lifealive

Of those three programs, I think that Michigan State is the only one with a terminal MA program now. Maryland is no longer accepting MA students, period. I don't think OSU is turning them away, but they're now accepting BAs into a combined MA/PhD program a la Penn State. However, they just started doing this recently, so I don't think this will affect the PhD program for another year or so.

If I'd had it my way, I would have gone straight into a PhD program. But I was older when I applied (5+ years out of undergrad) and knew exactly what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, my time "off" was a mixed blessing. I was more mature and motivated than I had been in my early 20s, but I had lost touch with the discipline. My writing sample was outdated (a close reading that flirted with a yucky form of historicism), and my statement of purpose, while avoiding the "I love literature" trap, was still pretty vague. I was soundly rejected by all PhD programs the first time around and got into two funded terminal MA programs (with PhD programs ranked in the 70s). Two years later, after having completed a year of MA coursework, I was able to swing into a top 30 program. I wasn't, however, able to gain admission to any of the top 20 programs I applied to. Whether that had to do with writing or fit or luck or age or MA, I have no idea and don't want to speculate. I do think certain programs are more forgiving of inexperience when that inexperience is young and right out of college. BA candidates have to be prepared all the same--these days, a love of literature and a good ability to close read simply aren't enough, which is why coming from a rigorous undergrad program or being really motivated and organized is essential--but rough-around-the-edges is more acceptable when you don't have an MA. For instance--okay, I don't want to draw huge sweeping generalizations--but my friend applied this year after taking approximately 1.5 years "off." She didn't have an MA but came from a top-20 undergrad program. She's smart but not that organized (didn't even start her statement of purpose until November, pick a writing sample until Thanksgiving, or take the GRE until December), and I can say without a doubt that my writing sample (from the second round) was much stronger. But she landed one of the best programs, go figure. Having an MA won't necessarily seal you off from the top programs, but I would recommend continuing to take courses at the graduate level and reapplying before taking two years to pursue an MA that might not count toward your PhD. Most people have a lot of success when applying the second round. I think I had to do an MA before going on to a PhD--I simply didn't have the undergrad preparation, access to graduate-level courses, strong recommendations, or background in theory--but if you have access to grad classes, I recommend just taking a year. You can always throw a couple of MA programs into the mix time, but I wouldn't apply to them exclusively.

I was only half serious. Though, given the general tenor of these discussions--which tend to be Berkeley or bust--maybe not.

If you're really concerned about money (and if school B is indeed Villanova, putting it smack dab in the suburbs of Philadelphia), then I would recommend School A. I mean, you have a fellowship, which is awesome and a real credit to you. However, if you seriously LOVED School B, then go there. I would cautiously agree with strokeofmidnight here. I usually tell people to follow the money no matter what. But an MA program at a top-25 undergrad school that will presumably give you a lot of individual attention and a little funding may be better than an onerous teaching load at a program 75+. It's all about which program will push you the most and train you the best, and unfortunately that is just impossible to know at this point. It's a tough decision, but I don't think there's any real wrong choice here. Personally, I would go with Program A, but I've always been weird about debt and money. For the record, I attended a well-funded but 75+ ranked school for my MA and managed to swing into a much-better-but-still-not-top school for my PhD. I felt that the preparation my low-ranked MA was adequate but not outstanding, though I have no point of comparison. I received merely token assistance on my statement of purpose and writing sample; as far as applications went, I was on my own. (This may support what strokeofmidnight is saying--professors at these split MA/PhD programs are busy helping PhD students write their dissertations and job application letters--they are not invested in seeing an MA student flee their program for Yale). And that brings to my final note of caution: I always got the sense that the professors at my MA really wanted us to stick around to attend the PhD program there. I felt that they did not want us to "trade up"--because that, of course, would be to imply that our program was something to "trade up" from. They wanted us to stay for the PhD program. I'm not sure if this influenced how they advised us, or how they wrote our LoRs, but I constantly wondered. Ugh.

I'd say wait another year. Going without funding--especially at a PhD program--shouldn't even be an option.

I kept thinking the same thing. "Projecting much?" I don't know. Perhaps people who did Fulbrights and lived on Thai beaches just have different expectations for life/career/etc. My time "off" was a little different (dehumanizing but gainful employment), so I approach grad school much more pragmatically and realistically. I don't attend a top-20 school--only a top 25--and I do solemnly agree that that is a serious setback (I know that I will probably never teach at an R1 or selective SLAC), but oh well. The rewards of being a grad student--or even being a professor at a lowly community college--provide a wonderful, fantastic alternative to my previous life as a cubicle drone (albeit a well-off one). For me, grad school is the reward itself. I've said this before: it truly is all about expectations.

