The Realist

You should read the post that I wrote in response to betteryear. On your concern about whether or not to train talent, yes, of course we would like to just find the best future political scientists and train them. But we can't tell who they are from our current perspective. So we use the information that we have. These informational shortcuts are imperfect and we make mistakes, but I'm not sure what other options we have.

We of course are open to people of many different backgrounds. I myself don't have an undergraduate degree in political science. Mine was in a hard science. But I took loads of political science and econ classes so it was clear to the admissions committee that I knew what political science was. I also had letter writers who were in political science and economics, so they could vouch for me. So I think it's important to be realistic. If you majored in chem and never took a political science course, committees are going to wonder what makes you qualified to be a poli sci grad student. (They are also going to wonder why you're applying to grad school in political science anyway.) Plus, chances are your application is going to be worse because you won't have a good idea of what to write about in your personal statement and your letter writers won't know how to sell you as a political science grad student. Does this mean that you're out of the running if you don't have a major in political science? Not at all. If you can show that you know what our discipline requires you'll be fine. Also, many people who took time off after college to do something else are compelling because they have an interesting life story. I'll never forget a fascinating file from a couple of years ago from someone who majored in engineering and never took a social science course in his life past his gen ed requirements. He got a job building bridges somewhere in Africa, and after several years dealing with bureaucracies and corrupt officials came to realize that he was fascinated by bureaucratic politics in poor countries. He was admitted (he went elsewhere). Also, cognate fields are something of a pass. Philosophy majors can usually credibly signal that they can be good political theory candidates. Economics and history majors often can demonstrate that they will do well in political science too. But for these fields, the importance of good letters and a killer statement is elevated. Many history undergraduates, in my experience, actually have no idea what political science is. Not that that applies to any of you, but it's part of the considerations we make.

IR is a bit different...we consider IR to be close enough to political science to be comparable, especially in foreign universities (like many British ones) that make IR a separate department.

Obviously I'm going to tell you "no" because I don't want anyone doing that when they apply to our department. But even ignoring my own selfish motivations, it's probably not a good idea. An application that claims, say, that you're a theorist when you've written a thesis on American politics and taken mostly Am pol classes probably won't make it through the first cut. You're undercutting your chance of a legitimate admission by gambling on a subfield where you don't have the right preparation. Could it work? I can imagine a couple of schools where it might. But you're not the first one who's thought of it, and I've never heard of it working.

Some feedback on how it looks from my end. We are still going through files now. Applications are up a bit from years before. So it's a bit more competitive. We are going to offer slots to well under 5% of our applicants.We are not a top-10 department. Since we are realistic about our chances at recruiting the top students, we sometimes don't admit the very best candidates unless we have good reason to think that they'd actually attend.Lots of students have a 3.9 GPA and great GREs. Even at a non-top-10 department like ours, those sorts of stats are insufficient to guarantee admission to our program.A lot depends on your letter writers. Not that they're famous, but that they write you strong letters. Letters must be glowing. Letters writers can't just say that you're smart or that you got good grades in Intro to whatever, they have to convince us that you'll become a good academic political scientist. There's a lot to read between the lines. Also, letters from political science professors are a lot more credible than letters from other professors (language instructors, literature professors, etc.).A lot also depends on your statement. Not because we care so much about what you plan to study, although that matters some for judging whether or not you understand what political science is, but because it tells us how well you can express yourself.We honestly are less impressed with where you did your undergrad than we are at how well you did there. I just compared two files, one from a large public university that is decidedly not the best one in its state, and one from an Ivy. The latter student was obviously smart, but the former student had a consistent record of high marks in a range of social science classes and made a much better case that s/he understood political science and would make it in our program. We're going with the former.Admissions standards vary a ton across subfields. My department is best at comparative. It's just easier to get into our program for other subfields than it is for comparative One more thing: I can honestly say that there is a large stochastic component to this process. Lots of wonderful candidates get passed over. We wish it could be otherwise, but it's just the nature of the game. Try not to read too much into it (although I remember how hard that was all those years ago when I got rejected at half the schools where I applied...)

