Noulli

I just read the post cited by @Boolakanaka, and that is pretty much exactly what I did. Once you see the various offers, you have a much broader sense of the funding landscape. As opposed to master's degrees, which often seem to treat people more fungibly, a PhD takes the form of an investment in the individual, at least from what I have observed, and it seems that many programs are quite careful in selecting the people to whom they make offers of admission and are thus amenable to some negotiation, provided it's done appropriately.

I successfully negotiated a more generous funding package in statistics from nearly all the programs into which I was accepted. If you have several offers, I would not hesitate to inquire about additional funding, especially if a certain program might be preferable to others if you could secure more funding.

@Dandelion_97 Last year, I applied and was admitted to some of the same schools that you are here considering. I see that you have divided the schools into classes based on the rankings from USNWR--a strategy that I used as well. I would, however, be careful,of considering a lower-ranked school on that list as potentially easier to gain admittance to than a higher-ranked school. Some other important considerations would be the size of the program, the overall prestige of the institution (e.g., I think it was recently mentioned by someone on this forum that some of the Ivy League schools tend to be more selective than their rankings might indicate), and the fit between your proposed research interests and those of the faculty members at the institution. It s difficult to tell how much the last factor influences the admission decision at a given institution, but for your own benefit, it would be beneficial to find places where there is at least some compatibility.