Temple is EXTREMELY douchey. I applied last year, and they totally jerked me around. I got in in late Feb. but with no funding details. I emailed the department to discover that the department considered me a "great fit" and that I had been nominated for a university-wide fellowship--whoopee! I thought for sure that I had funding locked up. Nope. By this time last year, I still had NO CLUE about funding. So after repeated calls and emails to the department (over the span of a week) I learned that not only had I not gotten this mysterious fellowship, but that I had not received a TA-ship either. I went from being a supposed "fellowship-nominee" to being on a waitlist for a TA-ship. They told me the same thing: that I would have to sweat out the funding game until April 16th. I was told that if I didn't receive funding, I was free to pay my own way. (At Temple, really? Who the hell pays for Temple?) I was pretty disappointed with the department's lack of follow-up and professionalism. I had taken a day off work and spent $150 to fly to Philadelphia to meet with a potential adviser, but when it came to funding, they would NOT give me a straight-up answer. Had they been upfront in February--had they said, "no, we don't fund everyone and there is a real chance that you will not get funding"--I would have proceeded accordingly (and I certainly wouldn't have blown through a vacation day). But their lack of transparency really pissed me off.

Temple accepts way more people than they can fund. They try to do the Berkeley thing, but they are no Berkeley. As for their reputation, I don't really know. I know they've lost some people in recent years. When I looked at their website last year (in deciding whether or not to apply), I thought their course offerings looked rather thin.

It's fun. That's the answer I give everyone. In truth, I don't think we need to justify what we do anymore than the person who handles insurance claims or works in investment banking or defends corporate workers' comp lawsuits. Most people in the world do not have meaningful, productive jobs, i.e. jobs that cure diseases and create policy and help people. Ours, as others have pointed out, is more meaningful than most.

For me, the cost of doing an unfunded MA was extremely prohibitive. In fact, an unfunded MA wasn't even an option. Instead, I did a funded MA, and when it came time to apply to PhD programs, I managed to "trade up" about 50 spots in the rankings. I didn't pay a cent for my degree and have absolutely no debt. To be blunt and completely unequivocal: I don't see the need to do an unfunded MA when there are plenty of programs out there willing to pay your way. Unless the MA program you're gunning for is extremely specific to your interests, then I do not think it's worth it. There is little you can get an unfunded MA program that you can't get at a funded one. A funded MA will offer opportunities for professionalization AND the qualifications to teach at a community college, and all of the other benefits that come along with getting an MA.

I meant, perhaps, that they wanted your money as in another application fee. But as I don't know the specifics of your offer, I really have no idea. Moreover, if you really have these unanswerable questions about the difference between an "offer" of admission and an "invitation to apply," I think it would be best if you just contact the program rather than asking a public forum and then dissecting what you perceive to be contradictory answers. I don't know the specifics of the program or of the letter you received. I'm just trying to help, not argue.

You should probably call them to find out, though it doesn't seem to be. Most programs are usually pretty explicit when it comes to offers. They'll just say you've been accepted to their MA program rather than "invited to apply." If it's the program I'm thinking of, then no, it's not an offer. They just want your money.

I think your post makes a crucial point--this is a "rebound" offer, and we all know that doing things on the rebound is probably not best in the long run. I know that it feels encouraging after having been through a long season of torment (I think I got the exact same offer last year), but unless this MA is funded, I wouldn't jump at it. It's best to take a year and regroup and try again rather than scrambling into an unfunded MA program. You can just as easily stay active in the field by taking a graduate-level class (if possible) or continuing to do more research in your field. Next year you can always mix some applications to funded MA programs in with your PhD applications to increase your chances.

