BigTenPoliSci

I’m coming back here for the first time in a long time to give you a different perspective on placement figures. I don’t know of any departments that outright lie about placement, but departments have some deceptive techniques to make placement seem better than it really is. The most common technique is multiple counting. I had two one-year positions before getting offered a tenure-track and my program counts me each time. So if you don’t look carefully and critically at our placement page, I count as three placements. Most programs do some version of this little deceit. A better way to look at placement is some version of a survival analysis, but it doesn’t need to be that complicated and I don’t have the data anyhow. What I do have is the outcomes of our cohort, so I’ll describe that here. My program was in the Big Ten, somewhere between 15 and 25 in USNWR rankings. We have a history of placing okay, but we aren’t putting people into prestigious R1 jobs with regularity. Based on stories I hear from friends who came out of similar programs, our cohort’s experience is fairly typical. We started with a big cohort: there were 18 of us. The first big drop off happened after the third year, when we were down to 14. We would lose a couple more over the next two years. None of us finished until the end of year 6, when 2 defended their dissertations and took tenure-track jobs and 1 defended and took a visiting assistant professor position. The big wave of defenses happened after 7 years, but none of those finishing were going into tenure-tracks – mostly postdocs. It’s now coming to the end of the 8thyear for our cohort and of the 18 who started, this is the breakdown: 10 have PhDs, 4 are in tenure-track jobs, 4 are in postdocs, 1 is in a visiting assistant professorship, and 1 is in a non-academic job. Put into percentages, 56% of our cohort has a PhD after 8 years and 22% are in tenure-track jobs. Our program’s placement is considered fairly good. Those in tenure-track jobs and those who didn’t finish were not always the ones faculty and cohortmates predicted in the beginning. You should take two things from that: one, if you have convinced yourself (even privately) that you are a star prospect, these odds still apply to you; and two, be nice to the ones who everyone says aren’t going anywhere and don’t take the egomaniacal “stars” of the program very seriously. It’s all pretty random.

I was being a bit metaphorical about the Uber thing, but since you are suggesting that I’m simply a loser let me reiterate: I have multiple peer-reviewed publications. I am one of the few from my cohort to get even this far. And unlike you, I have a PhD in political science and I am referred to as Professor _________ when I come in to work in the morning. But don’t worry. The market is fully meritocratic, it is not stochastic, and you are just as brilliant as your undergraduate professors say you are. You’ll be sipping coffee in your tweed jacket and strolling across that picturesque campus soon! unless you fail your comps...

I haven’t stopped in here in a long time. Comparativist is 100% right. Program rank is absolutely critical. Hiring committees get hundreds of job applications. They need a heuristic to speed up the process. Program rank is key. Just as key is the professional network of your advisor. The professional network of the professor at Harvard is a galaxy removed from the professional network of the professor at Pitt. Outside of the Top 20 is really grim. I came out of a good but not the best Big 10 program. I’m a VAP with nothing lined up for next year. I have 3 peer-reviewed publications (1 solo-authored) and rock solid teaching credentials. In this year’s market I had one Skype interview and no fly outs for an interview. I might be driving for Uber in September. Those placement rates? Heavily doctored. Schools love to count a student who did a postdoc then VAP then tenure track three times. 18 people were in my incoming cohort. All 18 of us were the stars of our undergraduate departments. 5 of us have academic jobs. Those jobs outside of academia? I interviewed for a data scientist job last year at a tech giant. They were also interviewing people from Top 5 programs and the competition was fierce. People aren’t easily impressed by your PhD anymore because they have them too, often from a program better than yours. Your professors with PhDs from Alabama? They probably came out on the market before the 2008 crash. In the 1990’s you got a job because you had a defended dissertation. Now you compete with assistant professors and Princeton PhDs even for a job at U of North Florida. Someone mentioned being content with a 3-2 or 3-3 job. I thought the same way in your shoes. Those aren’t consolation prizes- those are highly sought-after jobs. Those jobs get 250 applications. Look into what is happening to enrollment at universities. Pay particular attention to what is happening to liberal arts colleges. The marketplace is continuing to contract. I’m not going to talk anyone here out of going to grad school. I was you. What I am imploring you to do is keep your eyes open when you are in a program. Think long and very hard about taking an MA and getting out. You’ll have more control over your own career, you’ll make a bigger difference in the world, and you’ll be happier.

Obviously the "reading in the shower" line was a bit of gallow's humor among graduate students. It simply meant that we read a lot our first two years in the program. Comparing experiences between disciplines is a tricky business. Your experience in social psychology and public health (fields with programs often geared specifically towards training professionals and offering part-time options) might not be comparable to a top 20 political science program that is interested only in training academics. I find the demands of economics phd's to be really scary and I don't presume to tell them what time management in their programs will be like. Was my grad school experience a lot more demanding on my time than yours was? Of course I have no way of knowing for sure. I only know my experience and that of my cohort-mates. Maybe my program was harder. Maybe you manage your time better than I do. Maybe political science is a lot different than public health and social psychology.

I just looked up my school and program. A few people with some large external fellowships reported those. These survey results might not be a good guide for what the standard packages for most students look like.

