GradSchoolGrad

see my post about defining walls on another thread. on another line of thought, I will say that, no matter where you go to grad school, I recommend you really structure your thinking on 1-3 focus areas for your grad school interests. The saddest thing to see in grad school are smart people completely mess up jobs market recruiting because they suffer from decision paralysis and cannot coherently explain what they actually want to do when they grow up.

So here is the deal about "hitting a wall". There are lots off different types fo walls, and you need to figure out what matters to you. Given the supply and demand issues of city/state government (especially in high income areas), you could possibly ride the wave till retirement making 6 figures in local and state government ex major urban areas. However, you would be type cast as a local and state government guy and your wall would be the limitations of your knowledge base and network to transition. You could also slog your way up to different things but that would take years (so like half a decade to a decade). As for foundations, you can incrementally move up as well. It is however obviously less lucrative. Your wall would be being stuck in foundation land due to the limitation of your knowledge and network. The true strength of grad school is the base of knowledge and the associated network that comes with it (both your classmates and alumni base). In the short term, it is a one time super booster for you pivot career areas however you want. You can easily pivot to something that currently isn't accessible to you, at least at a higher prestige and scale of responsibility. This does not necessarily translate into immediate post graduate pay though because oftentimes in public service - the more prestigious something else, the less you get paid because of supply and demand. Example - new FBI agents can get paid less than new suburban cops. This is why, I recommend you think about what accessible jobs naturally fit you best post-graduate school that normally wouldn't be applicable to you now with earnings in mind. So, without completely knowing you, and I'm shooting in the dark, I'm gonna mention some ideas with salaries based on DC area. 1. Government consulting - 90K to 120K 2. Competitive Federal employee - starting 70K to 80K. The Presidential Merit Fellowship is a good one without a lot of domestic opportunitiies 3. Project/Program manager for a non-profit housing developer - 70K to 90K 4. Big City Urban Development Policy Advisor / Analyst - 75K

Lets place this in reverse. 1. Is income post grad school something you really care about? If the answer is no, then do what your heart desires 2. If the answer is yes - lets play this hypothetical - Below what dollar annual income level, would cross your red line in terms of expectations for post grad school job offers? Based off your answer, I can help you illustrate what career pathways may meet your salary goals, and then you can see if its still matches with your post-grad school considerations. I know you are in the fishing mode (okay - interested in lots of different things). However, it is helpful to see what fish is even available to you in your career potential pond.

Yes, the average salary is like 55K or so, but there is a huge variation within that. The variation ranges from 35K - teaching in Mississippi Delta to an extreme of 200K plus - lobbying That being said... what are you trying to angle yourself to do with a degree in terms of actual jobs (not interest areas - potential jobs) Are you trying to go management? be an analyst? go international?

Are you trying to go to grad school for a pay raise or a career change? Most likely it is a little bit of both, but what is your core angle here?

It depends on how interconnected the research is with real institutions and organizations. You got some Universities whose research centers do full real deal engagement with live organizations. Others are research for the sake of show and tell (on the other extremes). Its about a. having someone reputable vouch for your work and b. networking while researching and c. on occasion build a portfolio of research excellence. Also, your internship and work experience can have varying degrees of quality as well. NYU Wagner has been pretty good in placement for non-profit in the NYC area. The problem with NYU is that there is next to 0 alumni and student community. It is basically a take advantage fo NYC while you can and hope the NYU brand carries you far. I don't know USC that well, so I don't want to speak to what I don't know.

Those programs won't really get you there either. The three ways in is to go to a rock star program (like a U. Chicago, HKS, and etc.) or a program with focused strength on local and state stuff (Duke broadly, but local schools for regional stuff), or slog your way up through internships and work experience). However, to go through the #3 right, you want to make sure people from the program actually have a track record of going through Philanthropy. Georgetown MPP does not. Center for Public and Non-Profit Leadership is basically a cash cow to train executive on some stuff to give them a shiny certificate program ... and yes they do research to support that too. However, its not something strongly tied to McCourt MPP.

Yes... DC is... but Georgetown MPP isn't a strong pathway to get there. Just look at the job outcomes (and its kind of already skewed because they don't report the non-reports of people who don't get jobs or jobs they don't want to advertise - like myself since I have a tech job and not a policy specific job). Phiilanthropy is not where people end up. Yes, you are right generally speaking with location, but Terry Sanford, I would argue is an exception to that rule - a very well known exception. People from Sanford go across the country to do non-profit and philanthropy stuff. I can explain in detail how Terry Sanford mitigates the location matter and I would say more than makes up for it.

if you care about local and non-profit, you might as well strike Georgetown MPP off your roster. They are good at Federal Powers stuff, but not the place for local/state (unless you really want to focus on DC stuff). I also think its interesting, that the best school for Local and Non-Profit is Duke Sanford - and that is not on your list. Brandeis is blah... might as well remove that off your list. I can go in detail. Bottom line, I wouldn't go to that school for free (either its MPP or MBA).

yes

You can get into GHD easy... as for Harvard MPP and SPIA - it depends on how diverse you are compared to other applicants this year. This is rough year though!

Figure out what your career goals are... If you are going for lower paying post MPP job market --> loans are a terrible. If you seek to go private sector or even certain government roles, loans might not be an idea. However, you don't want to follow the money all the time. Just know what you want.

