ZeChocMoose

Well first off, I definitely get the disappointment that you are experiencing. Rejection hurts especially when you felt like you gave it your best shot. The good news is that you application season is not quite over yet so you may get off the waitlist. Although, when I received my first rejection in my first application season, I knew the writing was on the wall so to speak. I was correct and I did get rejected to at all 8 PhD programs that I applied to that season. So it might be best for your mental health to go to plan B. Plan B could be applying again next year, attending one of the master's programs, or tabling graduate school for now. I won't suggest changing course to a discipline that you have no experience or interest in. Even if you do get in, you'll be miserable because you'll be taking courses and doing research in a field that you don't have a lot of interest in. I also am surprised to hear that the PhD program is 2 years. Most Education PhDs are 4 - 6 years. If it 2 years, I imagine you won't be getting the quality experience that you are looking for.

Hmmm - I might talk with some current students too to see whether this a policy that dept/school is serious about and enforces. It seems like it would be because they mention it in the offer letter but you never know. In my program, people do work part-time jobs on top of their assistantships, but it is not the level of hours that you are thinking about (usually less than 10 hrs) and often our faculty send us part-time opportunities that they think will be a good fit for us based on methodological skills or research interests. I don't think everyone works another job, but a majority of the PhD students in my program do it at some point. Granted I'm in higher ed, so being at a university and having certain skills, you get a lot of requests to do paid, side projects that are really relevant to what we are studying. Many students also come in to the PhD program having worked in the field for several years so they have external connections who are offering them paid, part-time work as well.

Just so you know so you can make informed decisions about student debt loans, education professors (unfortunately) do not make that much money in general. Here is a great table by the Chronicle of Higher Ed about faculty salaries broken down by rank and discipline: http://chronicle.com/article/Average-Faculty-Salaries-by/131081/ (you'll need to have a subscription to see it.) (If you don't have a subscription...) Basically, the average salaries for education professors are: 56K for ass't professor, 67K for assoc professor, and 85K for full professor. (Only about a quarter of faculty in the nation are full professors-- not sure what the breakdown is for education specifically but I imagine it is around there.) Unfortunately this chart doesn't break it down by institutional type or public/private because you'll see a range of salaries around those means for education professors. One of my research interests is student loan debt so I think it is important for students esp in low paying fields to have a good understanding of what the salary expectations are when you come out so you can make well informed decisions about what level of debt that you are willing to take on.

I think that depends whether you want to go faculty or not. If you want to go faculty, trying to complete in 3 years is going to make it a bit challenging because you'll need to hit the ground running in terms of research and publications in order to have a couple articles published by the time you go out on the market. You might have to do a postdoc - which are not too plentiful in education but I have seen some. If you want to go into policy or admin, I don't think a shorter time to degree is really going to make that much of a difference.

I worked in IR after my master's degree in higher ed. If this is truly the direction that you want to move in, I would suggest going to a program that emphasizes research design and statistics. This usually means that you'll be cutting out student affairs type programs and typically one year programs because you won't be able to take enough statistics to make you competitive for an entry level position in IR. You might also want to look at Educational Methodology master's degrees. In general, the more methods and data analysis skills that you gain in your program, the better that you will do on the market for an IR job. Also, it helps to have an assistantship or internship in either IR or educational research in your master's program. (Sometimes this may be hard to do in a typical student affairs type master's program.)

I am a big fan of observing people's non-verbal cues. So-- I like to see how current students and faculty interact and when current students interact with each other. What is their body language while interacting? Do they seem like they know each other? Are people formal or informal in these interactions? (It's easier to do this when there is an event when people are socializing in small groups.) I also like to ask the same questions to multiple people to see what they say. Do you get the same answer or is it widely different? If people are saying widely different things, you need to investigate and figure out why. Or if multiple people answer the exact same way to a question that is not factual (i.e. how is the culture in the department as opposed to what do RAs make?), I would wonder am I being fed the party line? Also ask current students what one thing they would change about the program. Everyone has something-- I would not believe them if they said nothing but be respectful when and where you ask this question. It might be better to do this one-on-one than in a group or in front of faculty. Ask faculty what they see as the major weakness in the program. What (if anything) are they doing to address this? Where do they see the department heading in the next five years? At the end of the day, no program is perfect-- but you'll want to make sure that you are going in with your eyes open and that you can get the kind of experience that you want out of the program. I would figure out what are the most important characteristics to you before you begin visiting. Are there any deal breakers? The most important factors for me when selecting a master's program were: academically focused in the classroom, collegial, affordable, and opportunity to gain policy or research experience.