But it holds true on my undergraduate campus, where the majority of profs were not from Harvard and Yale but schools like Rochester, Indiana, Ohio State, WashU, etc. and many were widely published. At the barely-second-tier public university (with a low-ranked PhD program) where I took classes, the profs were from places like SUNY Stony Brook, UGa, U-Mass Amherst, and U of Oregon. There were a few Ivies thrown in, but very few. It almost seemed, from my point of view, that Ivy grads just would not quite have "meshed" with this program. I will say that the mid-Atlantic R1 where I did my low-ranked master's was almost completely Ivy. I guess it's a matter of personal experience, then, so I'm not quite sure how far swapping anecdotal evidence can get us. I could also probably tell you that most top-tier program graduates I've come across have very little teaching experience--an Ivy grad asked me the other day about a basic pedagogical term, and my other Ivy PhD friend recently told me that she was confronted again and again on the job market with her lack of teaching experience--but again, that would largely be anecdotal.

I was not necessarily disagreeing with most of your post, strokeofmidnight--and apologies for cherry-picking the quote which I admittedly took out of context--but I wanted to challenge the overall, wide-reaching assumption that going to a low-tier school spells doom on the job market. You seemed to be suggesting that instances of low-tier success were merely anecdotal; in my experience, it depends on how one defines "success." Moreover, I think it's naive to think that the job market doesn't work both ways. Yes, we know that having a degree from a brand-name school opens up so many more job possibilities ... we know. We've all heard this so many times--we know that where you get your degree largely determines the kind of job you can apply for or even fantasize about. We know that degrees from different places carry a certain currency. But it's foolish to think a degree from the top program in the country will really "mesh" with the expectations of certain less-prestigious schools. Say you're the program director at Third-Tier Regional State U-branch campus looking to hire someone for a 4/4 load (the most common teaching load), and an application from an Ivy PhD crosses your desk, an application from a candidate who has probably, barring unusual circumstances, taught only a few sections of upper-level English courses to the nation's best and brightest. Is this person really going to be appropriate for the job? Ivy PhDs might not despise the idea of teaching or teaching at certain places, sure. Perhaps they're great teachers who genuinely like students and who look at teaching and research as complementary goals. But if they haven't actually taught all that much--and if they haven't taught the kind of student one typically finds at most universities--how can they really tell? How is anyone supposed to know? And I would argue that prestigious graduate programs do instill in their graduate students an attitude toward teaching that is, at best, problematic. They keep them away from the classroom for the first few years. Service-free fellowships are viewed as a "reward" for good work--and they usually carry more money than the actual "grunt work" of TAing. My main goal here is to offer some hope for the rest of us who don't attend top-15 schools, those of us who start teaching comp on Day 1 and teach it for four or five years straight, those of us who have encountered and know how to work with a wide variety of students. Sometimes Third-Tier Regional State U-branch campus is not a terrible place to be. It probably is if you want to make major interventions in your field and have a long career publishing the kind of scholarship that colleagues and grad students read. But otherwise, it's okay. It can lead to a rewarding career if you are open-minded and willing to make the best of what your professors probably tell you is an undesirable result. I saw the superstars at my #70+ ranked program, with publications in flagship journals out the wazoo and fascinating dissertation topics, get swiftly and immediately rejected when they tailored their applications for R1 positions. But I have also seen quite a few Ivy-Duke-Stanford grads get turned down for more teaching-oriented positions--precisely because they did not have the experience teaching or teaching the kind of student one encounters at most public universities. All I'm saying is that it works both ways. And this is highly anecdotal, but I find it interesting: http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2009/12/do-we-feel-like-were-talking-to-kid-or.html http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2009/01/so-who-did-you-get-in-draft.html http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2008/10/ike-insider-spills-it-some-insight-for.html

I understand what you're saying here, but I want to offer an alternative viewpoint. There's an assumption emerging here that ONLY those who attend top schools have a solid chance of finding employment, and that everyone else is, well, kind of screwed. I went to a "low tier" school for my MA. As in, ranked in the 70s. The program had a TT job placement rating of over 90%, and when factoring in non-TT work or visiting assistant professorships, a placement rating of 100%. Why? Simple. People had different expectations. The students graduating from this program knew that they were never going to teach at Penn State, Wisconsin-Madison, or UCSB. Or most national SLACs for that matter. So they built solid teaching portfolios, worked on publishing, and took on other extra projects (journals, writing programs, writing centers, etc.). When they went on the job market, many of them were pleasantly surprised. Why? Because there are so many schools out there--and no, not just in the hinterlands or the deep south--who don't want to hire Harvard or Berkeley. Who want to hire someone who will stick around and not run off when an R1 position opens up. Who won't sacrifice teaching to pursue research. Who will "fit in" to a collegiate culture that privileges students over pursuing some obscure research topic. Harvard and Berkeley PhDs are going to fit in at certain teaching-oriented colleges as well as a Ball State PhD would fit in at Northwestern. This, I think, is why the placement rating is such a big concern for people who go to big-name programs. There are certain jobs they just can't (or won't) do. And schools know this. Many people graduate from top-tier programs with a mere year of teaching experience. Yeah, they better find a job at an R1. What else are they going to do? So, it all depends on what you want out of life. If you are driven to publish your books and monographs and feel just so-so about teaching, then you will probably be very disappointed in the job market. Most jobs out there are for teachers, and yes, most research positions go to those who graduate from big-name schools. But if you're like me--okay with the possibility of teaching students of ALL levels (from community college to elite SLACs), under no illusions about my own capabilities of actually etching a name in a field where most everything has already been said--then you may be pleasantly surprised by this field. I think the most important thing is to keep your expectations low, and get some teaching experience, and you may be pleasantly surprised.