MPP from Georgetown means nothing for PhDs unless you get all near 4.0 GPA. Our professors reminded us all the time.

COVID, Economy, and people have become more passionate about public policy with all the things going on

I think there are 5 main ways to think about this. 1. DC gravitational pull or Global Non-Profit Space. Both schools are strong for both. However, SAIS has strengths in being connected to the DC oriented think tanks, institutions, and very importantly streams of funding (which I would argue is generally more robust). SIPA is stronger in niche non-profits and non-economically oriented NGOs. 2. Super Quant vs. Quant SAIS is famous/infamous for its aggressively quant curriculum. A lot of people go from SAIS to analytical / analytically oriented jobs. Additionally, the analytical rigor of SAIS also gives its graduates an interesting level of career flexibility. By in large, SIPA is less Quant oriented (although you can always sign up for harder quant classes). 3. Clique Community vs. No Community SAIS is interesting because it is a self-contained school that does not participate in the DC consortium (so its students can't visit classes in neighboring schools). The culture tends to be clique (or so I have been told) driven and a lot of community interaction (keep in mind I speaking of the pre-COVID experience). SIPA is infamous for having a weak community because everyone has their NYC friends and social groups that they rather hang out with. My friends who went to SIPA pretty much tell me they didn't really make new friends via their program. 4. Greater University Access Although SAIS is part of JHU, it really doesn't historically collaborate with JHU's other schools (not that there are that many schools to begin with within the DC area). SAIS does do an amazing job of giving you a lot of academic resources though, but when you don't have a law school, prestigious MBA school, and undergrad - nearby, the scale of resources is less. Columbia as you you imagine has the entire University at your finger tips - however it is like big corporation and cross-discipline collaboration isn't always fluid. 5. Alumni Go on LinkedIn and check where their alumni go - you should be able to see trends. You'll broadly see that SAIS is more DC focused while SIPA has a bit less DC.

Given your years of experience, you are on the top layer of pretty good with the stats you provided. The issue for HKS is how competitive you are vs. people like you - this is where diversity of background/experience/policy area interest and etc. comes into play and you can't control it. This is assuming everything else is straight like recommendations + essays.

1. Depends on the program you are interested in. For example - JHU SAIS - VERY MUCH SO. Georgetown MSFS - you can get away with its if you can show you have professional experience with quant analysis.

Depends on 1. Difficulty of major 2. Mitigating factors like illness and etc. and how much professional experience or great your GRE is. It is better to have an okay GPA but have As in quant classes than an A with English major and no quant classes. also it depends on how competitive your application cycle year is. My application cycle year was really weak. I know someone with a sub-3.0 GPA and 80 percentile GRE get 15K per year scholarship. This COVID application cycle means only the truly more compatible are getting money.

Your major doesn't matter. It is about justifying your history of academic and professional excellence + showing that the grad degree is right for your professional goals. I will say that the biggest blocker I have seen people experience with getting into MPA MPP programs lack of quant (statistics, economics, and calculus). Reality is that policy is being more data driven and all grad schools are beefing up their (if they aren't beefed up already) their quant component. Depending on school, some schools require those classes for Political Science majors, but some don't. Just take those classes one way or another and get good grades on them!

Unless CIPA is fully funding you, I would not go there. Granted Cornell is a great name and CIPA is trying strategically reposition itself... its like Stanford MPP - great University but not so great program. CIPA is a young program still trying to figure itself out and still doesn't have strong track record yet (AKA: Alumni + career base) Your other options are much better than CIPA.

My point is only marginally so. They look at the body of evidence... GPA, Professional, Major, and transcript... if you GPA is okay.... but your other stuff is legit, then it is fine. What is more of the unknown is diversity factors. Oh and I did forget about social involvement + leadership. Those are squishy things, but when two people are tied, those become tie breakers.

One big chunk you are missing out on is professional experience. That is the other half of the puzzle. Say that low GPA philosophy major ended up in data science and has a few start ups. Recent professional achievement + GRE performance indicate that that a person has turned his life around and has the professional experience to be academically successful. If that engineer has been entry level engineer for the past 7 years and hasn't really shown growth, that a comes with the story of lack of boldness and experience despite decent GPA. The GRE simply becomes an moot point data point that can't help or the candidate. Bottom line - it is about the story that admissions can see from the packet. After that, it is matter of diversity factors - (more than just generally, race, country of origin, age, and socio-economic background), but also policy interest and professional background. It is possible that someone academically less competitive is accepted over someone more academically competitive if the former has a lot of diversity angles.

GPAs in comparison to the perceived academic difficulty of a school and difficulty of the major + professional experience. There big thing here is: 1. Ability to graduate (which means if you are a Philosophy major who never touched stats in your life but have an A GPA - it means nothing) 2. Professional potential

I have heard anything from a month to a few months... depending how busy admissions is. Like I said, this year is not a good year to do any prior year benchmarking. If I were you, I would just shoot admissions an email and ask. They might come up with something generic and that is as good as it is going to get for you, but who knows... you might get lucky!

So that is rolling admissions... it is as fast or slow or the admissions has has capacity for. Usually, they try to get it to you within a target certain number of months... This year is all sorts of bonkers, so I wouldn't take any historical timeline for granted.