bubawizwam

You mean the whole United States wasn't illegally occupied by the United States?

Africa is a pretty big place, fyi. There are a lot of different experiences and conditions in that huge continent. Many sociologists find lumping the whole continent of Africa together pretty offensive and inaccurate. Also, your comments make it sound like "Africa" is a savage and undeveloped place, which fits into the white, colonial and imperialistic narrative of Africa that has shown to be highly problematic.

Wow, if we are at all representative of future professional sociologists, then maybe the GRE will be a non-factor 20 years down the line. I think it's an interesting question. I agree that none of the substantive material on the GRE is very closely related to the academic skills used in sociology. Take the verbal section for example, once you're scoring above the, say, 85th percentile, you're dealing with words that no academic would use in her/his right mind. They're unwieldy and could only further distance the field from the public. In the quant section, the higher order problems are things like combinations and sequences. Maybe useful for game theory, but not generally applicable to most sociology. In fact, the more "stats" related questions, such as finding mean/media/mode, are the easier questions.

That being said, the GRE is currently a useful metric for adcoms. I don't want to hunt down the post now, but bloggers on Orgtheory.net have cited some studies showing that high GRE scores are positively correlated for success in grad school*. At best, the GRE score here is a proxy for any number of things that could contribute to academic success, such as work/study habits, "IQ", willingness to jump through hoops, etc. So even if we know the GRE really does not represent academic ability in sociology, it captures something harder to define that is related to academic ability in sociology. The question, then, is about finding a better proxy for academic ability than the GRE. The thing is, on a macro-scale, writing samples and SoPs can't predict success in the same way that GRE does because we don't have any comparable metric for measuring their quality. So while it's likely that people with great writing samples succeed in grad school, it's impossible (or difficult) to collect comparable data on "great" writing samples (barring some kind of content analysis scheme, which is not feasible to standardize and apply across all departments).

Now with that counterargument laid out, I will say that I agree that the GRE would be the first to go in my ideal world. I think that the GRE is a somewhat arbitrary proxy for academic ability. I think that the impulse to compare applicants according to an objective standard is convenient but unnecessary; we could very well be compared according to subjective metrics, although this is of course very labor intensive. I

However, I am somewhat at a loss about better options. I think GPA and courseload is problematic, because some/many undergraduates do not know they plan on pursuing a doctorate in their four years in college (who knew they wanted to do a PhD when they were 19? Not me.) Obviously good grades and background education are paramount, but we wouldn't want there to be a "pre-soc" track in the same where there is "pre-med", because then you end up with students are on that track just because, and not because they made a responsible, informed, adult decision that they want to be scholars.

So yeah, I guess I would echo that I would emphasize the SoP most.

Maybe, in another universe, departments would even have "tasks" for applicants to complete. For example, say you're applying to X department because you're interested in one of their 5 main concentration areas, say gender. (Many departments already ask you to indicate a sub-field in their online application.) So to all the candidates who selected gender, they department distributes a sociological article having something to do with gender. The prompt is something like, "Respond to this article. Approach it theoretically, substantively, methodologically. What are its strengths and flaws? What is a possible direction for future study that would build on these findings?" So now the candidate writes a response, which will in turn reflect her/his critical thinking, fluency with methods and theory, creativity with research proposals, writing ability, etc. An applicants who sucks at, for example, quantitative methods could suggest how these findings could inform a qualitative study to add thickness to the subject. An applicant who won't know to quote Foucault may have an awesome case study from work experience.
This sort of system would be extremely easy to automate online and could perhaps replace the writing sample. Also, because whole groups of applicants are responding to the same prompt, they are cross-comparable in the same way a professor might scale grades on an assignment. So a department with X,Y,Z express concentration areas, there would be 3 prompts on X,Y,Z topics respectively, and three pools of students responding to one of the three.

I dunno. Just a thought.

*Edit: Note that there is probably a selection bias here, as this only compares students who are already in grad school, and not those who weren't accepted anywhere (see more on this line of argument in the orgtheory comments).

Ha, UC-Riverside didn't seem to mind rejecting me today. I guess they love me not.

Epic, I think you offended practically everyone that could not get into or did not go to a Top 10. Sure you get a lot of freedom where you can teach, and prestige is everything, but not everyone can get into Top 10 nor aspires to be there. This is obviously a problem in academia and frankly, the elite ivory tower needs to be taken down a notch and realize sometimes it is not just where you went for grad school, but the quality of your publications and ideas. The ivory tower will protect its own, but that is only a group of only a small group of scholars.

UCR, where are you?

