RWBG

This probably isn't news, but sure, PM me about Michigan.

Michigan admits and waitlists should feel free to PM me if they have any questions about the program, funding, visit weekend, etc. Looking forward to seeing you guys in March.

Something could go wrong, but I was told today or tomorrow. The initial plan was to send it all out at once.

Could be as late as tomorrow.

This isn't bad, but I suspect there's a fair bit of noise to this measure. It's computed in sort of a weird way, where department chairs and directors of graduate studies "nominate" some number of programs (maximum ten) that they think should be recognized, and those that get the most votes end up higher on the ranking. Makes me wonder how close the vote counts were on some of these, and whether it's possible that a small difference of votes could lead to more dramatic differences in ranking.

It's me who should be sorry: my response wasn't to you, but to someone else, and yet for some reason the post initially said it was quoting you and I had to edit it to remove that. Everything you're saying makes perfect sense to me, and is at the level of information that one should have gathered ex ante.

Well, not really. This implies that the information you need to write a strong SOP and determine that a school is one you want to apply to is exactly the same level of information you need to write a precise rank-ordering between those schools. Before you apply, you should have a sense of the general strengths, some people you would like to work with, a general sense of placement, etc. This allows you to make the decision of whether the expected value of an application is higher than the application cost, and to mention a few POIs/strengths of the department in your SOP to demonstrate you've thought about fit. Once you've been admitted to a set of schools you need to set out to resolve as much of remaining uncertainty as possible so that you can narrow the confidence intervals around your estimates of expected value and make a better decision between the options you have. It is unreasonable to expect that applicants will have done enough research ex ante that they will not need to engage in more information-gathering after having offers in order to make a more fine-grained evaluation of the options, particularly given that many applicants apply to 10+ schools.

Also, congrats everyone on the offers. Hopefully I'll see some more of you in March.

It's even more particular than the other joint public policy offers, given that you hadn't initially applied to public policy. So, to others: even if you're a joint applicant, I wouldn't expect anything until next week.

I am still expecting the vast majority of Michigan admits to go out early next week. The offer that's already gone out is a bit of a special case, because of the whole public policy thing.

Michigan should be early next week.

We're close. Maybe by the end of the week, almost certainly by the end of next week unless something unexpected happens. Weather hasn't affected anything, although it is unpleasant.

I remember my year, UCLA did the whole blast admit, and I assumed that I had not been admitted. Then I got an e-mail a few days later from a POI congratulating me on being admitted (note: not notifying me of my admittance, but an e-mail that took it as given that I knew I had been admitted), and asking if I wanted to set up a phone call to talk about it. I said sure, that sounds great, but I haven't heard from anyone and I was under the impression that others had already been admitted, so was he sure that I had actually been accepted to the program? He responded with something like "I doubt they would have contacted anyone else yet, given that you were ranked first on our IR list". I guess they had forgotten to send me an e-mail somehow? In a less exciting but still related story, Rochester had admitted people all at once historically (to my recollection). So when they admitted a bunch of students on here, I figured I was out, especially when I didn't hear for a few days; I even started discussing my other options with people on the assumption that I hadn't been admitted there. Then I got a phone call from them while I was making lunch. Suffice to say, sometimes you don't want to jump to conclusions.

Translation: "I have once again been successful in aggressively lobbying to run the Rush, a name I came up with and love."

The only one of these I wouldn't put too much stock in is the Hix ranking, which tends to be actively misleading. The rest all say something, though given the age of some of the data it can sometimes be a challenge to discern what exactly that is.

Who does IPE at WUSTL besides Nate Jensen, who's leaving? I really like WUSTL (they have a great formal theory group) but I don't know them to be much of an IPE-house.

I don't have any information except that I was given an offer for two years of fellowship funding two years ago. The numbers floating around in this thread that you referred to are probably those I provided, and they were accurate.

