Point where ranking stops mattering (CS phd)

[tangledc]

My interest lies in data science. Assuming I applied to 1 school from the top 5 ( MIT, CMU, Stanford etc), 1 from 5-10 (Cornell, Washington) and 1 from 10-20 ( NYU,  Columbia, UCLA etc), and received an admit from those ranked 10-20. Does the school ranking really have a huge impact on my future chances in academia? At what point should I stop waiting for a possible response from the higher ranked school, and just accept the lower ranked one? 

[juilletmercredi]

Well, you want to think about other things like reputation in your subfield and your personal fit with the department and the PI. YOUR top choice won't necessarily be the top 5 school, depending on your research area and your personal preferences. (Maybe you like the lifestyle that UCLA or Columbia offers you better than the one at MIT or CMU!)

But this is going to vary a lot by field. In some really crowded fields (like the humanities) smaller differences in rankings/reputation may make the difference between tenure-track jobs and not. In fields where there are fewer competitors for TT positions (like accounting or economics) the small differences matter less. I'm guessing data science is closer to the latter end of the field, just because there are so many super lucrative opportunities for data scientists outside of academia. So I would imagine a graduate of a top 20 program (with the requisite publications et al.) would be pretty competitive on the academic market.

I would also advise asking the professors at these programs for placement results from previous years. Where are grads getting jobs?