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looks back to normal now!

Also Sarah Lewis at Harvard!

If only such a group could preserve anonymity. 

You're going to need a certain amount of English classes, as a kind of hard minimum--possibly at least a minor's worth. I would find a few programs that you'd be interested in, and then email the listed faculty contact to ask about their policies regarding the minimum number of English classes required. No matter what you will have to take some, somewhere, and they really, really should not be online. You need letters of rec. I think a funded MA (or one of the cash cow MAs, if you can personally afford it) would be really helpful to you, and if you flit through other threads on this forum, you'll find rec's for which ones are worth looking into. And again, online courses are basically useless for someone who needs to build connections and writing samples. 

As for a post-bac....I really dunno. I don't know anyone in my program who did one...I think most people did MAs if they needed to shore up their background in some way. 

@Heather1011 @writegirl I'm in the same boat. Paid off all undergraduate loans in 2 years. I am especially confident that I'll be able to pay off Harvard loans in ~2 years with the higher salary.
In other news, my significant other and I are looking forward to visiting Harvard this weekend. We are staying with a current doctoral candidate, attending the SLP Accepted Students Day, and doing reconnaissance on where to live.

I'm sorry, but I REALLY disagree with this advice. From first hand experience coming from a low-income family (I did undergrad on the max. amount pell grant & other forms of aid,) banking on IBR and PAYE is not a fail-safe for your future. Your income tax bracket determines if you qualify for IBR, and if you get married & file jointly it will be an even lower threshold of income to qualify for this payment plan. Some private companies do not allow forbearance or deferment even in the event of unemployment. Graduated payment plans are only a temporary relief. The 10 year forgiveness for working at a non-profit requires consecutive payments. Qualifying for this is very uncommon and realistically, you will not be consistently employed for this period of time. It is also much more likely for government sectors than an "typical" non-profit. Student loans are real shit. They are not something to ignore now and figure out down the road. I would call your financial aid office and potential lender and get all the facts before trusting someone on a message forum, even me.

I have nothing to say about the IFA MA itself, but I just want to correct some assumptions about the way IBR works. After the forgiveness period, when your loan is "forgiven," every dollar that is forgiven counts as "income" for that year's tax bill. If you are paying IBR rates, you are barely making a dent in the interest, and hardly touching the principal at all, so you can expect your $100,000 loan amount (if you took out loans for the $32-something-k a year tuition, plus living expenses in NY) to be significantly more than that. So if you're paying let's say a tax rate of 20%, all of a sudden you are expected to fork over $20,000 when you go to pay taxes when the debt is forgiven. I guess you can make a repayment deal with the IRS, and I suppose that's easier than trying to negotiate with collections, but idk man, it really seems irresponsible to say "you practically don't have to worry about your loan at all." 

But I was wrong about the public service aspect of it! If you have forgiveness from working in public service for 10 years, it's not taxable. 

But I was wrong about the public service aspect of it! If you have forgiveness from working in public service for 10 years, it's not taxable. 

I think the most inappropriate thing about @northeastregional sharing things about "his wife's" experience is that less than a month ago he(/she?) apparently had a male partner...? Get your stories straight before you troll, dude.

I don't think that's what anonymousbequest is saying at all. There is nothing undesirable about the job in question. What has changed is that a job that might have gone to a University of Kansas PhD at some point has now been given to a Harvard graduate, which means that the job pool is getting more and more competitive. Moreover, the examples you list are completely outdated; Elizabeth Broun received her doctorate in 1979. The job market has radically changed over the eight-year period since the financial bubble & recession, so reaching back 37 years is completely ludicrous. It's like me claiming that a PhD from the Catholic University of America will give me a chance to be the next Marjorie Perloff. 

In regards to Ivy League Schools, your sarcasm gets it completely wrong. I do not have an undergraduate degree from an Ivy League, or from an elite LAC. I received a very good education at a public school, but I will never be buoyed by the name of that institution. Because of this I've been forced to think & act very pragmatically. Every professor I spoke with told me to aim as high as possible when applying to graduate programs. This wasn't because they're myopic elitists, it's because they know the realities of the current job market at the moment, either through departmental hiring or through their own job searches. When it comes to applying for jobs, I will be happy with any tenure-track position, because as the number of candidates for these positions rapidly grows, actual TT openings are being cut left and right. I am sure some people are ok with working as adjuncts, or have the independent resources to do a PhD without needing it to lead to some form of stable employment. I am not one of those people, which is why I pay such close attention to the job market, candidate placement, and the shift towards adjunct labour. There is nothing elitist about this; if anything, I am more aware of the reality at hand because I come from a working-class background, and therefore need to think very hard about any academic decision I make. 

As a last note, those of us in this thread who are being more critical are not doing so out of malice. This has been said over and over. It is one thing to be critical of the cultural capital involved in the field in question, and quite another to be oblivious to it. There are programs I did not apply to, not because of any perceived scholarly inferiority, but because I couldn't justify it based on their placement records. No matter how much I agitate or protest, I don't have the ability to change the material conditions of academia. My political beliefs are more or less full fucking Communist, but I will be able to do more good (assuming academia has any political power) working from a position of employment, than I will if I'm precariously employed, or unemployed. I would rather push for that than live in some sort of fantasy land where good jobs are plentiful and the discipline is without hierarchy. Sorry if that rubs you the wrong way. 

