ExponentialDecay

WB hiring is connections-based. You can get a job from anywhere as long as you know someone, which, if you don't already, you're much more likely to do if you live in DC. Time and quality of connections is important too (i.e. the difference between meeting someone at an event and keeping in sporadic tough through email vs interning with them at their office), and the opportunity to work at the WBG or the IMF while you are in school is something to consider. That said, whilst I don't know anything about SIPA, my hunch is, you'll be just as fine coming out of SIPA as out of SAIS. If you feel that going to SAIS will tie you to working at the Bank, don't do it. Finally, I wouldn't accept an offer with 10k funding in this field as an international student unless I could pay it out of pocket (and even then, meh). Not sure where you got the idea that SAIS is best for people trying to get into the fed govt.

Given your work experience and assuming you can present yourself well in writing and in person, you should be fine wherever you go. IOs are huge organizations that are hard to generalize across, but the Harvard MPP isn't really held in higher regard among the technical staff than any other reputable MPP. It's your background as an entrepreneur in the environmental space in a client country that will be of interest to people (if you can sell it well/there's something to sell, it would be of great interest). If you're serious about the WB, it's regretful that you didn't apply in DC.

Congrats on your acceptances. What is your end career goal? And what are the specific programs at HKS and SIPA?

Unless you can pay for this degree out of pocket, I'd strongly urge you to wait out the year, improve your application, and apply again.

Assuming both programs cost the same, if your Harris program is the one that gives 3 years OPT, go to that one. 3 years OPT is a concrete benefit that no one can take away from you. All this network/internationalness/career services is handwavy bullshit that may or may not be true in your case. If SIPA works out to be considerably cheaper, go there. But be careful about how you price extended OPT: you can always make more money, but no amount of money will buy you a work visa.

At the risk of causing more offense, it's whatever is keeping you from winning scholarship money in spite of such great priors. If I met you and knew your profile in more detail, I could probably tell you; as it stands - well. Are you bad at selling yourself? Do you have some critical flaw, like being difficult to get along with, or phoning it in at jobs (although tbh I am both of those things and I do okay) ? Are you networking? It could also be something outside of your control - maybe you're simply unlucky. I do know for a fact that the few truly entry-level IR jobs recruit at "fancy" US schools (though fancy is a stretchable concept), and if you have a good GPA from a good school and a good GRE, you're already in good standing to receive some small funding at some of your programs at least. I agree with @devpolicy that you should ask your real life network for advice. You never know - they may be able to offer more than advice, even. I disagree that IR is all about grit. There's a non-trivial element of luck involved as well. I struggle to consistently motivate myself to perform at the level where I need to be to successfully take advantage of those rare chances because I'm afraid that all my effort will be wasted on a chance that never comes, btw, which is a casualty to consider for y'all who are looking into the field.

These two things are concerning. Why aren't you getting any scholarship money? These programs aren't super competitive, so as long as you're not a functional idiot, you should be able to. Take a look at the results pages for the various schools, SAIS, SIPA, HKS, etc. - people are getting 50, 60, 70k. So it's possible. Why aren't you? Like - and stay with me until the end of the post, because this next part is going to sting - when it comes to hypercompetitive fields, be it academia or IR, if you're failing, so to say, at the first hurdle, the field is probably not for you. IR may seem glamorous, but doing something you're not built for becomes really old really quickly. Career outcomes are path-dependent, which means that, if you're starting at a disadvantage, barring some deus ex machina shit, you're going to stay at a disadvantage - and in a hypercompetitive field, that disadvantage will quickly catch up to you and leave you high and dry. 100k in debt, btw, is one hell of a disadvantage. That'll preclude you from taking most interesting entry-level jobs and will trickle down to seemingly innocuous stuff like not being able to attend networking happy hours because you have to catch the last train to Largo - stuff that cumulatively makes a big difference. All of this isn't to say that you'll never amount to anything, but rather to say that you should avoid starting at a disadvantage. There's lots of reasons why somebody doesn't get scholarship money, and most of them are fixable. Do you lack work experience? Do you need to retake the GRE? Are you not applying widely enough? Is your application not telling a coherent narrative for what you want to do in the field and why School X is the best place to prepare yourself for it? If you don't know the answer to these questions, find out. Go on LinkedIn and set up some informational interviews with people in the field. Pick something you don't know about and learn about it, ideally by doing it. Immerse yourself in the field as a professional, not a starry-eyed child. A note on work experience in IR: as someone who got a job in IR out of UG, don't get a job in IR out of UG. The entry-level stuff is all bureaucratic support (so, not the people who get to even touch policy with a 3 foot pole). It's a good way to learn about how the sausage is made, but that's about it. If I were to do it again, I'd get a job in something competitive, like consulting, that will teach you grit and concise analysis while also paying well and looking good on a resume, or I'd move abroad and do something crazy, e.g. start a beach bar in Trinidad, and learn from the ground up. Or work at an NGO that does fieldwork on the actual ground. You can arrive at policy from any background: I know former engineers, MDs, stock traders, artists, activists and so on who have successful careers in IR. It's all about what skills and network you can bring to the table. All this bullshit about what degree you have and where it's from and how much it cost is so fucking secondary.

