BigTenPoliSci

I should have been more clear. You won't get a bigger stipend - those are usually fixed based on your type of appointment. But you might change a two year TA guarantee into a four year TA guarantee. Or you might bump a four year TA deal to a first year fellowship plus a four year TA.
 
Absolutely play one program against another. A couple people here have especially nice deals because they used the leverage. If Illinois offers you a four year TA package and Minnesota offers you your first two years of fellowship and next two of TA, tell the Director of Graduate Studies at Illinois that Minnesota gave you this better offer. Sometimes the DGS will be able to match it. The worst that can happen is that they do nothing. On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend bluffing. Dishonesty is an especially bad way to start a graduate career. 
 
It's not about playing "hardball" or even being all that strategic. Just be honest and direct about what your options are.

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’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’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.

So in other words, don't be a dick while you are visiting.

I'm sorry for saying this, do not be offended!-but...may be, the problem is in you but not in the ranking of your program? You are thinking of driving Uber after completion of Ph.D. in a top-notch program?...well...

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.

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.

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.

Yes. And there's many other instances of 'cooking' that goes on:
1) They often don't specify position on the list. So you could get a VAP placement and that person may never find a TT job afterwards. This isn't a placement. Tied to this, sometimes they will list adjunct positions as placements. 
2) They aren't updated regularly. Someone quoted a placement page of a Florida university a couple of pages back. I took a quick look and decided to google some names. One person listed as being placed at the University of Alabama...yet, when you google their name they have no position there and the only thing that comes up is their graduate school pages. 
3) They very rarely include statistics about the number of people who don't get jobs...nor do they break them down by type, type institutional type, ect. I think UNC was the only one that really had decent statistics on this that I have seen.
4) They often mislead by only updating the placement page based on the ones that finally get positions eventually. There's rarely ever a progression to see what kind of struggle it was to get there. For example, oh we placed someone at Clemson this year! Oh wait, btw, he graduated 5 years ago and has been bouncing around from VAP to VAP to post-doc since then. 
5) In some cases, the placement records are just flat out erroneous. 

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.

I agree with @toad1. Lots of excellent profs come out of programs that aren't in the top 20. Few top scholars, of course, because the programs don't attract the top talent and have fewer resources. But non-elite programs offer viable paths. I looked at the placement pages of three schools to which I'm not applying (so less self-investment), and which are a good cut under the top 20. Here's where we get the following gripes:
"Placement pages are incomplete." --probably, but no intentional misinformation or omissions
"Doesn't count how many people don't finish." --sure, but that number can vary anywhere
Those points aside, we notice that more grads end up in government, consulting, or big data than at the top 20. That said, the jobs look pretty good -- probably in the six digits -- and so while grad school was an inefficient use of time, neither did they have to spend 50-120K earning an elite MPA.
Among those in academia, the majority of placements are at directional schools and LACs. They won't be big-name political scientists, but will have happy careers as teacher-scholars. A few turkeys at for-profits, so watch out. But several more with very enviable, tenure-track jobs: Tulane, Johns Hopkins AIS, Naval War College, Missou, UMass-Boston, Georgia Tech, Cincinnati, Arkansas, Houston, Creighton, Kentucky, Texas A&M, West Point, Miami-Ohio, UNC-CH, Tennessee, Iowa State, ...
Ultimately, no one is going to grad school for big bucks and job security. Take this journey because of the joys involved -- the intangible benefits. But this is not the MFA Creative Writing forum. A social science PhD has economic value. The academic job market is tight, but not impossible, and there are plenty of opportunities outside of it as well. I try to do very careful research about commitments as large as these, and I haven't seen any compelling evidence from the "CHYMPS or bust" crowd.
https://clas.uiowa.edu/polisci/graduate/recent-placements
https://coss.fsu.edu/polisci/ph-d-alumni
https://politicalscience.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/politicalscience.columbian.gwu.edu/files/downloads/GW Political Science Placement Data.pdf
For further review: the most recent graduate placement report from APSA
http://www.apsanet.org/Portals/54/Users/220/92/28892/GPS.PlacementReport.FINAL.020817.pdf?ver=2017-02-08-161820-687
 

The game has changed. Sorry to say, but it doesn't work that way anymore. 
Obviously do what you want...I never said otherwise. But don't say I didn't warn you. 

With all due respect, I don't think anybody should discourage anyone from pursuing their doctorate because they can't get into a prestigious enough school, especially when that person doesn't know any of the other people's circumstances. Some of my best professors were from schools like University of Alabama or local universities people on this board wouldn't have even heard of let alone get ranked in the top 20 -- while some of my worst professors were from very elite schools. Thankfully my favorite professors didn't listen to this sort of advice, otherwise I wouldn't be one of the many (hundreds/thousands of) beneficiaries to their mentorship. If you want to be a political scientist, get your PhD at the very best school you can get into, rankings/prestige considered. If it isn't considered 'elite' by the masses, but it still seems preferable to any alternatives outside of academia, don't pay any attention to this elitist nonsense. Hard work will pay off in the end. And even if it doesn't, you would regret forever if you instead fall back into a job you aren't passionate for and grow miserable for because you didn't have the grades, scores, or research experience for an elite program that very few get selected for.