(Please bear with me-- I LOVE visiting college campuses. I would actually consider it a hobby!) I am biased towards colonial colleges so College of William and Mary has my vote for best all around. Middlebury College wins for me for most quintessential New England campus. Larger research universities-- it gets harder because you are dealing with so many different architectural types usually. For publics, I am partial to Berkeley and Michigan. (Although, I hear UCLA is beautiful but I have never been....yet!) For privates, Yale and Princeton. (They are SO colonial ) Internationally-- either Oxford or St. Andrews. I am definitely a fan of stone buildings and history.

Given how far away you are, I would just ask to Skype or do a phone conversation for the 30 min interview. Perhaps they are not use to dealing with non-local candidates... Given that you already have six acceptances and seven pending decisions, you are going to have to start narrowing anyways. You might only be able to reasonable visit 5-6 schools depending on how far away they are and your tolerance for traveling/visiting. You can always ask to talk to faculty/current students via phone or email to help narrow down the list of places that you want to visit especially since you are paying out of pocket.

Speaking for my own experience (granted this was ~7 years ago), only one program that I was looking at for my master's degree in higher ed paid for part of my expenses. The other 4 programs, I had to pay out of pocket to visit them. Visiting is so important though especially if you'll be interviewing for an assistantship during the visit. Hopefully, the programs will be offering to house you with a graduate student so that should help alleviate the housing costs. How I managed it-- two of my programs were thankfully in driving distance, two of my programs I had to fly to, and one I dropped out of the process because of the cost of the flight and the fact that they were not offering to fully fund me. I also was working full-time so I had some savings to pay for the visits. If your budget for visits are limited, I would look to see how many visits you can reasonably pay for and then use that to narrow down your schools. It's a little tricky now since you probably still have some offers pending, but I would say in about 2 weeks you should know (hopefully!) where you stand with all your programs.

I could see how someone on the admission committee may have concerns. I am assuming here that you have never stopped your schooling and there may be at least one field change in your education since you have two master's degree. If the admissions committee didn't fully understand your transition to this new field (which I assume is your second master's)-- perhaps they are concerned that you'll want to transition again once you are done with this program (which I am assuming is a PhD program). Since it is a top program, I imagine that the spots are selective so they want to double check your rationale esp. if there are many qualified applicants in the pool. When I sat on the admission's committee in my dept, I learned that sometimes it is not about the current applicant, but you remind the faculty of a past student who entered the program but didn't work out for whatever reason. They just want to make sure that you are committed to the field/program/what not before they commit to you for 5+ years. I would at least wait until the campus visit day before you rule out the program. If you still get a negative vibe or bad feelings, then yes don't enroll. I think it is too early to make that call because we don't (yet) have a pattern of bad behavior. Edit: And yes, I too had several weird phone conversations with programs when I was applying. I chalked it up to academics not being the most socially savvy bunch of individuals.

To be fair, it is not an accreditation issue. In Maryland to grant new academic degree programs, HEIs need to get approval from the Maryland Higher Ed Commission (MHEC). MHEC requires HEIs to go through this approval process to coordinate efforts. They don't want 30 programs in X field if the demand is not there so the school proposing the new program (JHU in this case) needs to show there is demand for the program in their region and that they have adequate financial resources to create and maintain the new program. Other HEIs in Maryland that already grant this degree may submit their objections to JHU's proposal especially if these schools think that the new program at JHU will decrease their enrollments substantially. This new program approval process is separate from accreditation though. It looks like MHEC is going to make the decision on JHU's proposed PhD in education on Feb 1. So far, there are no objections registered from other schools. Here is the link: http://www.mhec.state.md.us/highered/acadaff/acadproginstitapprovals/AcadProgDescriptions/APTLogPDShow.asp?sPD=12203 However, whether you should go to a newly created PhD program is a whole other discussion. I think it comes down to whether there is faculty there that you would want to work with and how comfortable you feel with risk i.e. the program might be fluid for a bit until they work out all the kinks per say. They are also not going to be able to tell you their job placement rates since you'll be the first class. Perhaps being in a new program will allow you greater flexibility with your program and maybe the faculty and staff will be more motivated to help you because you'll be the first class. It is difficult to tell in these cases and that is why you'll need to be comfortable with some degree of risk.