GPA is a tough signal to interpret, because there is so much variation in grading standards, both between institutions and within an institution depending on what kind of courses you take. I find it very challenging to use GPA as a signal, except as a negative one, although grades in particular courses can sometimes be useful. GRE is not the most important factor, but it is at least a consistent measure from applicant to applicant, so I tend to take a quick glance at that first. Fit and intangibles are probably most important when at the final narrowing stage, although significant violations of fit (i.e. applying to do nothing but ethnographic research focused on a region where we have no-one with expertise) might be enough to make us feel that we shouldn't admit you. LoRs can vary a lot in usefulness. Think of it in terms of signalling, where the letter-writer has to navigate how to send us credible signals besides "this applicant is great". If we know the letter-writer well, these signals can be a bit clearer, as we know the pool against which that letter-writer is evaluating applicants, they can make explicit comparisons to other successful applicants, and if we have a history with them, we know what a good letter is and what a great letter is. In some of these cases, a single, very strong letter has had a huge impact on the success of an application. In other instances, letter-writers might make comparisons to students in the letter-writer's former graduate programs, etc. Other cases, we might be looking for a letter-writer to say positive things, but because we don't know enough about them to fully interpret the signal, we have to rely mostly on other factors so long as the letter doesn't discourage us. Reputation of your school's program mostly has an effect through the letter-writers you can find, the degree of socialization you're likely to get in the discipline before applying, and to some extent the credibility of the grades. However, lots of people with Ivy undergrads and great GPAs and GREs were eliminated early on, so it's definitely not the main contributing factor to success.

There was some slight variation in the funding packages given, so 24k for two years was not "incorrect" per se. Some students also didn't get funding.

I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole of answering questions here, given that I risk accidentally overstepping what I'm allowed to reveal publicly. Generally, I'd say that if there are other components that make admission unlikely, all other aspects of the application will still be read, but possibly skimmed. Anyone who's graded papers before probably knows you don't need to read the whole thing in detail to assign a grade. GRE and GPA are basically never sufficiently good or bad to make admissions likely or unlikely on their own; indeed, we've had many people with near perfect scores and GPA who were eliminated, and many people who were much weaker on those dimensions that have moved on.

Re New Questions: Every stage of the process introduces randomness, and we might have had tie-breakers if we didn't end up with 120 applications that had been recommended for admission. We had hoped to narrow it to about half of that with the first round. Realistically though, if there's a member of the committee who wouldn't have recommended you for admission, it's unlikely your application would make it past the final round even if you made it to it.

Re Q1: If either member who reviewed your application gave you a rating lower than "excellent: admit" you would not make it to the round two. Many great applications were eliminated in the first round. Re Q2: We do not screen on any factors. Every application is read at least twice in full.

At some point, once the cycle's over and I know what I'm allowed to discuss publicly, I'll probably write something up with a few of my thoughts on the admissions process. For now, a quick thought following this point: In admissions at my top 5 program, applications go through an initial round of review by two commitee members, after which we decide between those applications that have been recommended for admission independently by both members. This year, we had about 120 applications that were recommended for admission independently by two members of the committee, and have to narrow that down to less than 40 (probably closer to 30) to actually make offers to (which constitutes a substantial increase in the number of offers we intend to make this year relative to previous years). All that is to say that even if two commitee members really liked your application and thought you were good enough to enter the program, there is about a 75% chance we won't be able to make you an offer. So if it turns out we don't make you an offer, you really shouldn't take this as saying anything particularly harsh about your application, as things inevitably get a bit mercurial when we're at this stage.

Other thoughts: -Some programs deduct fees from the amount they officially give you. This will make your effective stipend lower than the stipend they report to you. -You might consider as well whether your school is on the semester or quarter system. If it's a quarter system, you may have a shorter summer with less time to allocate to profitable pursuits. Trade-off is you get more faculty time, but something to think about. I think Michigan's stipend is at 18600 w/ 3000 summer funding for all five years (21,600/year total) without any fee reductions. It goes up by a modest amount (2%) each year. Teaching commitments are years 2-5, though most people seem to be able to pick up fellowships from the school so that they don't teach that whole time (particularly if you're a US citizen). Comfortable enough for Ann Arbor.

Anecdotally, I'd say Harvard and Stanford are likely to have the highest yield. Michigan's had plenty of success getting people with offers at Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, and we've had some applicants (though fewer) turn down Stanford for us, but I can't think of anyone I know who turned down Harvard for us. In terms of people who've turned us down, it's almost universally people with other offers from the top-6: my year, I think we lost one to Harvard, three to Stanford, three to Princeton, one to Yale, one to Berkeley, and one to Illinois (I imagine for idiosyncratic reasons). From what I recall from the visit weekend, Rochester had at least one person who turned down Harvard for them, so it does happen, particularly with places that are more specialized. For the record though, our yield rate has generally been above 50%, and I'd be surprised if Stanford's wasn't a bit higher.