keangarc

Apologies for the double post... but I just got into Michigan. Very excited but am going to take the next twenty-four hours to reflect on it before making a final decision. 

Every season, a few actual professional art historians play Cassandra, warning applicants and recent admits of the difficult road ahead of them at mid to lower tier schools. None of the admits want to hear it, because they "made it" into a PhD program, sometimes after a few rounds or slogging through (and paying for) an MA at a lower ranked institution. I do know that there are many people on gradcafe admitted to HYP, but I doubt they are the ones so invested in arguing for lower tier schools.
Marie_Ret is arguing that there's a democratization in PhD programs, which is an old chestnut. I'd say that programs are contracting somewhat because many are realizing that it's irresponsible not to fund students. Income inequality affects institutions too. A subset of that argument is "but your advisor is really the only thing that matters." Where did they go to school? A great advisor can make up a little for institutional reputation, but I'd say this would be of greatest advantage to students at still respectable programs, let's say the 10-25 "according to you". The reality is, except in rare cases (likely because of spouse/partner proximity) or really obscure fields, faculty at fair to middling programs are not going to be the most respected in their field. They work too hard, 3-2s if they are lucky maybe more, up to 4-4s, and can't publish as much as their peers with 2-2 or sometimes even 0-1 loads, no matter how brilliant they might be. Even if they have a manuscript they have to slog through many grant proposals to string together enough for the subvention, at rich schools the institution can contribute most or all of it. Not to mention little things that help, like mortgage subsidies and great child care that make being a productive academic just that much easier. So yeah, really hard to be that fully engaged superstar mentor at smaller public programs. 
The argument that "you just have to get out there even if you have to self fund to attend conferences" is totally ridiculous. Condivi addressed this fully above, but dropping $1000 per conference usually isn't feasible for graduate students or junior faculty for that matter. Plus, if you are at a school with poor funding, you are probably TA-ing your ass off, maybe not even in art history but in any department you can, introductory lit perhaps. When are you churning out those papers? I've seen trust fund students do it, so if you are part of the 1% I guess it's possible.
I'm not saying that you are doomed if you are going to Missouri or Kansas, and you may have a very rich experience which is great. But your best outcome is most likely a TT at a lesser school where you are working that 4-4, teaching often ill prepared commuter students, maybe as the only art historian. Maybe you also "get" to be the director of the art department's little gallery too. It'll be hard to publish, but your tenure package doesn't have to be all that extensive, and you'll be making $40,000 as an associate professor, but cost of living will be lower in your rural community. And you will live the life of the mind as a real, fully credentialed, art historian. It's a small world in most fields, so you will also build a network of your peers, who will likely genuinely respect your work, and privately might say things like, "I really wish more people knew of so-and-so's work" while they are on their third book with California or MIT.
I'm also not trying to be a snob, just as others only trying to point out that there really are differences, they are substantial and they are limiting, not just for your career but also your family and future. By all means hold on to that little spot of warmth that lets you want to believe that you'll beat the odds, like the student who got offered the job on the spot on the strength of a paper CAA(?!?!). I hope that person went out directly after to buy a lotto ticket, because they must be the luckiest art historian ever.

Would this were true! 
Unfortunately, everyone out there is active outside their department and meeting people and presenting their research. This is not enough. You need fellowships. You need publications in good journals. Coming from a lower-tiered school puts you at a clear disadvantage for fellowships, which slows down your research and also makes it harder to meet important peopel--it's at these various research centers (CASVA, Getty, the Met, iTatti, etc) where you meet people. The competition is fierce. There are more qualified people than jobs. Most people do not end up fine. Most people end up on the job market for years, even ones who are more than qualified. Some never find jobs. Going to anything less than the a top program puts you at such an advantage that the deficit is hard to make up.
 

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm talking about tenure-track jobs. You don't get job offers at conferences. At CAA you might do a first round interview, but you will not get a job offer; that's not how the job search process works. Also--saving up some cash in your pocket for a trip to a conference, which, with accommodations and airfare, will cost about $1000? Ha! Not easy when your stipend is less the $30,000 or when you're on a TA salary. Better to go to a school that has funds to send you to conferences or better that sets you up to get a fellowship with a travel budget. And when I'm talking about fellowships, I'm not talking about fellowships from your home university. I'm talking about external fellowships. Most people don't get those. In fact, a professor at Rutgers and another at Pittsburg once lamented to me that their students never get fellowships, and they're not sure what to do.
 
Again, wish this were true. But this has not been my experience. Look at any decent school, and you'll see the majority of the faculty got their PhD at Harvard, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, etc, not University of Illinois, Kansas, Pittsburg, Temple, etc, etc. Do you have numbers to back your assertion up? I have some numbers. Here's the distribution of schools for CASVA fellowship for 2014-15: Stanford (2), CUNY, Johns Hopkins, Harvard (3), Princeton (2), Brown, Yale (2), Berkeley, Columbia (2), USC, UPenn, UChicago.  All of these, with exception maybe of USC, are top 10 programs. And notice how Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia have the most fellows? That's not an accident. I'm not saying it's right, but you should know going into a less prestigious program, the cards will be stacked against you to a degree.
So please people, I'm not saying this to be nasty or snobbish. I'm saying this so you go into this with your eyes open. Don't kid yourself about the realities of the job situation.

Wow. Well done for basically summarising the opposite of your attempted position. You seem to be incapable of realising that if you cannot read the original texts from which you are working then you are immediately beholden to the whims of the translator. Don't you see that? Your comment that "perhaps you needed Latin in 1807" is staggeringly fatuous and if you are a genuinely serious academic the you should realise the sheer idiocy of your post. The increasing accessibility of Classics is wonderful, but not when it means that lazy people think they can fully engage with classics without engaging with the primary texts (or, even worse, effectively dismiss the primary texts as meaningless now we have a nice, easy "translation", seemingly ignoring any potential foibles of the translator); your complaint smacks of nothing but dumbing down of the most academically obtuse level. 
 
Honestly, if you are not skilled enough to read the original texts, then you are not a Classicist. 

I urge those of you who were given offers of admission to input the stipend information, if any, at http://www.phdstipends.com/ .  Knowledge is power, and congrats to those who were accepted.