TDBank

Penelope Higgins definitely got the facts better than I did. Maybe I should've pointed out before I gave my advice that I'm not a comparativist and I know next to nothing about non-quantative comparative politics. By and large, I do stand by my basic thesis though: virtually every major political science department is becoming more quantitative, and most are already more quantitative than qualitative at this point. Yale, Chicago, UW-Madison are not exceptions to that rule. I agree with PH's view that one should not make a decision based on methodolical preferences, but my reason for this is somewhat different: an incoming PhD student now can assume that her methodology of choice will most likely be quantitative if only for pragmatic reasons, and she can also be confident that her choice will be accommodated regardless of where she ends up going. I don't think a PhD applicant should make her decision primarily based on subfields of interest. I say, go to the best department overall, take a core course in each of the major subfields, and then decide. First, it's a good thing in and of itself for a political scientist to be reasonably well-versed in all major subfields of political science. Second, the borders separating subfields are becoming more porous everyday. The stories about how MA students are treated like second-class citizens are basically true, and everybody should be well aware of that. But I don't think that should deter most people from considering a fully-funded MA for reasons I wrote in my last post. And last but not least, if a department has admitted you to their PhD program once, they can likely admit you again in the year after, especially given that your profile has been further strengthened by an MA (you just need to convince them that this time around, you're serious about staying with them for 5 years). In that sense, the opportunity cost of doing a funded MA is not a PhD offer but only one year of time.

Just wanna point out two things, with regard to someoneoutthere's original post and curunfinwe's comment. First, two out of three of your options are uncertain, someoneouthere. You should wait until you have full information before you make your decision. Second, every mainstream program is quantitative now. As far as your offers are concerned, UW-Madison is certainly quantitative, and has been so for a while now. Chicago's been moving in the direction of quantitative study, with the hiring of Ethan BDM being the definitive signal. The Yale's New Initiative has been decidedly quantitative-oriented, and people like John Roemer and Kenneth Schieve are as quantitative as it get (Michael Ting is insanely mathematical, I know, but he's one of the few exceptions in our profession). Ultimately, assuming full funding at all three schools, my personal opinion is that Yale MA >=Chicago Phd > UW-Madison PhD. People seem to be thinking that the point of doing an Yale MA is to impress professors there and thereby gain a leg-up in the following year's admission season. However I think that the primary advantage of doing any MA is that you can get used to the graduate environment, and if you are allowed to take PhD courses, that would be an invaluable preparation for the long haul. Always remember that the PhD doesn't stop at admission, it's the second, third, fourth, fifth, and maybe even sixth year. It's a long time, and it's pretty easy to get discouraged without proper mental as well as intellectual preparation.

This is true. I've never held a non-academic job, so I don't know if breach of contract is a bigger problem for academia than for other professions, but it's true that oral as well as written contracts are sometimes broken in academia. Having said that, it is usually the individual departments that break contracts rather than the GSAS or the university as a whole. So as soon as you receive a letter of admission from the Dean, you can take all details in that letter at face value.

I hope this thread would be helpful for future applicants. And in the interest of science, more data are better than less. So if you've received all of your decisions, please fill out the following form to the best of your ability. If you're still waiting, please wait until your admission cycle is completely over. Finally, this thread serves the purpose of data aggregation only, so please post any comment in a separate thread called "Profiles and Results 2010 - Discussion": PROFILE: Type of Undergrad: Undergrad GPA: Type of Grad: Grad GPA: GRE: Political Science Courses: Other Relevant Courses (especially Math, Stat, or Econ): Letters of Recommendation: Research Experience: Teaching Experience: Research Interests: SOP: Other: RESULTS: Acceptances (not counting original Waitlists): Waitlists: Rejections (not counting original Waitlists):

Any comment regarding the "Profiles and Results 2010" thread should be posted here.

I agree with you about the need to be explicit. Just to be fair to the authors, however, they did explicitly state the biases of their ranking. Specifically with respect to the bias against non-PhD-granting institutions, they wrote: "Although our method does not count those placed into positions at prestigious liberal arts colleges, the number of positions at such schools is limited compared to those at doctoral institutions. While our method also excludes graduates in other sectors of academic employment (comprehensive universities, two-year colleges, and high schools), it seems unlikely that a great number of those able to find tenure-track employment in doctoral universities would choose such positions instead.

It is evident that their results are skewed toward PhD-granting institutions. As for why, it's simply because their ranking methodology cannot accommodate non-PhD-granting institutions (for mathematical reasons which I'm sure you're not interested in).

This is indeed the educated guess I was thinking about. There is no way to empirically confirm it though, as the placement data are (perhaps unsurprisingly) not readily available at low-ranked political science departments within otherwise prestigious universities. As far as reputational rankings are concerned, I really don't trust US News, as they don't seem to know what they're doing and their methodology is pretty sketchy. The NRC ranking would be the "gold-standard" reputational ranking to look at, but the old one is too old, and the new one hasn't come out yet. Hey SuddenlyParanoid, that is an impressive list of acceptances you've got so far. Looks like you're gonna get it all. Good luck.

The US News ranking is based on reputation, and its input is feedback from chairs of political science departments from all over the country. The ranking cited in this thread is based on placement of PhD graduates, and the methodology is to assign an initial value to each program and placement into that program, which changes after each step of an iterative process, until the iteration converges. The authors do not talk about the how sensitive the final convergence is to the initially imputed values of the parameters, so that could be one methodological weakness of this ranking. But all in all, I think ranking based on placement is the one PhD students should care most about, and this ranking is the best placement-based one available at this point. It could be just the brand name that attracts top applicants to schools like Penn, or it could be not. I can give an educated guess about this, but I really can't know for sure. The rankings certainly don't give us any decent answer to this puzzle.

Gary King's article was written in 1993, Jackman's in 2004.

This is how PhD admissions supposedly work at Harvard and Stanford. Harvard: http://gking.harvard.edu/files/PS93.pdf Stanford: http://jackman.stanford.edu/papers/pa04.pdf -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ranking of PhD political science programs based on placement: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chingos/rankings_paper.pdf 1. Harvard, 2. Stanford, 3. Michigan. 4. Rochester, 5. Chicago, 6. UC--Berkeley, 7. Duke, 8. WUSTL, 9. UCLA, 10. UCSD, 11. MIT, 12. Yale, 13. Princeton, 14. Cornell, 15. Columbia, 16. Northwestern, 17. Michigan State, 18. Ohio State, 19. Emory, 20. UNC--CH