Can you delay your trip to end of April or May? I remember that March was a very busy time for me when I was applying for higher ed master's programs. All 5 of my programs had visit days. I think I pretty much had a visit every weekend that month. And yes, you do definitely want to attend the campus visit days especially since you'll be interviewing for positions. When I was a master's student, I coordinated the student - employer interview matching process for the visit days. It was a beast trying to make everyone happy (i.e. making sure students got the interviews that they wanted and making sure the employers got the students that they wanted to interview.) In my program, students who could not attend the campus visit days were given the contact information of employers and were told to contact them directly to set up phone interviews. It was really difficult trying to coordinate the people who could come so we didn't have enough time nor resources to coordinate the interviewing schedules for the students who couldn't come. I don't know if that is atypical or not of how my program handled it. If you can tell us where you applied - I am sure more people can help you out on whether those schools have visit days. Sometimes if you do a little digging on the program's website, there will be a calendar or an announcement that tells you when the campus visit day is.

What do you hope to do once you graduate? Since a master's program is pretty much all course work, I would make sure the schools that you are applying to have courses in your area of interest. Also-- where are you hoping to live after you graduate? Usually, your schools have more networks and connections within their region. It looks like most of your schools are in the Midwest or New England. Is this where you want to live after you are done? Besides that I would also look into funding. Do all students get assistantships that cover tuition and healthcare? If not, how do these schools expect you to pay for your degree? I applied to 5 schools when I was looking to get my master's in higher ed. I found it a bit overwhelming because all of the programs I applied to required a multiple day on-campus visit with numerous interviews. I ended up declining one visit because it was too close to another's schools and I was exhausted from all the previous travel. If you are a strong candidate, I would narrow it down to a handful of schools to apply to (5 - 7 although 7 seems really on the high end).

It is going to depend on what type of federal loans and the amounts that you took out for your first master's degree and undergraduate degree (if applicable). For Stafford loans, there is a lifetime limit of $138,500 for graduate and professional students. For Perkins loans, the lifetime limit is $60,000 for graduate and professional students. Both of these lifetime limits include the amount that you took out as an undergraduate. For the Grad PLUS loan, I could not find a lifetime limit, but you can only borrow the cost of attendance minus any alternative financial aid for each year. You also cannot be currently in default on any of your federal student loans to receive federal loans for this second master's degree. This website has good information on federal financial aid and eligibility: http://studentaid.ed.gov/

I agree with michigan girl about branching out a bit and also applying to some programs that will have less strict academic requirements. The programs that you listed in your first post are some of the more popular, well ranked institutions for the field. A couple of them have really tiny master's programs too so that might make it even harder to gain admission. If you have a better blend of programs (in terms of selectivity), you might find that you'll fair better when you receive the results. Your current list of programs are also more academically focused as they tend to emphasize theory and research in the classroom. Do you want this? What do you hope to do after you graduate from a higher ed program? There is not a lot of merit aid for master's students. The ones that I know about are focused on academics (GPA and GREs) as well as your SOP. It might be difficult to get a merit scholarship with your GPA though. The assistantship process (on the other hand) is all about the experiences that you have in the field and how you come across in the interview. Usually, you'll be invited to campus sometime in the spring (Feb - April) and you'll go through a series of interviews with different offices to secure an assistantship. Your potential supervisors don't see your transcripts (usually) just your resume and they tend to select based on how well suited they think you are for the position. This is when having decent practical experiences in the field can really pay off.

If you get in, you might end up being a conditional admit if your GPA is not above the recommended 3.0 either set by the department or the university. This happened to one of my cohort mates in my master's program. He just had to get a certain GPA by a certain amount of credits. I think it was a 3.5 by 12 credits. Also, he could not preregister during his first semester. Instead, he had to wait until his grades came in before the department will allow him to register for the spring semester. It didn't end up being that big a deal for him, but there was a 5+ year gap between his undergrad and master's program so he could better argue that his grades from his undergrad don't reflect how he'll do in the program. He also ended up taking 1-2 courses in the program as a non-degree seeking student to show that he could handle the course material. (Of course this is all very program specific but I won't be too surprised if other universities have something similar to the conditional admit status.) My only concern with your GPA grade history is that you are still getting some lower grades in your latter years (C, C-, and D+). What is going on there? Are these similar type of courses? You'll just want to make sure that you'll be able to handle the amount of reading that you'll have to do and then writing multiple 15 - 20 page papers at the end of the semester. Not all of the programs that you listed are that intense, but a couple of the ones that you are applying to that is the typical work load.