My experience is just what I had when I was in graduate school and with the job searches that I've sat on in the years since then. So take that as a caveat. In my own experience, there is actually less interest these days in the sort of panel-data regression dissertations that seemed super sexy in the 1990s today than there used to be. Comparativists are real social scientists now. We are very concerned with poor data quality, omitted variables, identification, and internal validity. For lots of questions, we just don't learn a lot from mis-specified and underidentified cross-national regressions. The solution is to get better, more reliable data and to think about research designs that give us good inferences. Now, it just so happens that the way to do that is often to have really good knowledge of a couple of countries, and to use the more reliable data (often original data) and clever research designs from those cases to make broader theoretical claims. One example is Stathis Kalyvas' book The Logic of Violence in Civil War. This is a landmark study of violence civil war--it has defined the field and won every award it was eligible for--and the vast majority of the empirical work in it comes from one country, Greece. No one thinks that Kalyvas is just an area specialist. In graduate school and since then I have never been in a department that has hired a comparativist who had no experience either in the field or in the archives. I also happened to look at the Harvard Gov't Department's website. I took a look at all the faculty that could be called comparativists and took note of their work. It turns out that with almost no exceptions, they have extensive experience in the filed or in the archives in at least one country aside from the US. Here they are. • James Alt: Britain • Robert Bates: Africa • Timothy Colton: Russia • Jorge I. Dominguez: Latin America • Grzegorz Ekiert: East Europe • Peter A. Hall: Europe • Stanley Hoffmann: Europe • Nahomi Ichino: Africa • Torben Iversen: Europe • Alastair Iain Johnston: China • Steven Levitsky: Latin America • Roderick MacFarquhar: East Asia • Jens Meierhenrich: Africa • Elizabeth Perry: China • Susan Pharr: Japan • Robert Putnam: Italy, US, etc. • James Robinson: possible exception, but even still, extensive research experience in Colombia • Kenneth Shepsle: exception • Prerna Singh: India • Theda Skocpol: Europe • Daniel Ziblatt: Europe

You're overstating the distinction between area specialists and generalists in comparative politics. Bob Bates is a "generalist" whose field work is in Africa. Adam Przeworski is a "generalist" whose field work is in Poland and Latin America. Like it or not, most job searches in comparative politics have a regional focus. That is not because comparativists are just area specialists, but rather because the best generalists also know one or two places really well.

Looking at the job market over the past two years, I'd say that trying to figure out how to combine major and minor fields to game the job market doesn't tend to work. It's better to have a good dissertation and lots of teaching experience. What that means is, if you're interested in IR as a major field and the most useful minor field for you is American, then proceed accordingly rather than worrying if you should do comparative or methods or whatever instead. It's always great to take methods classes--I'd say the more the better--but having methods as a minor field is probably necessary but definitely not sufficient to make you able to teach methods. The exception is for theorists. I think that theorists should take their minor field choices very seriously and should get experience teaching in them. So what's the job market like across the major fields? Here's my impression: American politics: always in demand, especially behavior and institutions. Judicial politics less so (for this, the more quantitative the better), public law even less. APD is good for the very best APD students, but for the rest it's miserable. State politics expertise can be useful if you are shooting for a non-selective LAC or public in the south. Comparative politics: high demand right now for specialists in South Asia, China, and the Middle East. Not a good time for Latin America, Japan, Russia/former Soviet Union, and Europe (both East and West). Average for African politics and Southeast Asian politics. For these, competence is demonstrated through, extensive in-country experience, strong methodological training, and an original and interesting research question. There are always a couple of jobs around for "comparative politics, non-specified" (people who don't do field research and instead download cross-country datasets and look for significant partial correlations) but for a number of reasons that's normally not where either the best R1s or the LACs are looking. I can go into this in more detail if people are interested. IR: strong demand right now for innovative IPE and security work--stuff that looks more and more like comparative. Average demand for democratic peace/IO/constructivism/IR theory stuff unless you have a super-original approach and are the very best. Lots of interest right now in terrorism and civil war for obvious reasons but I think that is peaking right now. Theory: always low in demand. HPT scholars have to be extremely original. Modern PT scholars the same, and also have to show why their approach is interesting to other subfields in a way that they didn't used to have to be. Never a good time to be a theorist and now is no exception. Too bad because well done theory is the most interesting subfield in my opinion. Methods: if you want a methods job you have to be fluent in Neyman-Rubin-Holland and what it means to identify a causal effect. This is what it's all about right now. There is always demand for good methodologists but it's hard to become one (and if you aren't sure if you can be one you probably can't). Political scientists as a rule are not savvy enough to make methodological contributions to pure game theory. If you can do this, go to an econ PhD program instead. Public policy: not a hiring priority in most departments. If you do policy, it's best to be able to sell yourself as a comparative or American scholar too so that you can participate in those job searches.

