adynata

"but I'd put Santa Barbara and UNC over Michigan and maybe Stanford right now. Rutgers, Maryland, and CUNY are still safeties but are what you make of them." You are joking, right? In terms of faculty numbers, awards, citation numbers, impact and prestige of publications do you really think Santa Barbara and UNC are even remotely in the league of Michigan, Stanford and CUNY? No disrespect, but just to call out some examples do you honestly think Cary Levine (who is an excellent scholar) attracts the same attention as Joselit/Bishop? As wonderfully briliant as he is, Peter Sturman does not equal the critical mass of the *five* Asianists at Michigan (which just made a hire in Latin American now making it the third largest art history department in North America in terms of tenure-track faculty)? Or what of the Pam Lee/Nancy Troy/Richard Meyer triumvirate -- I have no doubt that those three alone probably attract more grad applicants per year than UCSB and UNC combined. Rutgers and Maryland have some really great up-and-coming faculty that would make it hard to call them safeties -- Rutgers got a record number of applications these past two years that had their acceptance rate at less than 10%. I would hardly call that a safety.

If your main objective is to work outside academia in a non-Western country (and I'm thinking Asia, given the enormous weight put on Ivies even if it's a cash cow MA) then go for the Ivy. Just wanted, however, to correct the common, but not wholly accurate assumption that being at an Ivy, by which I mean a top-tier Ivy like Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, will automatically give you a leg up on the "competition." It really depends on the field, and on the student-advisor relationship. Not every school is uniformly strong in every field. For instance, if I was serious about going into academia I'd never go to Yale to study Asian art right now, nor would I think about going to Columbia to work on Pre-Columbian for fairly obvious reasons. I have close friends who suffered terribly while at a big name school because of a poor advisor fit and despite producing good work are struggling as adjuncts or have left the field altogether, disillusioned. There are also advisors based in non-Ivy schools whose students win prestigious fellowships (CASVA, Getty, ACLS) and jobs at R1 schools at a considerably higher rate than their Ivy peers (e.g., MIT students had quite a monopoly on the CASVA Ittlesons/Islamic jobs; the IFA Chinese art students, etc). In the end, however, it's really what *you* make of the program, whichever program you think works best for your goals and interest. Even the best school in the world won't make a difference unless you can figure out what you stand for as an intellectual and what you can get out of being at a certain place. For every "star" are countless others who looked perfect on paper but somehow couldn't quite get it together intellectually and were usually passed over by their advisors for the next bright young thing, especially when the BYT in question had interests that more closely aligned with those of the big name advisor. I used to work in university admin at an Ivy (best way to see what really happens behind closed doors!) and saw this happen year in and year out. The students who "made it," who got jobs, etc, were the ones who figured out early on what they wanted to do whilst in grad school and who had a clear sense of what they were about. The ones who don't were the ones who, consciously or not, so identified themselves with the prestige of their institution that they forgot who they were as scholars and/or became so puffed up that it worked against them in interviews.