What does this mean in practice? I confess I didn't even know SH had a school of diplomacy. Anyway, OP, I wouldn't say that South Orange is exactly close to NYC. It's out past Newark - that's a ~1 hr train commute into Manhattan, which doesn't seem like much, but once you're actually living in that situation, it'll be a hassle to come into the city on a regular basis, especially if you're studying full time. It's hard to give you any advice because you don't give any information: cost of attendance, intended career, geographical preference...

you know there's a government affairs forum right? https://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/11-government-affairs/

???? OP come on tbh I'm having trouble mustering any empathy because I don't see what's wrong. You're taking easy classes, you're working in your field, you have a bunch of exciting travel coming up (I wish my grad school would take me to Sierra Leone ffs), and you get to live at home and save money doing it? Why are you upset again? It seems like you were pressured by family into doing this despite not wanting to, and now you're suffering from making the wrong choice, even though objectively it turned out all right. So let that be a lesson to you. You're a big boy or girl now, and you are responsible for the decisions you make because you will be bearing their consequences. Don't let people pressure you into shit anymore.

There's not a lot of knowledge on this forum about programs that aren't prestigious/American, and I doubt you'll get good answers to questions about the specifics of local Canadian government hiring. you can try the reddit academic community, but tbh I'd talk to your contacts in this industry.

why do you think it's douchey to provide information on your grad school application when asking about the strength of your grad school application in a forum about grad school applications? Anyway, it doesn't matter - GREs aren't very important. tbh, I don't see how you can make it into a PhD without doing a master's first. Even if your UG profs were willing to write you amazing letters, those facts would still be 10+ years old. That you are the same person today as you were 10 years ago is a highly questionable proposition, and if your understanding of academic history reflects the training and contexts of 10 years ago, that's a problem. Journalistic writing isn't relevant to academic research, even if it were for NYT. Employer letters, at least in the humanities, aren't particularly useful as they can't speak to your potential as a scholar. Top programs are exceptionally competitive, even for people with an excellent background. Good luck with law school, but yeah, if you want to do the PhD, I think you'll at minimum have to take some non-degree classes in history and try to get letters that way.

The very important factor that none of us (or OP) are seeing, which doesn't get mentioned nearly often enough on these forums, is the personal factor. Attitude, soft skills, how hard you are willing to work and what conditions you are willing to accept determine where and how far you will go in this field. OP seems very offended at the prospect of being a "paper pusher" - and since they definitely got a rude awakening about the chances of being made Secretary of State as a 25 year old kid with no work experience and a generalist master's degree, perhaps to them hiding out on a coke farm in Costa Rica was the next best alternative. For my part, the #1 reason people should get relevant work experience before signing up for grad school in IR is that IR usually implies very specific working and living conditions. I've seen people who couldn't handle it and people who could but didn't want to - and, really, undergrads, take 1-2 years to make sure that you are neither of these people before giving up more of your time or god forbid creditworthiness.

Maybe we'll go back to a time when you could only study the liberal arts in prestigious schools and everything else is basically a glorified polytechnic.

I'm not talking about the shape of the distributions or what points of it you should be comparing. I'm talking about the difference between correlation and causation. It is highly possible that middling graduates at top 5 schools were better applicants a priori than middling graduates at the next 5 (as suggested by the fact that they attend a better school - but we can't reason from the outcome here for the same reason that we can't reason from the outcome previously). In that case, the school value added is negligible. I'd be an exception if I knew exactly what organization and job title I wanted at graduation and got it (though not a rare exception). I don't think I'm an exception for knowing roughly what kind of work I want to do in what field. Most people don't go in thinking they want to do trade policy and come out doing refugee resettlement. We're talking about numbers here, so let's not get personal. The problem is that fulfillment means different things to different people, but we can't compare preferences. To some people, money and power is fulfillment - and when they are asked "is your career fulfilling", they hear "does your career get you money and power". This is not what people for whom a low-paid job working with their community is fulfillment will hear, and yet you endeavor to lump them all - and countless others - into the same ranking. If I'm reading such a ranking as an applicant with my own individual opinion on what is fulfillment, what exactly does that tell me? (although, it does tell me something if the fulfillment figure across all programs is about the same - not least that it's a shitty variable). More data is good, I suppose. If you know how to use it.