No one should do an unfunded master's degree--especially not one as pricey as Chicago's, and especially not in some nebulous "humanities" field--when there are plenty of MA in English programs out there that DO fund. Sure, they're in less glamorous places such as University of Delaware or Arizona State, but they won't set you back 40 grand. Chicago's MAPH program is widely known in these communities as a cash cow. I've heard it's not all that great, but that's just what I've heard and I have no personal experience with it.

Don't worry. Last year I got waitlisted at Uconn and ended up getting into a much better program in the meantime. They get a s-ton of applicants because they are the "back-up" school for everyone on the east coast. Everyone else has figured this out but UConn. They have a very high opinion of themselves, but their poor yield says otherwise. They pretty much go through their waitlist every year because they have such a hard time filling the spots with their top-pick candidates.

It my experience, youth isn't what gets punished in the admissions cycle. It's age. From what I've observed, older non-traditional candidates seem to have a tougher time. It's difficult to know why--if it's because time away from the university causes one to get "rusty," or if programs want to recruit younger faces, i.e. people who still have big long lives ahead of them in which to publish and get hired. Programs seem to like it if you've taken some time "off," but God forbid, not too much time. And while we're on this subject, I wish we could stop calling it time "off." This is just a big pet peeve of mine. Not everybody takes time off to dally around and enrich themselves for a few years before getting started on grad school, i.e. a "real" career. For some people, it's about needing to work, to have a career, to make money. It's not time off. It's your life.

I wish there was a way we could talk more honestly about this without being called out as "sour grapes." I would personally love to know the importance of the name on the diploma, and to what extent adcoms deliberately perpetuate this classed cycle of haves and have-mores (which continues into the job market stage, of course, and then into the next generation. And on and on.). To be blunt, I believe that background matters. I know there's a lot of anecdotal evidence to the contrary--"I know somebody from Crackerjack State who just wrote a really good writing sample and got into Harvard"--but I've also seen tons of anecdotal evidence pointing the other way--people with elite diplomas and low GPAs who very easily walk into top-5 programs. I seriously have to question the notion that this process is ONLY about talent, hard work, and making the best of your own resources. I think it's incredibly naive and potentially dishonest to perpetuate this belief that the awesomeness of your application is what gets you into graduate school, and that background doesn't matter. The problem is that you can't really claim causation--people who come from elite backgrounds are likely smart to begin with and have had access to the best preparation, so there's that. Then there's just the quirky nature of each individual admissions committee, and each committee member. But when my professors steered me towards programs, they didn't exactly mince words about someone from my background getting into a top school. Like you, I was told that certain programs were simply "out of reach." (And no, I did not have a low GPA or GRE or anything that would have immediately precluded me from admission.) I applied to top schools anyway and was rejected, naturally. I clawed my way into a fairly decent program (one that others here have called a "safety," but it was a dream come true for me), and now I'm just clawing my way towards my dissertation stage, trying to publish, trying to do anything so that I don't end up teaching in a bog. That's the other thing--I had the "pleasure" of sitting in on a hiring committee lately, only to see explictly spelled out what I always suspected: R1 schools only consider certain kinds of candidates, and those certain kinds of candidates come from a select few schools (duh). After seeing this elitism spelled out so transparently in the hiring process, it's difficult for me to believe that it doesn't exist--at least subliminally--in the admissions process. I think you can make it into top school from a low-ranked one, sure. Just as you can get "hired up" or make a "lateral move." It happens once in a while.