jazzrap

I agree that theory people might bring noise into the already noisy placement information. However, even taking theory into account, the two schools you just mentioned are still ahead of any of the non-Stanford top 5s in terms of placing their job candidates into TT jobs. Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, among outstanding frontier scholars, some behave more like power brokers than others do, and some take much more time on grad mentoring and training than others do. However, at this point, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for incoming grad students to identify who have more connections in the discipline and put more time on advising. We only hear from second hand sources that some names are more powerful and "nice" than others, but for most senior professors, we don't know.

Thanks people! I am really glad to see many folks are quite interested in discussing such an issue.

Guys, Hopefully my post will not start a ranking war. I apologize if it does. Perhaps there are already threads about schools where folks can discuss placement, but I still want to have a thread dedicated to this aspect of PhD programs, as it is the single-most important thing for our careers. This thread could help some of us fortunate enough to get into grad schools to have better educated choices to make. It might also be useful to prospective applicants. I want to start off with some of my observations made before and during this cycle. As any other applicant, I have been going to programs' websites to find information about placement, and trying to make an educated guess about what program has the better ability to land its ABDs into jobs. Thus far, these are my observations, and I really hope anyone here can comment on these things. First and the most obvious: a lot of programs that houses great faculty and seem to have wonderful resources do not participate in the "honest grad numbers" enterprise. My question is to what extent should a program's decision not to be a hundred percent transparent about its placement affect a prospective student's choices to attend. Second and still pretty obvious: some schools formally ranked between 10th and 15th that emphasize methods training have placement records better than any of the non-Stanford top fives (or top six). Their placement records are also better than many non-UCSD top tens. My question is why this is so. I have a few guesses, and hope you can comment on these. a) a lot of the programs at the very very top tend not to require too much methods from their graduate students, and instead stress "methodological pluralism." Many PhD students coming without prior exposure to advanced statistics tend to try to avoid mathematical training, and their programs' structures are not preventing them from doing so. These people pass the comps, and go on the market. Many top 10 and top 5 programs are pretty large, so faculty pay less attention to their students on average. This observation might be wrong, of course, because these programs may have larger number of faculty as well. However, I do feel that a relatively small program is better than a larger program in terms of sustaining a culture of working together to place well. c) Some of the very very top programs might tend to admit students from diverse backgrounds. Some students have wonderful grades and have a lot of extraordinary experiences outside of the academia. Their SOPs are professional enough to pass the cut-off, yet not as "nerdy" as some other folks in their cohort. Maybe one third of them go on to become the greatest thinkers in their subfield, but a lot of them find themselves into a discipline that they do not particularly enjoy. These two thirds pass the comps, decide to stay, and go on the market without a frontier-driven paper. I know of one student from previous cycle who got into a top 5 in the US but instead joined a British program, with "having a better opportunity to work for the Economist" being one of the primary reasons. These people exist, and many of them do attend "top 5" or "top 10" schools . I am less confident about this theory, though. d) Most importantly, as I found through some anecdotal evidence by some graduate students I know, is that top 5 or top 10 do not push students to work hard in comparison to some in the 10th-15th. Some of us lucky enough to be accepted into top 10 programs might decide to work hard anyways, and we will have pretty good endings. Others do not, and these folks go on the market as well. And top 5 or top 10 may not have intense job training, whereas one grad student from a top 15 literally told me that their DGS and Chair will tell job market candidates what kind of meals to order during office visits for job talks. In addition to my two observations and the guesses I made, I also hope to share with you one of my strategies to compare schools in terms of their records of placement. Hopefully people can come and correct me and offer their tips. One way to compare placement record is to find how many people who obtain TT jobs without first-authored publications. Say, if one school has a lot of these students, then this program must have a good ability to place. There are other programs that place their students very very well, but tend to place them through publications. I am not saying that we should go to the former kind and be lazy about research. My strategy is just to find out about programs' ability to place after controlling for the number of publications. This approach has a lot of caveats. One of them is endogeneity. More importantly, however, publications in general do not tend to be the sole decider on placement. Interesting dissertation presented in a job talk is much more important than a solo-authored piece in a top journal. Whether a student's dissertation is interesting cannot be observed, so I assume that these variables are randomly distributed, though they are not... I hope this thread has not offended anyone, and most importantly will not start a ranking war. Sorry if it does. One of the most urgent questions I and probably other applicants all have, is to what extent we should choose programs based on placement vis-a-vi fit or ranking. There is one school that provides me and other accepted applicants with information more thorough than the "honest grad numbers". From their information, calculated roughly by odds only, if anyone studying comparative politics goes on the market, he/she will have more than 70 percent chance to get a TT job as an ABD and 90 percent chance to get a TT job after a year of post-doc. NO kidding. There are better ranked schools that have much greater fit that also sent me offers. There must be other people here who have similar results and wonder whether they should attend based on record of placement.

