emilyrobot

I know this is a frustrating non-answer, but it's the best I've got: if you haven't heard that you've been rejected, that means you haven't been rejected (yet). If you haven't heard that you've been accepted, then you haven't been accepted (yet). No news is not news. There are a lot more variables in the air for the masters program that make it hard to speculate. I'm sorry I don't have anything more helpful to offer!

Masters admissions are going to be on a totally different timeline than PhD, and there is likely to be a lot of variation across departments (potentially even within departments by concentration or advisor). If you are a Master's applicant, you're in for a bit of a longer wait. For doc students, I second nashville0808's general assessment that if you haven't received an invite to the recruitment weekend you're not shortlisted, but it is still possible that you'll receive an offer later in the season. I also know that they stick to a stricter GRE score cutoff for the invitation to recruitment weekend than the necessarily do for admission, so if you are an applicant with lower GRE scores, but have other upsides and have been in contact with a faculty member the general assessment may not apply in your case. There are also always exceptions to any general rule, and, basically, you won't know until you know. I know the waiting sucks, but the only way out is through. I don't know specifically about joint programs' timelines. However, I know neuroscience is doing an interview/recruitment weekend this weekend.

Yep, the University Z might not allow you to have an outside job. As others have said, if you want the option to go into academia, you've got to go with either X or Y. Presitge, fame and impact factor are the things that the acadame runs on. You won't be able to make up that difference from a less respected program by developing an outside network (part of what going into a well-respected, highly-ranked program means is that you have an advantage in building a good network, through your advisor's contacts and through the other graduate students that you work with). You'll be more likely to do better work and develop a stronger network at a place where all the faculty is research active, the students are interested in research, and the university makes it a priotity to support research. Also, did your potential advisor at University Z come in with tenure? It might be likely that that person (like the rest of the productive faculty) might leave University Z, possibly sometime in your tenure as a student. Were that to happen, what would that mean for you? You, or your family, probably have more information about how much prestige matters in industry. I've got no information for you on that.

I make no claim about the average graduate student, or about anyone's stupidity. There are certainly applicants to graduate school (some of them who post on these boards) who don't know these things. How much those applicants resemble the norm, I can't say, and won't speculate, but they do exist. And I wouldn't say it's because they're stupid.

Let me say this, first: the humanities, broadly, are incredibly valuble. There are questions that science can't answer, there are values that aren't material. The distinction between the sciences and the humanities is an artificial one (there's no scientific method without epistomology, for example). I recently came across this article, which I thought spoke to some of these issues nicely: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/playing-with-plato/358633/ Understanding and producing culture is an important undertaking, and requires lots of gifted minds puzzling at problems. Advances in the humanties aren't opposed to advances in science, and often, the two support each other (would the iPhone be as valuble an innovation if there wasn't music and literature and video art to load onto it?). I can totally understand why the humanists in this thread react defensively to a suggestion that the economic costs of attending grad school in the humanities might not be worth it, since they've probably heard a loud and ignorant chorus of "what's that good for?" everytime they describe their studies. I totally support a full-throated defense of the value of studying the humanities. Still, I'm disturbed by the posters here who assume that anyone who tells the truth about the downsides of pursuing a PhD in the humanites must have ulterior motives, or must believe that the advanced study in the humanities is worthless. The job market in many humanities fields is brutal, to the point that professors in the humanities (who probably don't think advanced study of history, english or philosophy is valueless) debate about whether it's even ethical to take students. For many folks, the PhD is a ten-year apprenticeship for a job that is disappearing. Academia is not a meritocracy, where everyone is devoted monasitcally to producing knowledge and living the life of the mind, but a weird political buracracy with lots of perverse incentives, so plenty of folks who end up scratching their way into a tenure-track job end up unhappy with the way things actually are. Maybe most folks already know this stuff, and it's unbearably condescending to have people point it out to you (if so, I'm sorry). But there are at least some folks who don't already know it, who are getting bad advising from professors that were on the job market 40 years ago, or no advising at all, who have an innacurate picture of what the academic job market is like, and what an academic job entails. Those folks need to hear these things: about half the people who start an advanced degree don't finish it; that obtaining an advanced degree in the humanities is not a guarantee of a middle class life; that you won't get to necessarily work on the questions that are most interesting and valuble (to you and/or to the culture) in grad school; that you won't necessiarly get to work on research questions at all once you're done, even if you get a job in academia, because more and more jobs have higher and higher teaching loads; that there are infuriating and frustrating downsides to being a professor that you may not be aware of. Getting any kind of PhD is a gamble, it's just a gamble with worse terms for (many) humanists because the degree often takes longer to complete in the humanities, and you have way fewer options outside of academia to use your degree than science folks do. Maybe the gamble is worth it. It probably is for some folks. I'm hoping it is for me (in a non-humanities field). But everyone should make that decision for themselves, with a good sense of what the actual stakes are. There's no one answer to the opening question in this thread, but you're a fool if you don't take the question itself seriously.