GW is indeed a rising department and I have good friends on the faculty there. But I nevertheless would not attend GW for a PhD without full funding. Looking at their placement record online indicates that placement is OK but still a major concern.

Speaking as a comparativist who has done survey research in-country, let me offer some responses. 1. Do you have to speak the language? If you want to be considered a credible expert in a country by other comparativists, then yes, you must. If you want to call yourself an Indonesianist you better speak Indonesian. If you want to call yourself an Egyptianist you better speak Arabic. Same for Russia, China, Japan, Nigeria, etc. Do you really think you could be an expert in American politics if you only read sources in French? 2. Surveys can be contracted out. And yes it is expensive.

In comparative politics, there is no longer any presumption that you do field work or quantitative methods. The best PhDs--and by this I mean the ones that search committees consider to be real comparative politics scholars--do both. Cruise around the websites of the top comparative politics programs (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, etc.). The young hires all speak languages, do field work, and do sophisticated quantitative research. The graduate students at these programs are doing the same.

Compiling the list you've described is a good idea and it will teach you a lot. Two things to keep in mind: 1. Your conclusions will suffer from selection bias because you won't be taking into consideration the people who are not there. Everyone knows that there are examples of people who have succeeded from lower ranked departments. But you want to know what your chances are of being one of those people, and knowing that these people exist doesn't tell you that. Departmental placement histories do, which is why up-and-coming departments worth their salt will tell you what happened to everyone who advanced to candidacy in the past decade. 2. Shanto Iyengar and David Brady have PhDs from the early 1970s. Iowa was a top-10 department then, and this is no longer the case. You can't go to Iowa in 1965, you have to go today. What you want to know is where did junior faculty hired in the last, say, ten years get their PhDs. If a school like Iowa tries to tell you that it has a good placement record because two graduate students with PhDs from 40 years ago are today at Stanford, you should be afraid.

To answer your questions: Yes, I am trying to help people. I don't want people to be discouraged, but the reality in this business is that sometimes reality is discouraging. No, I don't regret any of my choices career-wise, but I know plenty of people who do. I have been profoundly fortunate in my career. No, no one took me aside to give me this talk. In fact, I got the exact opposite feedback when I told my undergraduate adviser that I was going to get a PhD. "Oh, you're going to get a PhD at XXX? That's a great department, you should have no trouble getting a job." No one should enter this process with misinformation like that. I also see what happens in my very own department as some of my colleagues promise the moon and the stars to prospective PhD students. I don't do this myself, but I'm in the minority here. I feel that I owe it to you prospective students to give you an honest picture of how things work in our profession.

Unfortunately, for most people, money and a job really do matter. I have a family to support, and we don't have any other source of income aside from my job and my wife's job. Our ability to live comfortably depends on me having a job. I suspect that many PhD applicants are like me, or at least will become like me (i.e. will have a spouse and children) by the time they are out of graduate school. These people need an honest appraisal of their likelihood of being able to support their family after getting a PhD. I don't think that you can possibly argue that this is a bad thing.

Not confrontational, it's a good question. Yes, there are people who do place--I would never claim that outside of the highest tier of schools no one ever gets a job. Some do, and you found some good examples. However, what you didn't find on the UGA website is any information on the many who do not get academic jobs. And I don't think that you can understand at this point in your careers the extreme frustration that I see in our discipline when every year we produce hundreds of PhDs who will never have a chance at an academic job. These are people who have worked for years with the belief that there is market for the skills that they are learning, and when they enter the job market they find that the supply of qualified candidates far, far outstrips the demand for them. Please don't misunderstand me: I love political science and I love teaching and I love research. I want everyone to succeed and I want everyone to pursue their academic dreams. But our university system in the United States takes advantage of PhD students who have very little chance of getting an academic job in order to use them as cheap labor. It does this by and large because prospective graduate students are not sufficiently informed about the likely chances of getting an academic job. My post is designed to give you the information that will help you all make better choices. Best of luck.

I can assure you that I'm not talking about wealth maximization.