Do you want to go to the local school? It's nice to honor your parents' wishes, but you have to live your life, not your parents. If you don't want to attend the local school, not only is it pointless to await a response you don't need, but you should probably let them know to take you out of consideration, since you're wasting their time as well... and I doubt having the conversation with your dad about not going local is going to get easier if you get accepted.

@Poli92 I'm not dismissing all rankings (as is evident from my post). I am dismissing policy rankings. You're making a basic logical error. It may be that middling graduates at top 5 schools are better than top graduates at the next 5, and if you put them into boxes marked A and B for 2 years rather than making them attend classes, you'd still get the same outcome. It may be that the middling graduates of top 5 schools are carried by their top graduates, who attend those schools not to learn anything, but because they want to be carried by the reputation of those that came before. How much of education is signaling is unclear: Cowen has a new book out on this subject this month, which is already making the rounds in economics discussions, where he makes a persuasive argument that education is 80% signal. I think rankings based on subjective ideas, whether it be what school a professor thinks is best or whether an alum thinks their school empowered them to pursue their chosen path, are useless. You're not getting a standardized answer, as everybody is interpreting the question differently, and most importantly, you're not getting at the crux of the question: is the degree significant value-added? If you asked me that question, sure my school empowered me to pursue my path. Could I have pursued the same path had I gone somewhere else? Yes I could. I'm also not interested in hearing the evaluations of people who don't work in my field. I don't care if School A prepares you well for campaigning or running an education non profit. I'd be interested to hear how graduates in the aggregate evaluate their experience, but not as a ranking. And I'd be interested to see how schools rank on objective criteria: funding, attrition, debt at graduation, placement, salaries. I don't think malarkey about whether you feel happy and fulfilled has any place in this decisionmaking process. Even the best designed rankings are questionable, methodologically and, even if they're sound, as to whether they're worth the paper they're printed on.

You're a 2nd year PhD student and you're asking these questions on gradcafe? I mean, let's start a conversation about professionalization in the humanities (I need more things to procrastinate on), but I'm not sure how helpful the advice of mostly applicants, mostly not in Comp Lit, is going to be helpful to you. Where is your adviser in all this? ime - and fyi I haven't touched comp lit since UG - it's an interdisciplinary field, and since it's an interdisciplinary field, you need a mentor that isn't just in Comp Lit (it's agnostic as to whether they should be in Comp Lit), but one who does the sort of work you want to do and can professionalize you in that direction. Someone who is professionalized as a disability scholar will be much different than someone professionalized in late Roman literature. Comp Lit departments are rare, so you'll probably need to be competitive for national literature or -studies jobs (whatever your bend) as well, which is an uphill battle for an interdisciplinary PhD, which is why you need to build strong networks in those fields.

The attempt to rank programs that prepare people for such a variety of professions and skillsets is in itself ridiculous. It makes sense to rank history programs, or economics programs, but to rank history and economics programs together and then try to figure out which one of them is best? Bizarre. I wouldn't bother with the rankings. In the professional world, nobody knows or cares how these programs rank. They know where they went, they know where their colleagues went (and if their colleague who went to SAIS is a blowhard, guess what), and they know who teaches where in their particular policy field. There is also a tacit understanding (ymmv - I'm in a field where you can't learn everything on the job) that the quality of graduates from some of the mammoth programs (SAIS, SIPA in particular) varies widely - to the extent that a lot of people advise getting a specialized master's rather than an MPA. So if you're graduating from one of those, it matters more who you are than where you went (which, idk, would that defeat the purpose of going there?). Some of the top midwestern and west coast programs are virtually unknown in DC because of how regional even this market is.

An unfunded MPP at GW seems bizarre to me. If it costs the same as SAIS, why aren't you going to SAIS?

the MLA publishes this data for languages and literatures. I assume MHA does the same for history, etc. a few journal articles have been published in recent years on the humanities job market. you can find all these resources on google.

You can validate these claims by looking at job market data tl;dr job markets in all of these fields suck and you shouldn't expect any academic job at all

It's not possible in 2 years. I don't think it's feasible to write a PhD dissertation in 2 years, in the US or abroad; in the US you will also be expected to do 2 years of classes before comps. You can ask if it's possible to limit that to 1 year, but international credits never transfer. Once you've passed your comps, you can negotiate to do the remainder of your program from abroad.

@CFGauß Just as an observation, but most people I meet in international organizations with a French social science background studied at HEC or INSEAD. From what I understand, the ranking/prestige wars between the French institutions are quite severe. Do you know anything about that?

Because your tone was defensive and combative. You bust into this conversation all, lemme educate you about real jobs because you've obviously never had one, and your confusion looks rather put on. Either you think we don't know that people outside academia have to earn money (because we're ivory tower trust fund babies), or you don't understand academia to such an extent that you are unaware of the basic differences in salary and time commitment between an academic and someone who works in a generic office.