Jeff, DO NOT GO TO A PHD PROGRAM WITHOUT FUNDING. Do not do it. There are a number of very good reasons to decline your unfunded offer: First, you may not finish your degree at all. 50% of all PhD students don't, and often they leave the university without their degree after spending more than 3 years in their program. http://chronicle.com/article/PhD-Attrition-How-Much-Is/140045/ Attrition isn't a thing that gets talked about much around here, but it's real and it happens to a lot of people, and not having funding makes it more likely. Second, if you do manage to finish, you're unlikely to find the kind of academic job you want. Tenure-line professorships are disappearing, and the academic job market in the humanities, is dismal. There are plenty of folks with degrees from top programs who can't find jobs and who are scraping by adjuncting for less than minimum wage. Grad school is a gamble that is unlikely to pay off, and the more debt you need to take on to get though, the riskier it is. Cf http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 and http://chronicle.com/article/Just-Don-t-Go-Part-2/44786 Have your mentors at NYU been talking to you about this? About how often people don't finish? About how bad the job market is? If not, they are failing you as a student, and you should be mad about that. You might be able to revamp your application for next year, but I don't have any specific advice for you about that (although, looking at the list of schools you applied to, I'm wondering if you were choosing schools based more on location than on best fit with professors, which, if so, is something you could fix). You're worried about what might happen if you don't get in anywhere next year, and I can see how that would be a scary thought. Here's the thing, though--it might be the best thing that ever happened to you. Academia is a mess, and it's going to get worse. The world is a big place, and there are many many jobs you might enjoy and many kinds of satisfying things you could do with yourself. Not getting a PhD doesn't have to be about closing a door, it can be aboout opening a hundred different ones.

I'm in a different program at Peabody, so I don't know that much about your department, but I am a certified teacher. I would say, though, the few people I've known in Elementary Ed getting initial certification are astoundingly busy, and I just can't see compressing the same quality of experience into one year. Unless you have significant classroom experience coming in (and it doesn't sound like you do) I don't think you could build all the skills that you need to be a quality teacher in a year. The difference in cost isn't marginal, though, unless Penn's a lot more expensive than Vandy, considering the extra year, and the opportunity cost (with the shorter program, you could be out earning a salary in the second year, and you should count missing out on that salary as part of the expense of attending).

Did you ask UIUC about their placement rate in PhD programs? You identify that as something that you'd be looking for, but don't say whether folks with a masters from UIUC can get into the kinds of doc programs you want to go to. Email your contact there and ask what PhD programs their graduates matriculate to--they'll likely have this info on hand. Have you told Michigan State about your UIUC offer and shared you concerns about money with them? You might consider doing that. You might also consider asking to be put in contact with current Masters students there . It may be the case that the university can't make any promises to you before you accept, no matter what other offers you have in hand, but a current student might be able to give you an informal picture about how the funding shakes out--obviously they can't promise you anything, either, but they'd be able to tell you if there are lots of folks who show up with some vague promises of funding who end up with nothing.

I'm already in Nashville (finishing up my M.Ed at Vandy, probably staying on for my PhD, though I'm still juggling offers). Happy to help out if folks have questions about the city.

Every school runs their admissions process differently, some interview, some don't. You can totally ask the prof you've been emailing with to put you in touch with current students, and you should. That's probably the quickest way to make connections and get your questions answered.

I wonder if this is a question better asked at the Chronicle of Higher Ed forums; here, you'll hear mostly from students and prospective students, but over there you could hear from current administrators and faculty. (You might also get some information about whether your impression of academia as a place free from mergers, cutbacks and reorganization is a correct one, as well as some information about whether you'll be able to restrict your job search to certain geographic areas and still find success). If it's experience you're missing, it's not a certainly that coursework in Higher Ed will fill in the gaps. An internship might help, but then you'll have to look carefully at the opportunity cost of attending full time. Maybe there are lower level jobs in a university that you could apply for? Even if such a job involved a cut in salary from your current position, it might be less than the opportunity cost + tuition.

Oh sheesh, people interested in education aren't required to take a vow of poverty to indicate their purity. We don't do ourselves or the field broadly any favors by pretending that we're somehow exempt from the kinds of cost-benefit analyses that most adults have to do when considering a career trajectory. Especially considering the cost to attend the schools that the OP name checks, it would be crazy NOT to consider the expected salary range when you're done. Were I to go back into the field after receiving my masters, I'd be able to make anywhere from $500-$5,000 more per year than I could have with my BA and teaching certificate, depending on the district. Even though I had funding, just the opportunity cost for not working for two years works out to be around $62,000--a pretty absurd investment based on the salary return, and completely crazy if I were actually paying the $100,000ish tuition. Continuing on to the PhD, as I plan to do, extends the ceiling on my future salary significantly, but there's still a big range, depending on how productive a scholar I turn out to be.

I'm not an expert, but it's my understanding that in Higher Ed/Student Affairs, job experience is an important part of admissions decisions and in employment after degree. I would actually start by finding folks in your current university who do the kind of jobs that you'd like to have and asking them about what their career path was and what they know about the job market. Perhaps there are entry level jobs at universities that you'd be qualified for after graduation without going to grad school first. Maybe there are opportunities for internships or work-study jobs that would help you get to know the field as an employee rather than as a student. With some work experience, you'd be better able to evaluate what exactly you're interested in and what questions and skills you want to focus on in grad school, and choose your program with that in mind. You might want to pop down to the Education forum and ask this same question of folks who have more specific information about your field, too.

Congrats, Birdy!

Oh Birdy, so sorry to cause a panic! I'm a PhD applicant. The M.Ed program has a different admissions timeline, I'm pretty sure. The discrepancy between the two departments you mentioned might be because the SPED folks are focused on evaluating the PhD applicants first, and then will turn to the M.Ed folks (Child Studies doesn't have a PhD program, I'm pretty sure). I think it's way to early to panic!