CONGRATS TO YALE NEW ADMITS!

Their quant methods training is now on par with NYU, WUSTL, Rochester, UCSD, Columbia, and any top 5 for anyone not willing to go beyond applied methods. Their two areas of longstanding strengths, security and industrial political economy, are not very trendy subfields on the market. Taking that into consideration, therefore, this year's job placement is pretty good.

Do it! Even if you end up at World Development, it would still be a pretty good signal.

Okay, thanks!

Stanford cycle is over for sure?

Technically, I am not a second cycle applicant, but in my "first" cycle (applying for fall 2013) I estimated my strength and decided to take a semester off to "avoid" applying. What I did in the past year: my senior thesis won award. I got a higher GPA. Took more methods courses. Got a near perfect GRE score. More importantly, however, I figured out what an SOP should be like. I did know that an SOP should talk about research questions, but the past year I was so immersed into the literature that I could actually write an SOP that really speaks to the frontier.

I apologize for my previous reply. I thought that it was a spam.

Wait you a girl? didn't know that

Hey SCREW YOU!

It is an automatic email I think. Mine came at 9:00am. When I came back to the forum people are already claiming Princeton offers. I assume they received it at the same time.

Congrats. Hey, I can't believe it still. It is my dream school.

I still couldn't believe it. Congrats again though. I still can't believe it man.

I thought the email was spam, but a notification from KRISTOPHER RAMSAY MUST BE NO JOKE RIGHT?!?!?!?! Congrats, and see you at Princeton!

I guess it will be Thursday or Friday!

Money on Michigan. I don't think Yale and Stanford will send out offers Thursday or Friday, however. Both were slow historically. But Columbia and MIT definitely this week

Sounds awesome:) Will I receive the same letter? Hopefully!

Unfortunately, we don't proceed to candidacy until the end of the third year when we finished the dissertation prospectus. So two years of tuition...

Thanks a lot for the input, professor!

Three cheers for you given your strong methods list. And congrats on Berkeley. And congrats to new admits to Carolina and Caltech

Don't apply to PhD unless you are a hundred percent sure that a research career in Political Science is what you absolutely want to do. In this sense, working for a few years after your college education might help you figure out where your true passion/obsession really lies. On the other hand, as far as admissions are concerned, I don't think there is empirical evidence (and anecdotal evidence suggesting both directions) establishing work experience as a key factor for higher likelihood of acceptance. It might improve your chances through things like taking more time to write a SOP, succeed in your GREs, meeting more powerful mentors who will support you, etc. However, they won't accept you just because you have more non-academic experience than ordinary undergrad candidates do. Note that any kind of experience outside an academic institute is at best mildly related to what you will want to show in an SOP.

Ah GopherGrad, here you come!

My strategy is to look at the overall ranking instead and then consider faculty fit. I don't believe in sub-field ranking. MIT in the last four years has accomplished a significant upgrade in their training, but its methods ranking did not move in 2013. The CP ranking seems to make a little more sense for UCSD, as they lost Matthew Shuggart and Gary Cox. However, I do not do standard democratic politics (e.g. legislature, democratic voting, public opinion, bureaucracy, etc.), except when it comes to the recent literature on informal institutions and institutional change. Therefore, their departure did not affect me.