I would bet that most of these curators and professors were advised by just two faculty at Kansas: Charlie Eldredge, who must be close to retiring, or the (late) Marilyn Stokstad. 10-20 years ago, Kansas would likely have been in many people's 10-25, and many of the people you cite (at least those I'm most familiar with) are themselves on the back half of their careers. 
I almost added to my post that students from second tier schools have a much better track record in museums than academia, thank you for bringing it up. There are several programs that have had strong placements in museums, but less success in academia. Curators are more recent to fully professionalize, now lots of positions that would have required an MA from just about anywhere a decade or more ago now want PhDs from the top 25 programs "according to you." Some of the top 10 programs definitely discouraged their students from becoming curators historically, seeing museum work as a waste of talent and time. Yale was really the exception. However, this is changing. A recent Harvard PhD is now the curator at the LSU museum. Let that sink in, both for the dearth of jobs this seems to suggest, and that your competition for a college museum position (that isn't Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, UT, UCLA, Williams, Oberlin, etc...) could be from Harvard by the time you graduate.
But go ahead and hold tight to the exceptions. Whatever gets you through the night.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm talking about tenure-track jobs. You don't get job offers at conferences. At CAA you might do a first round interview, but you will not get a job offer; that's not how the job search process works. Also--saving up some cash in your pocket for a trip to a conference, which, with accommodations and airfare, will cost about $1000? Ha! Not easy when your stipend is less the $30,000 or when you're on a TA salary. Better to go to a school that has funds to send you to conferences or better that sets you up to get a fellowship with a travel budget. And when I'm talking about fellowships, I'm not talking about fellowships from your home university. I'm talking about external fellowships. Most people don't get those. In fact, a professor at Rutgers and another at Pittsburg once lamented to me that their students never get fellowships, and they're not sure what to do.
 
Again, wish this were true. But this has not been my experience. Look at any decent school, and you'll see the majority of the faculty got their PhD at Harvard, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, etc, not University of Illinois, Kansas, Pittsburg, Temple, etc, etc. Do you have numbers to back your assertion up? I have some numbers. Here's the distribution of schools for CASVA fellowship for 2014-15: Stanford (2), CUNY, Johns Hopkins, Harvard (3), Princeton (2), Brown, Yale (2), Berkeley, Columbia (2), USC, UPenn, UChicago.  All of these, with exception maybe of USC, are top 10 programs. And notice how Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia have the most fellows? That's not an accident. I'm not saying it's right, but you should know going into a less prestigious program, the cards will be stacked against you to a degree.
So please people, I'm not saying this to be nasty or snobbish. I'm saying this so you go into this with your eyes open. Don't kid yourself about the realities of the job situation.

Would anyone here be interested in having/contributing to an art history specific funding doc, similar to what people in English lit have done here?
Personally, I had no idea what I could expect in terms of funding when I was applying to schools.  I think if people had a better sense of what schools were offering, it could help future applicants plan accordingly, or even save on application fees if they knew beforehand a school just couldn’t meet their needs. While “follow the money” may not be universally true advice, financial considerations when selecting schools are something to be taken seriously, especially for people moving with spouses or families.
I’m also imagining this could be helpful for people on waitlists who might want a sense of what a potential funding package could look like when weighing it with other options.
Lastly, as someone very interested in labor equity, organizing, and activism, perhaps transparency in this area could empower students to advocate for better compensation in programs where it is lacking. A few years ago a sit-in at the University of Houston was effective in raising the graduate student compensation for English PhDs from 9k to a “living wage,” with the chancellor pledging $1 million to go towards increased stipends. Similarly, students at UW-Madison, U Missouri, and others have recently organized for livable stipends.
I’m very grateful for the funding packages that I’ve been able to secure, and I hope this doesn’t come as rabblerousing OR money-grabbing. On the contrary, I’m hoping that sharing the few data points I’ve gained in the process could be of benefit to someone else, and if there was a critical mass of participation, could give a clear and transparent picture of the field at large, and the financial considerations one would have to make to attend graduate school.
I’m happy to start the doc, if people think this is a good idea/beneficial/would contribute.  

Here it is for those who are interested: Art History Funding Packages
Let me know if there are any issues adding info to it! 
 

We just had this discussion in our relativism seminar on Monday. "Nobody's a moral realist about norms of fashion," quoth my adorable Swiss professor, while wearing his suspenders under his shirt again. "Sandals with socks, Stan," the class unanimously replied. "Sandals with socks."

Oof, I know I'm lucky to already have some acceptances, but rejections from Chicago and Columbia today still hurt more than I thought they would. This entire process seems like such a random game--I know a lot has to do with fit for sure, but equally often it comes down to factors that no one can predict or control. I'm already having a tough time deciding between my top two choices, so honestly it's for the best, but man this entire thing takes way more emotional energy than anything else I've done or than I expected. 

I don't know if this is only for people who already got emails from the DGS, but Harvard's online app now says "DECISION STATUS: AVAILABLE BEGINNING 2/3/2016." I only mention this because in years past the board suggests that Harvard updated their online portal without necessarily emailing people of the change in status (even for some admits!), but it's still super early so I wouldn't think anything of it if there is no change. 

One of the Harvard admits here--yeah it was super early, not expecting that at all!
Had just gotten the Berkeley reject on Friday, didn't think I'd hear from anywhere else for another couple of weeks. 

I definitely can sympathize with the anxiety of waiting!

And, I never really introduced myself. I'm applying to 9 PhD programs and 2 MAs. My AOI is modern/contemporary (predominately American) and I'm interested in feminist practice, critical theory, and theories of artistic labor.  I graduated from a SLAC a few years ago, taught for a year, and have been working in a large museum (admin position) since then. 
I know (because of the obsessive spreadsheets I've made) that I shouldn't expect to hear back from the schools I applied until early-mid February at the earliest, but the closer to February we actually get, the more anxiety and self-doubt creeps in. This is my first round applying and I like my job a lot, but I would really prefer not to have to go through this process again...
 

Congrats to the CUNY admit! Mind sharing your area of interest and who you received the email from?