How many people get shut out each year?

[HomoLudens]

Considering how competitive most programs are in a normal year, I would imagine that the number of people who get shut out of grad school is pretty high. Can any of you stats whizzes make an educated guess as to what % of applicants don't get any offers? 

[Outer Heaven]

enough to create a bottleneck next cycle

[washabirva]

Thanks for starting this thread. I know many people on this forum and the Facebook group are willing to share their experiences of being shut out, but I believe many more are either uncomfortable to share or simply not connected to any philosophy social media platforms. So, my guess is that it's significantly more common than we think, even though I have no way of knowing a specific number or %.

For what it's worth, I'll share my personal experience. I graduated from a PGR T10 program, wrote an undergrad thesis, won awards, yaddi yadda. Seeing that all my friends got into T10 schools *seemingly* easily, in 2016-2017 I applied to only 10 schools, 9 of which are in T10. I was rejected by all of them and waitlisted/ultimately rejected at the one ranked T20.

It felt really devastating at the time, but now that I look back, I feel embarrassed to have been arrogant/ignorant enough to apply like that. But my rationale at the time was that this was a career path, and therefore attending any program outside of T10 would be futile. Plus I truly had no idea that it would turn out like that because I wasn't on social media at all. And even though everyone kept telling me admissions are a crapshoot, it was basically impossible to not take it personally.

This year, I submitted a different writing sample and applied widely to 21 programs within T50. So far I have 4 acceptances and 5 waitlists, but all 4 acceptances and 2 of the waitlists wouldn't even have been on my radar 4 years ago. So, I probably would've been shut out again if I didn't apply this widely, and I did so only because (1) I'm desperate to leave my home country and (2) I learned my lesson last time!

To whomever is reading this and is potentially getting shut out this year, please know that you're not alone, and that this doesn't necessarily mean anything regarding your philosophical abilities/talents. Hang in there!❤️ *hugs*

[Mischief]

5 hours ago, HomoLudens said:

Considering how competitive most programs are in a normal year, I would imagine that the number of people who get shut out of grad school is pretty high. Can any of you stats whizzes make an educated guess as to what % of applicants don't get any offers? 

Occasionally people ask questions like this on the forum, so there is now a boilerplate answer: there is no reasonable way to make an "educated guess" about those who don't get offers this year. Even who will get offers and who won't (as washabirva's point illustrates) is quite unlikely to be fruitful, unless we're comparing fringe cases and making a lot of generalizations. The only way we could approach an educated account of this would be through a disciplinary survey of applicants, which I believe someone has put together this year.

Even then, having a raw account of how many people are shutout in a year wouldn't tell us anything actionable because of how imprecise the process is as a whole. We would need a corresponding study of the institutions accepting applicants that would assess the trends in decision-making. Such a thing might be useful if it were conducted a bit like the ADPA research, but would be a huge undertaking in itself.

For what it's worth, I was shut out last year and have an offer of admission this year, so I'm happy to chat if anyone on here is would like to. I just think it's a good idea to discourage attempts to try to do napkin math about the application process (I've seen some very cringey attempts to rationalize the possibility of success on this forum).

[MtnDuck]

41 minutes ago, Mischief said:

Occasionally people ask questions like this on the forum, so there is now a boilerplate answer: there is no reasonable way to make an "educated guess" about those who don't get offers this year. Even who will get offers and who won't (as washabirva's point illustrates) is quite unlikely to be fruitful, unless we're comparing fringe cases and making a lot of generalizations. The only way we could approach an educated account of this would be through a disciplinary survey of applicants, which I believe someone has put together this year.

Even then, having a raw account of how many people are shutout in a year wouldn't tell us anything actionable because of how imprecise the process is as a whole. We would need a corresponding study of the institutions accepting applicants that would assess the trends in decision-making. Such a thing might be useful if it were conducted a bit like the ADPA research, but would be a huge undertaking in itself.

For what it's worth, I was shut out last year and have an offer of admission this year, so I'm happy to chat if anyone on here is would like to. I just think it's a good idea to discourage attempts to try to do napkin math about the application process (I've seen some very cringey attempts to rationalize the possibility of success on this forum).

Indeed we had a survey a while back about how many schools folks are applying to this year with some elements about potential shutouts that could be extrapolated from the data (somewhat). I believe that as the application cycle wraps up there is intention and a willingness for folks to engage in another survey to see how many schools folks got into, how many As, Ws, and Rs, and to see how many shutouts there are.

More on that soon potentially--right now I'm trying to get the data and writeup from the first survey done today/tomorrow so I can make it public facing ?