That's a pretty accurate description of a lot of programs, including one that I'm pretty familiar with. Of the ones that don't make it through the PhD normally drop out. I really don't know what happens to most of these people. They go on to other graduate programs, or they get a job doing something else. Of the ones that make it through the PhD program and go on the job market, the ones that don't make it...well, lots teach high school, or try to cobble together a career adjuncting. Most do this for a couple of years and then get a job in a field unrelated to political science. The point isn't that getting a PhD makes you unemployed. The point is that getting a PhD--especially out of the top 25 schools or so--very often does not result in one job that a PhD trains you for: teaching and research in political science. So you need to think of the opportunity costs. There's nothing wrong with being a political consultant (I think it actually sounds pretty cool), so why do something that takes a long time and doesn't pay very well that doesn't help you to become one?

These are good points. Don't stress too much about 10 versus 15, but 10 versus 35 matters a lot. Also, most PhD students who get jobs get jobs at lower-ranked institutions, not higher ones. But this observation obscures that past 25 or so, you're getting into the range of schools where well over half of the incoming students will not complete a PhD, and of those who do, the majority will not get any academic job.

My PhD is from a top-10 program in comparative politics. That's about as much as I'm willing to share.

I am a tenured associate prof in political science at a large state university. I posted this several years ago under the screen name "realist" when I first learned about this forum. At the time, I read through the threads and couldn't help but think about all the things that I wish that I had known before entering my PhD program. So with that, I thought that I'd give you all some advice from an actual PhD. I've made a couple small changes from the original version but this is basically the same as what I wrote before. While some of this may be hard to read, I offer it as-is, with only the thought that more knowledge is better than less knowledge. CHOOSING GRADUATE SCHOOL Your graduate school choice is probably the most important choice that you'll make in your career. Do not take this lightly. There are many reasons, but they boil down to some uncomfortable truths. 1. Only the best schools place students in academic jobs. While there are thousands of universities in the United States, there are many many many thousand more political science PhDs. 5-7 years is a very long time to spend in a low-paying job (which is what graduate school is) only to realize that you have very little chance for promotion. Even at top 10 institutions, a good half of entering students do not end up with a PhD and a tenure track job. Is it fair that this is the case? No. Are there very smart graduate students that are not at top departments? Absolutely, there are literally thousands of them. But this is how the world works. And you have no chance to change it from "the inside" unless you are already at a top department. 2. Advisers are fickle beings. Especially outside of the top institutions, they are busy and pressed for time, and they cannot offer you the type of guidance and support that you may believe that you are going to get. I had a very close relationship with a very influential adviser, and saw him for about 10 minutes once every two or three weeks. This is the norm. Do not assume or expect that you will have a different experience (although there is a small chance that you will). Moreover, good scholars are often terrible advisers. I think that one of the worst aspects of our profession is that at middle-range departments, top scholars often will not even acknowledge graduate students. 3. Graduate school is an unequal partnership between students, who receive very little and give very much, and faculty, who have many other things to do but rely on students to do things that are in the university's best interests. Graduate students are (1) essentially powerless and (2) extremely cheap labor. Universities have an incentive to keep a lot of graduate students around to fill instructor slots and TAships. This means that they will keep on a lot of graduate students who will never have a chance at a tenure-ladder job. This is a pathological system of incentives, and I find it repugnant, but this is the reality. So what sort of advice does this lead me to give? First off, above and beyond almost anything, you need to go to the best possible graduate school. It doesn't matter if you don't like Ann Arbor as much as Athens or Austin, graduate school matters tremendously for your future ability to get a job. At nearly every university or college, a PhD from Michigan will get your file looked at when applying for jobs. I know that this sounds harsh, but for most jobs, a job file from a school out of the top 25 won't even be considered. It will just go on the trash. Let this sink in. As a corollary, you need to think long and hard about graduate school if you do not have the opportunity to go to a top one. You should understand that you may not have a good chance of landing a tenure track job. The one's available to you, moreover, will likely be at "directional institutions" (think Northern X State) or small, low-ranked liberal arts colleges in the middle of nowhere. Even there, you will be competing with Harvard and Berkeley PhDs for a job. It's hard. It's not as hard as English or History, but nevertheless it's really hard. You should know this and plan accordingly. The academic job market has gotten much harder in the two years since I first wrote this. There are thousands of students right now chasing a couple hundred jobs, and every year it gets worse because most people who strike out in one year go back on the job market the next year. Do not assume that the academic job market