successful have your POIs former students been on the job market? How high ranked is the higher ranked school? Are we talking top-10 vs. top-30 or top-30 vs. top-50? Without knowing all of this, my uninformed preference would be the much higher ranked program, especially because you said it's only somewhat lower ranked in your AOI.

I think there are lots of other questions you should be asking besides just "Does PGR ranking correlate with placement?" For example, why only count TT placement? Why not count postdocs, VAPs, lectureships, etc. and use some kind of weighting to measure the desirability of each type of position? Also, isn't it plausible that placement should correlate better with particular faculty and not the entire department? If anything, it seems to me that you should be using the specialty rankings and not the overall rankings. But this complicates things considerably. Basically, while I think it's admirable that you're willing to investigate this, I'm worried that presenting your data analysis will mislead a lot of applicants. Unless you're a professional statistician (in which case, please proceed), I think we're better off looking into placement records the old-fashioned way, i.e. asking for the raw data from individual departments, talking with our advisors, talking to current grad students and alumni, etc. EDIT: I should also add that I think the PGR overall ranking is an extremely crude, possibly bad, measure of "faculty quality" (for evidence just read the methodology page on the PGR site), and so it's not likely to yield interesting correlations. But that's a whole other can of worms...

I'm not sure this is a great idea. Make sure you read the the post that Establishment linked so you can avoid some of the errors that that study makes. Here's one thing you need to consider: placement data are backward looking. If you're looking for a meaningful correlation between PGR ranking and placement, you'd need to use past PGR rankings. Students placed in 2010-2014, would have joined their departments in 2003-2009 (give or take a few years) when those departments rankings could have differed substantially from their current (2011) rankings.

If you read the post you linked to carefully, you'll see that it points to several major methodological flaws with that study. When the study came out, a few months back, it was heavily criticized (correctly, in my view) in the philosophy blogosphere. It's false that it supports the claim that "you shouldn't go to graduate school in philosophy at anything less that a top-20 program."

I strongly agree with this. I've been told by numerous professors in my department that publishing in low-tier journals and presenting at student conferences will not help your admissions chances one bit. Of course, it's plausible that having a paper in, say, J Phil or Nous, could confer some advantage. But if your work is already good enough to get published in venues like that, I doubt you'll have much trouble getting in to good graduate programs.

Four rejections really isn't such a big deal. Especially considering they're all from really competitive, top-notch programs. Even the most successful applicants typically rack up a handful of rejections. Try not to despair just yet!