drb

While theoretically attractive, this is probably not feasible. Firstly, there is the "herding cats" aspect of getting graduate departments to agree - medical residency programs are much more regulated by and accountable to their accrediting boards. Second is the highly varied constituent departments. For example, a student interested in neural engineering may end up applying to a biomedical engineering program, an electrical engineering program, and a neuroscience program. Getting all of these into the same match system would be difficult, as their applicants would otherwise not likely overlap. (Residencies, in contrast, are much more homogeneous in nature - you pick surgery, or pediatrics, but rarely both). Finally, this would ultimately be a disservice to the student. In contrast to residencies, alot of a student's evaluation of a program is made after admission, when in-depth consideration of and interviews with individual PIs are done.

Um - can we keep this thread on topic? If you wish to discuss the merits of stat vs. intangibles-driven admissions, and its implications for less-privileged applicants, please feel free to start another thread. Thank you.

Indeed. But you would think that having gone to the trouble of identifying the desired students, they would be more proactive regarding communicating this likelihood. Otherwise the student may make a commitment elsewhere. Your point regarding the third tier being satisfactory is well-taken, but, again, given the many year and $ commitment, a modest amount of active engagement during March would be in order (vs. "check the website"). Further, those in the third tier who are still uncommitted close to April 15 may be largely those who have no funded offer anywhere, so you might be going pretty far down the list.

[ While this works for undergrad admission, I would think grad admission would be more finely tuned, given the costs. Consider your example - the difference between 30 and 40% is 8 students; at around $25K this is a difference of $200K to the department (not including tuition). It would be less for smaller departments, but as you note, the variability would be greater, and they might end up having to take a larger fraction of their class from the third-tier. It just seems that, given the multi-year commitment of both students and school, there should be a little more communication with the second tier, so that there is clarity as to the degree of mutual interest. In particular, it amazes me that at this late date there are programs that have not even informed applicants whether they have been admitted.

The graduate student admission process seems to be as follows: Shortly after the application deadline, a cohort of highly competitive students are admitted with funding. A second-level cohort are either admitted without funding, or are identified but not contacted. As April 15 draws near, decisions are made, and only a subset of the top-tier cohort accept (since they have multiple offers). Meanwhile, the second-tier group has visited elsewhere, gotten funding elsewhere, etc. Then what happens? Is there some frantic attempt to engage and recruit these second-tier students on April 14? Or does the school just pass on them and make offers to students who have not been accepted anywhere; i.e. they end up accepting a third-tier cohort? Or they just live with the subset of first-tier students who accepted, even if its not sufficient for filling TA-ships, etc? Seems like an inefficient way to train the next generation of scholars.