will get easier in 5-7 years, when you are going onto the job market. First, there will still be a substantial backlog of unplaced PhDs. Second, trends in academia are leading to more adjunct and lecturer positions and fewer tenure-track positions in all but the very best schools (and it's starting to happen there too). I would not still be in academia if I didn't have a tenure-ladder job. Let's say you don't want to go be professor. Maybe you want to work in a think tank or a political consultancy. OK, fair enough: but in this case, I would recommend against getting a PhD in political science. There is little that you can gain from a PhD in political science that a think tank will find attractive that you cannot also have gotten from a good MPA/MPP/etc. program. Outside of academia, the PhD has little value-added over most professional masters degrees. Given the opportunity cost, the only people who should get PhDs in political science are people who have a passion for college teaching, or those who have a passion for academic research AND who are willing to settle for college teaching if the academic research thing doesn't work out. Do not choose graduate school based on one individual who you "want to work with." Instead, you should choose the best program (by subfield) that you can. Why? Let's say that you identify one faculty member whose research interests match yours perfectly. For this to be the person upon whom you rely for your entire PhD course of study, it must be the case that (1) your research interests don't change (which is rare), (2) that your potential adviser is a nice and approachable person (which is about a 50-50 shot to be honest), (3) that your own research is interesting to that potential adviser (which you should not assume, regardless of what is said on recruitment weekend), and (4) that that adviser doesn't leave (which is common, especially for productive faculty at top-50-ish departments). If you chose a program based on that individual and any of these don't work out, you're in trouble. If you've chosen the best program, you'll be OK because there are other options; if you've banked on one faculty member, you're out of luck. You should be flattered by faculty who are nice and approachable during recruitment weekend. But recruitment weekend is not like the other 51 weekends a year. Remember, faculty are approachable during recruitment because you provide them with an unlimited supply of discount labor. They have their own worries and incentives, and these rarely align with yours. Likewise, funding matters. My general advice is that outside of a top 25 institution, you should not go to graduate school unless you have a full ride and a stipend large enough to live on. Without these, graduate school is a long and expensive process with little reward. There is a constant demand for doctors, so doctors can pay for medical school and still come out ahead. $200,000 in debt and only qualified for a very low paying job is a terrible situation that many PhDs find themselves in. It is tempting to think that a potential adviser's kind words mean that you are special. You are special, but so are many many others. Wherever you are, you will likely not even be the smartest or most successful member of your cohort. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you are the one who will buck the trends that I have described. It's just not likely. Finally, I have made a big point about top 25 schools. We all know that Stanford is and Purdue isn't, but what's the definitive list? Simply put, if you have to ask, your school is not in the top 25. And of course subfield matters more than overall ranking. Emory is not a top-25 theory department so think long and hard about going there for theory. JHU is not a top-25 American politics department but it's a different story altogether for political theory. If you need to convince yourself that your program is a top-25 program, it's almost certainly not. YOUR CAREER If you decide to go to graduate school, congratulations. I mean this sincerely. You are embarking on the most intellectually rewarding period of your life. (Of course, intellectually and financially rewarding are not the same, as I mentioned previously.) Here are some brief tips. The best political scientists are the following five things: smart, creative, diligent, honest, and nice. Smart is obvious. The rest are not. The best political scientists are creative. They look at old problems in new ways, or they find new problems to look at. A good way to land a middling job (or no job) is to find a marginal improvement on an existing estimator, or take lessons from Paraguay and apply them to Uruguay. The best political scientists show us how our estimators are incorrect, or better yet, find new things to estimate. The best political scientists are diligent. They think about problems for years and years, they rewrite their draft papers repeatedly, they collect giant datasets from scratch, and they go into the field, learn the language, and stay there until they have learned something. There are no quick research trips, there are no obvious philosophical points, and there are no datasets that you can download with results you can write up in a week. The best political scientists are honest. There are many points at which you might fudge your work: creating a new dataset from scratch, during fieldwork, in writing up your results. You will be astounded at how frequent this is in our profession. Don't do it, for it always hurts you in the end. Being wrong and honest about it is OK. Being wrong and hiding it never works. Finally, the best political scientists are nice. It is tempting to be prickly to make yourself seem smart or to protect your ego. But the same person you criticize today might be in a position to give you a job tomorrow. As they say, make your words soft and sweet, for you never know when you may have to eat them. ************ I hope this helps you all. I wish you the very best of luck with your careers.