I'm not saying be reckless, I'm not saying sign away your life to endless student loans.. but I am saying that, if this is the path you want to take, make it happen. Don't let anonymous people on the internet tell you that the best program you can get into isn't good enough. Maybe it isn't good enough for them but it is good enough for you.

Guys and girls...the rankings thing is straight-forward:
Ideally, you want to go to a CHYMPS. A top 10 is good. A top 20 is fine. Outside top 20? Not advisable. 
That's it. 
Are there caveats? Sure. For example, the big publics in the 7-20 range are pretty hit or miss. The privates in the same range fund and place their students better. Does Emory place their superstars well? Certainly. Are there some very highly ranked programs that don't really punch their weight in terms of placement (*cough* Duke *cough*)? Yes. 
But all of this is to say that these exceptions are relatively minor and inconsequential.
I strongly, strongly advise you to not try to 'buck' the rankings/prestige trend. It's hierarchical for a reason. As you move up the ladder the training is better, the faculties are better, the methods are better, the funding is better, the resources are better, and the networking is better. All of these factors are going to help you, maybe, get a job. And you can sit there and say, 'but what really matters is what you publish'...okay...but that doesn't change the fact that you should try to go to the best institution you possibly can, and if you cannot get into a certain threshold of program, you should seriously consider (and that's really a nice way of saying: don't fucking do it) not attending and trying again. 

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.

@sethbwa - I went to one of the schools that you're talking about for undergrad, and I can tell you that:
1. The placement list is not comprehensive. It isn't intentionally deceptive, but you certainly should not take away the idea that most grads get TT jobs.
2. Attrition rates were very high, due in part to lack of funding/resources and higher than average TA/teaching loads.
3. ...and, for the reasons mentioned in #2, the grad students who stuck around were pretty uniformly unhappy and overworked. Of course these are conditions common to all graduate programs, but it's much worse when you have no guaranteed funding/are made to TA for multiple courses per semester/have little access to departmental resources for conferences or otherwise.
My point is that attending a top program not only increases your chances of getting a fancy research job, it increases your chance of getting any job at all (including small teaching schools) and means that you'll likely have a less stressful/financially ruinous time in grad school.

Placement pages are notoriously inaccurate. They often do not include the scores of people who dropped out, took a VAP/post-doc and never got on the TT, or conflates things.
Yes, you should trust the doom and gloomers. I would personally not attend a program outside of the top 20 (and preferably a top 10 program or CHYMPS). Everyone has their own parameters for risk acceptance though. 
In fact, if I really cared about job prospects and earning money, I wouldn't be doing a Ph.D. It simply isn't worth it if you are driven by 'career' goals. 