It's a little different though in Education where you could have adjuncts/lecturers who work at the university and teach 1 course per semester or even 1 course per year. Generally though, these people don't do research (as they are in admin) and the student wouldn't be on a research team with them even though they could be the student's advisor. I know that the context around adjuncts/lecturers is completely different in other fields but in education it could be possible for a PhD student to have a lecturer as an advisor. Why you want to do this is another story however.

In my master's program, there were a couple adjunct professors/lectures that were advisors for PhD students. I am not sure how helpful that was for the students who wanted to be faculty though because those individuals were not involved in research. It seemed to work out fine for students that were interested in admin or policy so I guess it depends on what your purpose is for doing a PhD.

You really need to start talking with people in those fields. Sometimes it is easier to go through the alumni office at your alma mater to ask whether they have any alumni who are willing to talk with people about x,y,z field. Sometimes you can just email people you came across through searching the internet. Ultimately, you ask them simple questions about what they like about their jobs and what they don't like, how they got to where they are at, and what they typically do on a daily basis. You can have this conversation through email, phone call, or in person meeting (the initial contact should be email since that is usually less obtrusive). Generally, I would let them pick which method that they prefer. If is through email though, limit your questions to only the most important ones since emails that take hours to respond to might not get answered if and when things get busy. Their responses hopefully will help you narrow down what field you should consider. Then you need to decide based on those informational interviews whether you need to go back to school or not. I definitely don't recommend enrolling in a graduate program if you are not sure on what field you want to be in. Grad school can be pretty expensive in certain fields and you don't want to be stuck in an area that you don't particularly enjoy because you need to pay off your loan debt.

The classes are on legislature behavior and redistribution of public goods. I didn't mean that as derogatory - my couple of good texts comments. My own field is very interdisciplinary as well but usually people can point to certain books or review articles by topics that can be helpful for people just starting out.

Yes, I could do this but I am hoping to get some personal recommendations of books/review articles that grad students have found helpful. Usually there are a couple good texts in each field, but it is hard to know as an outsider which ones those are.

Next semester I am taking two graduate-level political science courses to help me with my comprehensive exam and possibly my dissertation. Since this is not my area of expertise (nor did I take any classes on political science when I was in undergrad), I was hoping to read 1 - 2 books over break to help me become familiar with the terminology of the field and perhaps some of the big theories. (The classes are on legislature behavior and redistribution of public goods.) If you have any suggestions of which books to read or even review articles to look at that would be really helpful. I realize that I am not going to become an expert, but I am hoping to get some of the relevant terminology and theories down so the learning curve isn't as steep and I am not utterly confused when I start reading the journal articles for the classes.

Have you talked to older students in your program? It could be that the classes in your first year don't lend themselves to that type of activity. It also could be that you need to seek out opportunities to get involved by asking professors to join their pet projects. Or it could be that your program is not very research intensive in general. If that is the case than you may have to work harder to get the necessary research experience and you also might want to look outside your program if you can't find anything that you would like to get involved with.

I agree with michigan girl. Enrolling in a one year program with limited professional experience may set you up for a difficult job search when you graduate. You'll also want to gain some substantial professional experience in your program and perhaps try out different areas within higher ed. This is much easier to do in a longer program. I attended a two year master's program and I was amazed how my interests and career trajectory changed a lot. The second year gave me the opportunity to gain experience in my new area of interest which is honestly why (I think) I was so successful in my job search. There are also definitely good reasons to attend one year programs, but usually should be left for people who have a decent amount of experience in the field already (3 - 5 years or so) or have life circumstances that make attending a longer program extremely difficult.

It honestly doesn't matter that much. I have seen people do either Higher Ed or Student Affairs programs and secure advising positions. Hiring managers tend to be more concerned if you have experience in advising during your master's program than your specific type of program. I would select a program depending on what you want to study and its overall fit. If you want to learn about student development and counseling-- then go with a student affairs program. If you want to learn about faculty, admin, students, higher ed policy, organizational theory, etc -- do a higher ed program. If you want a combo, you can always look into HESA (higher ed and student affairs) programs. Master's degree programs are not ranked in higher ed programs. She might be referring to the rankings of higher ed PhD programs, but they are not the same. (Some depts treat their master's students very differently from their PhD programs--- and some don't.) I would be much more concerned about coming out debt free or relatively debt free from my master's program. You also want to make sure that you are getting enough quality experience either through assistantships or internships so you can get a job when you graduate.