I reject the notion that some silly organization's ranking of programs is what determines anyone's success in a career academia. Maybe some search committees are initially enamored by a fancy sounding institution as an applicant's grad school, but I see jobs as much more about sociality, the kind of work you're doing, who you've worked with (SPOILER ALERT: there are some high esteemed scholars at "unranked" programs just as there are some 'no-name' scholars at "highly ranked" programs), and research productivity. In short, the job market is nuanced.

Some of the comments I have seen on this site over the years do seem to point, however, that professional socialization at "top" programs might include stressing an idea that their students are categorically better than others. This kind of hierarchy in unnerving to me--it led to slavery, fascism, and genocide in several nation states throughout history.

Elitism in education is exactly the kind of social phenomenon sociologists should be working to end. Or, at the very least, well informed of its inaccuracies.

@Sociolog86

I'm sure there are exceptions, but sociologists themselves find the prestige of a school matters a whole lot when being hired. All three of my letter of recommendation professors told me, with no uncertainty, that unless I could get into a Top 10 program with funding, they could not in good conscious recommend going to graduate school in sociology in the state it is in now. Thankfully, it worked out for me.

I want to have absolute freedom to do my research, write books, and publish articles, and for me, that means going to a top tier grad school, and being adequately prepared for the even tougher crapshoot that is the hiring process after graduate school. Idealism aside, I fully intend to make a career out of sociology, and I plan on doing everything I can to make that happen, within reason. Doing an unfunded masters at any level, and then doing an unfunded Phd is, to me, ludicrous. I love the research I do, but I would never go into crippling debt for it. As I have been told, if you can not get somebody to pay you to do something, then that is a clue it should remain a hobby.

I realize people have different aspirations, and every case is different, but I think many, many applicants need a healthy dose of realism when approaching the application process for graduate school in sociology. I am very glad I had professors who, early in my undergraduate career, told me what I needed to do to get into a top graduate school and explained what I should expect when approaching sociology as a profession

The_epicure, for those of us who don't get into Top 10 programs with funding, do you suggest we work at McDonald's?

Also, for those undergraduates who don't go to Top 10 schools where would you suggest they be introduced to good Sociology? I'm not a math whiz so maybe I'm not calculating correctly but it seems to me that if the world has to rely on ten programs for producing quality sociologists we're going to be quite short in the very near future...

Furthermore, it has been argued quite sucessfully that education systems perpetuate class stratification. Perhaps in this case, those of you who go to Top 10 programs will remain secluded in the world of "Top 10-ers" and the rest of us who go to State schools will interact with society on a more fundamental level.

I personally cannot wait to start doing research and delving into a discipline that gave me a reason to aspire to more than being a receptionist. Maybe focusing on those who are in similarily disadvantaged positions is elementary but it's also what makes sense to me...

By the way, would your reccommenders recommend that I tell my reccommenders that I will not be accepting my fully funded offer because it wasn't to a Top 10?

@ epicure

If you're looking for absolute academic freedom, you certainly won't find it at "top tier" graduate school where you're often RA on someone else's project you could potentially care less about. I do, however, have friends who were perfectly pleased with their RA assignments during grad school and felt they opened doors. You definitely won't find absolute academic freedom on the tenure track. Collaboration and interdisciplinary work, to provide immediate examples, are rarely given due credit in tenure decisions.

I never mentioned doing unfunded graduate degrees. I agree that's probably ludicrous (although I can think of a few isolated situations where it might be appealing). I have a conference buddy who received over $55,000 in funding for her MA program. That level of funding, although I admit must be rare, isn't outside the range of possibilities, but you "top tier" students probably wouldn't know about that. Elitism can breed ignorance I think, although I certainly applaud your admission into the program you wanted to attend. I don't mean to say that "top programs" are in and of themselves bad. I mean to say that academic elitism reinforces a system of oppression that should have no place in a discipline so often leading the way on social justice.

My critique of academic elitism still stands. Thank you for providing further evidence to support it.

PS- Do you think the author's discussion of an "academic caste system" is a positive thing?

Looks like I wasn't a part of the UCI or UCSD acceptances this week

Our next few weeks....

And, to be honest, this board is actually pretty demoralizing. It seems those with the strongest applications like to come on here and post up their stats to get some kind of extrinsic confirmation to what they already know inside...


"Oh, hi.... can someone tell me if I would be a contender for a university? I have a 4.0, a 1500 on my gre, OUTSTANDING letters of rec, a magnificent written sample, summa cum laude, a stunning statement of purpose that perfectly expresses the exact fit I have with the professor I want to work with (who even emailed me back saying he wants to work with me too tehehehe) and I have published work! Oh, and my chancellor said I'm the brightest student that's ever come through my university. So, how bout it guys? Think I'm graduate school material?"