I read this thread with a little concern and wanted to add my own perspective. I am presently in my fourth year, recently defended my dissertation prospectus, and am preparing to start gathering data. Prior to my PhD program, I worked as an attorney and taught practical courses at two law schools. In this thread, I’ve seen three related, basic concerns: job prospects, strategies for maximizing job prospects, and the work load. Take my advice as a current student with a grain of salt, but be aware that the path to success in this field is idiosyncratic enough to doubt that tenured faculty know how it works, either.
Job Prospects
BigTen is right here, and the attempt to rose-tint the job market issue by noting that an important number of tenure track positions at research universities are held by graduates from 10-25 ranked schools ignores the struggles faced by the vast majority of student from those programs. It is frankly unconscionable that faculty at 50+ ranked schools encourage graduate students to attend. I truly believe the emerging consensus that a number of graduate programs exist to fill the egotistical and labor needs of the department rather than because they provide reasonable employment opportunities to graduates. Evaluating job prospects and placements by reading placement boards provides some information. Watching your colleagues graduate and fight for positions provides another.
Attending a PhD program outside the top 10-12 is a real gamble. Most students in this range seem to place at universities or outside jobs that at least provide standard of living and a reasonable connection to the questions and research that drew you to study social science in the first place. But the plight of Visiting Assistant Professors who make minimum wage is real, and in most cases the PhD does little outside the academic/think tank world other than convince employers with no idea about the academic job market that you’d leave. After the 12-14 rank, most graduates have fewer tenure opportunities, period. They certainly face uncomfortable constraints on the region and pay they must accept for any measure of job security.
If your passion or self-assurance prompts to take the risk of attending a program outside this range, do yourself a favor and pay special attention to the advice in the following section.
Securing a Stable Job
Publishing: Ask yourself an important question over and over again (and ask your advisors): can some part of the questions that animate me be answered in a compelling, novel way with data that exists on the internet? If the answer is yes, you need to work on publishing. If the answer is no, then you need to focus on generating compelling research and data collection designs. When you graduate, hiring committees will have an opinion about whether it should have been possible to publish on your question during school, and often times the answer is. Often times (especially in comparative politics), the more promising candidates are the ones that generated awesome data sets.
Networking: I promise you this works. Every week during your first three years of graduate school, find two non-academic employers that have jobs you think you might like and be qualified for, then email a person that has 5-10 years experience in one of those jobs asking for advice. Ideally, you would get 15 minutes to speak with them about their own day-to-day (like you’re interviewing them about whether you want the job) and what skills the job takes (as though you are preparing to interview for it).
This means you send out 300 networking emails in three years. You’ll get maybe 40 people willing to speak with you and 10 that like you. Find excuses to stay in touch with those people, and 1 or 2 will have a job for you when you graduate. This job worked for young law school students I mentored and seems to be working for MA candidates I work with now.
Grants: Winning a grant is easier said than done, but it can be very beneficial. Winning a grant that pays you to research frees you from needing to work and sends a signal to future grantors and employers that you are promising and talented. Winning grants for research activities achieves the latter. 
I have not won any of the general work-replacement grants, but those I know who have burst ahead of the rest of us. They have zero distraction. This is part of why students from private schools like Harvard and Stanford outperform equally talented students at Michigan or UCLA. They work less.
I have been fortunate enough to win a couple of small but prestigious-sounding grants to fund research. It has completely altered the way senior colleagues view my work and promise.
Work Load
I think the gallows humor about reading in the shower is part of what makes for bad graduate students. It is absolutely true that you cannot read enough to stop feeling behind your classmates or (heaven forfend) the faculty teaching you. So why bother?
First the saccharine advice: if you are an interesting and curious enough person to attend a decent PhD program, there is very little in the world, and nothing at school, worth the sacrifice of five to seven years of your personal growth and exploration. I don’t care if you end up teaching at fucking Harvard, your colleagues will never look at you with the wonder your friends do when you serve them a perfectly seared scallop or play them Fur Elise on the piano after you eat someone else’s scallops. They won’t know you like your mother or your husband or your son.
Here’s an inconvenient truth: 90% of you want to go to grad school in large part because you want to feel smart. Your colleagues will rarely make you feel smart, even though you are. The whole enterprise is about identifying flaws in even the best work (in order to improve it) and on some level, this is miserable. Don’t believe me? Ask students at the schools you were admitted to how they felt about the process of drafting and defending their prospectus.**
But your friends and family will make you feel smart, especially if you turn your substantial talent to excelling in at least one thing they can relate to. You want to feel proud and useful and cherished and special? Learn to give people something that gives them instinctual pleasure. (Usually not an AJPS article.)
Now for the professional advice you won’t ignore: You will have plenty of pressure to read deeply and critically and to learn method. I don’t suggest ignoring this. But the best ideas and the best careers don’t seem based on picking apart the causal identification of a key article. Great insight requires time to rest and percolate, and inspiration comes from wondering why people haven’t solved real world problems more often than it comes from replication data.
Models don’t provide insight. They describe it.
Good ideas require some amount of travel and art and philosophy and debate and REST and EXPERIENCE and EXPOSURE. If you want to have any hope of avoiding the scholarly lament that “my research and my life talk to twelve other people” you have to set aside some time to be out of the literature and out of the methods.
I’m not suggesting you spend every Saturday smoking weed and reading Batman comics. Maybe baseball games and 30 Rock marathons are rare indulgences now. But don’t cancel your subscription to the New Yorker or stop seeing your friends, because politics is about real life and on some level no one trusts that the academic without work experience, without family, without friends, without hobbies, has any insight about what animates actual people. 
Good luck with everything.
**Setting aside the problems with political science as a science, while this process of critique and revise makes everyone feel stupid and insecure, it does help you eventually feel proud of and defend your work. But to scratch the itch of feeling competent, you’d be better off having kids and teaching them to camp or make great spaghetti sauce or something.

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.

It's not impossible. Lots of people do this every day, and leave academia for industry positions. You have to make time for it; you have to carefully choose opportunities and pursue threads that will help you build this networks. And you need to do it very early.


I have completed a PhD in the social sciences and I can very confidently say that I have never read anything in the shower. (How, Sway?)
I absolutely did more than just work - in fact, I had a very robust social life and I still managed to leave my program with five publications and two fellowships. And I got married. And I consulted on the side. You have to manage your time well. But it's not necessarily true that all you do is work. It's unhealthy to do nothing but work, actually. (I suppose this is also departmentally specific. I am horrified by the prospect of any department that thinks 72-80 hours per week of actual work is not enough. I think this is a dysfunctional department.)


I would give the exact opposite advice. Consulting work is what helped me get my current position. And even if academia is your goal, you can get publications from consulting on the side - I have some second and third authorships from doing statistical consulting.


Yes, but those jobs are competitive as well.


People have such interesting conceptions of what corporate work life is like.

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.

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.