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Hi! Also looking at these programs. One thing to consider on UCSD is graduate student housing is much cheaper than private renting, so you can get a studio for less than $800/month and share a 2BR for as little as $600. That significantly decreases the cost of living. Another thing that stands out to me is that lots of their strength in placement, at least for my specific research area, comes at least partially from methods research. Lots of their top placements over the last few years have been people doing cutting edge work on things like network theory who then publish with Fowler and others in Science/Nature on more general methodological questions. That's obviously really good for training and placement, but if that's not your cup of tea, it might be worth thinking about and focusing on the placement who aren't doing that kind of work. This is just an observation from my research area, too, so might not apply to yours! Chicago lost some senior folks and continued hiring lots of theorists, to the detriment of some other areas. My feeling on it is that the junior people they've hired have been exceptional, so the program is seen as on a strong upswing. Staniland and Albertus come to mind. USNWR is pretty weird because their rankings are entirely based on peer evaluations, which of course have all kinds of strange biases, time lags, etc. I'm also cognizant that recent placements in my research area weren't advised by the people who would be advising me, so might not be entirely reflective of the training/placement assistance I would get there. My POI also told me they're in the process of hiring two senior methodologists after Patty/Penn left for Emory. The methods training seems to be the weakest link in the program so two strong hires in that area would help with training. Only other note I'll make is the difference in systems. UChicago tends to have longer PhDs (6-7 years) then a post-doc, while UCSD tends to get people out in at most 6 years and straight into TT jobs. UCSD also has much higher teaching loads from the first day, but the alumni I've talked to have said it's pretty manageable.

I really doubt it. Monday news always kinda confuses me (little chance they hadn't made decisions by Friday, so why not send it out earlier and be done with). There's of course a chance they will but Yale is all over the place in the past. Their usually releasing results at the earliest around now but have released at the end of February before. Ya, I'm relatively certain they've sent out all the acceptances and we're now just waiting for the official letters from the grad school. Have you heard from POIs or anything? Radio silent on my end, which is a big contrast with other schools that all have lots of emails out. I'm just unsure who would be my advisor and having someone email me would at least tell me who the program has allocated preliminarily.

Tbh, I really dunno. My research interests are in this area so I thought a lot about the good programs when I was applying, but I'm definitely no authority on it. That said, I agree Stanford is probably the strongest overall, particularly if you wanna do the kind of large-N cross-national work they're known for. Plus, it's Stanford...so you'll get a job. The problem is Yale was kind of the counter-weight to that political economic approach with their grads doing lots of work on the micro-foundations of civil wars, but there isn't somewhere that looks as strong in that area. MIT is strong with Petersen and Christia, but I think (could be wrong) Bateson is leaving, and the other two really don't work on civil wars anymore. Like Stanford, UCSD is very political economic of course given that two of their big scholars were advised by Fearon and Laitin. Michigan has a big mix with Nordas, Davenport, Zhukov, and some people on tangential stuff like Slater or Shiraito. Chicago probably has the largest, most diverse conflict cluster and might end up the strongest place: Staniland, Lessing, Wedeen, Albertus, and Pape all work on some area of civil conflict, at least tangentially. Blattman and Dube do the development-economic approach, but it does look like the huge new Pearson Institute is having some....troubles.

Ya Kaylvas leaving was big, but Wood is still there, and while the OCV closed because he wasn't there to run it, they've started up a consequences of political violence workshop that has essentially the same framework just without the fellowships. I also think Kalyvas is still on the grad students' committees that he was on before so hasn't abandoned anyone. But it is pretty crazy to think if you got in yale five years ago to do civil wars you probably assumed you'd won the lottery, but by the time you graduate, Sambanis, Lawrence, Kalyvas, and Lyall all left. That said, their younger hires' research is really interesting and it'll be interesting to see whether they try to replace Lyall with someone else. Yale still has crazy amounts of money and cache. Chicago has similarly acrimonious internal politics but has managed to turn around their department with an overall endowment that's about 1/4 of Yale's. I doubt they'll ever be *the* place to study civil conflict again but I won't be shocked when they're a very strong department in a few years.

As Yale is the only decision I have left that would be attractive, I'm also waiting on them, but assuming I'll be rejected and definitely end up at Chicago, barring changing my mind once I've visited places. From talking to a couple of my professors who either went there, taught there or had friends there, Yale's a strange place. The department has bled senior academics like Kalyvas, Mantena (leaving for Columbia apparently), Thachill, and Sambanis. They've also struggled to hold onto some talented younger academics like Adria Lawrence. They just denied tenure to Jason Lyall. As I understand it, there's some bad power politics within the department that likely are a big part of why so many people have left. As such, lots of political scientists who for whatever reason care about rankings would say they've struggled to maintain their stature in recent years. I'd bet most would still say they're a strong top 10 department and better than that depending on what you're studying/who you're studying with, but I know some would say they're not a CHYMPS-caliber department right now, or at the very least, they are the weakest of those six. If that reallllly means anything I guess is a bigger question. I'm sure someone else on here might disagree with this. On the whole, their treatment of staff and grad students is historically less than great. The university refuses to recognize the grad student union, while morale among academics is pretty bad. The Yale Daily News just reported that the administration pushed for a report on faculty satisfaction to remain secret because it said 69% of faculty didn't think their department was top 5 and a majority thought the university mistreated staff and was failing to recruit top-level academics. Pretty hard to recruit when the stories coming out of the department are all about dysfunction.