Good eye, bubbatubba. I'm in the American subfield.

RE: rank. I am referring to US News rankings. RE: directional/regional. Same thing. I just mean directional, but I was writing quickly, didn't want to use the same word in the same sentence, and didn't bother to go back and edit to create a better and clearer sentence.

One additional thing: I don't want to be too gloomy here. Pursuing a Phd might be great for you. Some of you will end up being professors. Most of you won't. Many of you will end up having PhD's. That's pretty cool.

The most memorable piece of advice I got about my first two years (the classwork portion): "If you're not reading in the shower, you're falling behind." I had an MA from a terminal masters track before I got here. i thought that experience was what PhD-track seminars and methods courses at a top 25 would be like. I was wrong. Until you are through comps, all you do is work. You mostly read, but you also write a bit (you'll write a whole lot more later). All of you on this forum will get through that process - this board is clearly biased towards better students - but don't think like I did that you'll be able to do anything else. I thought that I could do consulting jobs on the side. i tried to take on a couple of very small ones at first but quickly gave that up.

People in our program that came from abroad seem to have better outcomes. Several take academic positions in their home country after finishing here. So you are probably right - international students have more options and access to job markets that attach a premium to a top 25 US PhD.

The ones who came here with prior professional experience (real salaried jobs, not internships) are the ones with options in the private sector and government. Students straight from undergrad rarely have the network, the professionalization, or concrete experience that is essential to getting those interviews. Graduate school is sufficiently time consuming and isolating that it is pretty much impossible to build a professional network outside of academia after you start.

I will be finishing my dissertation in the near future and moving on to the next phase of my life and career. Like most grad students, I stopped visiting this site once I started and the whirlwind of grad school kicked in. I recently had a conversation with a cohort-mate about the correct and incorrect impressions we had when we applied for grad school. That conversation made me think of this site, so I have visited again a few times lately. The biggest misconception I had was about how program rank translated into job prospects. I thought that getting a PhD from Harvard, Michigan, or Stanford was what I needed if I wanted to end up at a big time R1. I didn’t get into a top 5, but that’s fine. i never wanted one of those high-pressure jobs at a top school anyway. I am delighted with a job at a 3-2 directional or a 3-3 regional. Maybe a 4-4 liberal arts school will be fun too, if it turns out that I like teaching and the location is good. I felt like my expectations were reasonable. That’s not how it works. The tenure-track (TT) jobs at the big time R1’s rarely come available, and when they do come up they go to a tiny handful (e.g., 3 or 4) market stars from the top 5. The market for ALL of the rest of the TT jobs (yes, that includes the undesirable locations and the 3-3 directional schools) is fought over by assistant professors looking to make moves and the rest of the ABD’s out of the top 10. Those of us in the 15-25 range are looking for any TT job at all, not ones we like (e.g., the Arkansas Tech opening in American politics last year got well over 100 applications). Most of us take a visiting assistant professor (VAP) or postdoc jobs somewhere for one year, and often a second one. After that some of us get a TT job at an urban commuter school or remote directional. The rest? We lose track of them. Based on Facebook and word of mouth it seems that they become homemakers, yoga instructors, high school teachers, or wherever else life takes them. After six years my cohort of 20 has 12 people left. 1 has a TT job offer. 6 of us are waiting to hear on some VAP / postdoc jobs and waiting on more to post in the spring portion of the job market cycle. The rest need more time to finish. If you are an applicant reading this, you are probably thinking that you’ll do fine. You’re really good at school. Your professors really like you. The hard part of convincing a person not to go to graduate school is that person is told all the time that s/he is one of the best from their school. S/he feels special. I get it. I felt the same way. But once you are here you realize that we were all special. And almost none of us will end up being professors.

The notion that we "only" want to write books and teach is a bit unrealistic. Going to a top 20 or 30 isn't a path to getting a TT job at a top 15 school; it offers just a chance at getting a TT anywhere at all. The "consolation prize" for those of us in the 15-25 range isn't a TT at a directional or liberal arts school. Directionals and liberal arts TT jobs are the prizes that go to the very best and lucky candidates in departments like ours - oftentimes after doing one or more VAP / post-doc appointments.

I have to politely but firmly disagree with some of the remarks about the University of Georgia. The statement that they have "a solid methods curriculum" is dubious since they don't have a clear methods track and suite of courses within the department. A huge red flag is that the department encourages students to go to econ and elsewhere for methods training. The statement that it is unusual to be able to comp in methods is simply false. Virtually all top political science programs offer methods as a major field with a prelim/comp. Further, the "fast track PhD" is just a gimmicky way of showing a standard track through a doctoral program with a timetable that assumes no additional efforts to publish or teach (i.e. a PhD for someone seeking a non-academic career). I would kill for a job UGA, but I wouldn't go there for a PhD.

aronburn, Your best play is to walk away. You have a great degree with an MA in Econ. Your best pathway into government or NGO's is getting some work experience, working from the bottom up. A PhD from a middling institution won't give you many good connections, it will bog you down for six years, and will render you "overqualified" for a lot of jobs when it's all over.