Yes, so the chart is lagged. It's about the 400 most cited political scientists, many of whom will obviously have received their degrees decades ago. As such, Chicago is bigger than it should be while Stanford and UCSD are both under-represented. My feeling is that Chicago's system favors a long PhD (6-7 years) plus a post-doc before placing in TT jobs, while UCSD favors a shorter PhD (5-6 years) -- probably partially due to funding -- and prefers to place people straight into TT jobs. Regardless, UCSD has placed more people in TT jobs than Chicago has over the previous decade. Chicago struggled and lost loads of top academics, but I think is pretty universally considered to be on a strong upswing. Still, neither of them, at the moment, seems to place many people at CHYMPS jobs. But that's also a symptom of the current market: wanna teach at HPS? better go to HPS and shine. Michigan/Yale/Cal are a bit more open but still mostly populated by people from CHYMPS with the occasional star from lower down. UCSD places very well, but like most places, its grads go to lower ranked schools to teach, while its faculty is overwhelmingly CHYMPS grads plus some older staff who went to Chicago/Columbia when they were stronger. To those above, in polisci, CHYMPS is certainly Cal and Michigan. MIT, Columbia and Chicago are all fantastic programs, but the traditional acronym doesn't include them.

Michigan is a top 5 program, OSU is outside the top 10 but still a good place to end up, depending on what you want. Equally, unlike undergrad, the difference between a top 5 and a 15th ranked program is massive in terms of your chances of getting a TT job, top fellowships, external funding, etc. If you have the choice between OSU and Michigan, I would say there is essentially no reason to choose OSU. This year they claim to have admitted 4% of 400 applicants. It's known for having exceptional academics, training, and placement records. Funding wise, Michigan almost certainly offers more, though I'm sure there are people on this board who have been admitted to both who can tell you exactly what the difference is. Michigan is historically a top program, part of the 'CHYMPS' acronym of top schools: Cal, Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford. This is by no means a definitive or even that useful of a list of top programs -- for instance, many people see Yale as struggling after many top academics left -- but it is a good general guide to the most prestigious programs. For instance, this blog has a network map of where the top 400 cited political scientists went to grad school and the edges represent where they then went to teach: https://alexandreafonso.me/2019/02/11/academic-hierarchies-in-us-political-science/

No worries. To be fair, there are great masters around Europe worth looking at. The Juan March Institute-UC3M masters in social sciences offers good training and has some exceptional academics (Sanchez Cuenca is a big deal guy in terrorism studies). Amsterdam is very good. The Oxford MPhils are of course very good and lots of students at CHYMPS have gotten in with them, particularly if you're working with some of the more famous people at the DPIR. LSE masters are a cash cow for the university but do provide good training, substantive knowledge if you play it right, and the academics there are still very good.

Ya my assumption is official acceptances haven't cleared the graduate school. Once they have, the official offers and further info will follow. The portal still says 'under review'. My research interests could theoretically involve quite a few of their academics, though, so I'm really not even sure who my POI would be.

Really depends. I'm an American who went to Oxbridge and have spoken with lots of people there about this very issue as I was tempted to stay on for an MPhil. The general rule is go to a top US program or go to school where you want to work. The pipeline of US PhDs to top universities around the world is strong and a good route if you wanna teach in Europe/Asia/Latin America/MENA, but the pipelines does not exist in reverse. The US is the gold standard for training. The methods training, research experience, etc. are all far superior to almost any European program, and usually, if you want a job in US academia, you need to attend a US university. There are of course a couple instances of people coming from other places, e.g. Ragnhild Nordas at UMich, who went to European universities, but they are very rare. Half of this is snobbery: Americans don't respect European social science for several reasons, none of which are very good. Many American academics erroneously see Europe as where you get a job when you fail to get one in the US. Oxford is likely the most well-respected institution outside the US and it almost never places people into R1s. The DPIR there has worked very hard to hire top-quality US academics -- see Ben Ansell, Stathis Kalyvas, Jane Gingrich, Andy Eggers, Todd Hall, and quite a few others -- but even those academics' students don't place well in the US. LSE does even worse. That said, the UK is probably the most well-respected system outside the US. If you want to do political sociology, Utrecht, Amsterdam and the Nuffield crowd at Oxford are exceptional, and there are good academics at the Juan March Institute and the EUI. Sciences Po in Paris is very highly ranked internationally but only go if you want to live and teach there. Their academics write almost entirely about France and its former colonies and do so in French. All of these places could get you jobs in Europe. None should be seen as a good way to get an R1 job in the US.

Has anyone heard anything from UCSD post-admission email? Have been emailed by professors from other departments and gotten lots of info on open days that are in April, but I haven't heard anything from UCSD professors/department, which is weird because their visiting day is in less than a month.