How to you gauge the feasibility of getting accepted?

[pinkrobot]

To add another layer of intrigue into this rankings conversation ...

We've so far been talking US News. But there's another system--the NRC rankings--which has several subcategories, within which each program is classified according to a range of rankings, each of which could potentially be the "actual" ranking. Find the English NRC rankings here: http://chronicle.com...English/124728/

While these theoretically seem pretty useful (for sure, I think their methodology seems more sound than the US News folks' approach), they still don't deliver much actual information, and to add an additional level of excitement into the mix, they often contradict the US News offerings. A striking example: UC Berkeley's S-Rank is 27-56 on the NRC list, meaning that for the category of strength in the "criteria that scholars say are most important," NRC determined that Berkeley could rank anywhere from 27th to 56th amongst the schools sampled. There have also been some issues with accurate data collection: many departments have noted that NRC vastly overestimated the number of professors in their departments, which skewed the "Research" ranking significantly. (The Research rankings have a lot to do with how many publications and awards per professor each department had or received; an overly large denominator of professors would slaughter that figure.)

What to make of the data clutter? I have no idea, except that it confirms to me that there's no exact thing as "the best" program. (My experience trying to select which school I'd attend also confirms this: every time I found a "pro" for one school, I found other "pros" for the other ones.) This leads me to agree with Stately Plump that there is no clear way to determine feasibility of acceptance, and to also agree with Phil Sparrow that the idea of publishing cutoffs has quite a few downsides. With the difficulty of ranking programs so clearly demonstrated, imagine how difficult ranking applicants must be! This is a really loose analogy, but if a school were to say it simply won't take a student with a GPA under 3.5, the equivalent might be if a student refused to apply to a school that offered a stipend of under $20,000. I don't think any of us would agree that said student was evaluating schools fairly: we might say that his or her cutoff was arbitrary and didn't account for a variety of factors, including the many other assets that the school undoubtedly has, not to mention the school's overall finances and cost of living in the region. Similarly, we might say to the school that published a hard-line 3.5 cutoff that they're not being fair to students who have considerable strengths through the rest of their portfolio, or that they haven't considered the difficulty of the student's undergrad institution or other life circumstances that the student experienced.

For my part, I used the rankings list to come up with a broad range of places that have solid English PhD programs. This was particularly helpful for broadening my search outside of my current geographical region, which is where I've lived my whole life--I found that there were many schools that I would have disregarded (and, indeed, did disregard during my first round of applications) not because they're not amazing schools, but because, frankly, I'm young and this country is big and has a lot of universities. From there, I ran the list of schools I wanted to apply to by my recommenders, who have a much, much better sense of the strength of my application and the "reputation" of various universities than I could possibly hope to and than a list could possibly indicate. As for trying to figure out whether I would be accepted: I didn't. I tried to pick schools that might be interested in what I was putting down, and I tried to make my profile as strong as it could possibly be (in terms of both the words and the numbers). Beyond that, I used the uber-concrete method of crossing my fingers, tossing salt over my shoulder, and not opening umbrellas indoors.

Edited July 1, 2012 by pinkrobot

[English2013:)]

Do we know anything about schools in Canada? There is a scholar I really admire at the University of British Columbia. What are the implications of attending a school in Canada in terms of the job market?

[veniente]

Last application season (correct me if I'm wrong), someone on here got into one school: Columbia. She (he?) was rejected from all others, which, needless to say, were ranked far lower than Columbia. Figure that one out.

(<--- sunglasses to hide PTSD from last year's app season)

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but there was a student last year who was accepted to one program, which is ranked in the top 5. Obviously, all the other programs--from which she was rejected--were not ranked higher. So did those lower-ranked programs accept "better" students, and the top 5 school take what was left? Of course not! It just happened to work out that way. There is zero "scholarly" or "professional" explanation for that. It just happened.

An application tyro. A grad cafe novelty. I couldn't have wished for more. But no, I jest. Both myself and my MA supervisor were somewhat surprised I didn't get a few more offers, funded or otherwise, however, the other schools that I did apply to were all ranked similar (or higher?) to the one at which I was accepted.

I don't really know if I have any recommendations; or, if I do, they would be entirely person-specific. If you want to ensure that you get accepted somewhere, I guess I would suggest apply to a range of schools - that is, as far as rankings are concerned - and definitely speak frankly to your LORs about which schools, or range of schools, they believe you can get in to. Of course, like everyone else's, weigh their thoughts on the matter against your own .

[TakeruK]

Do we know anything about schools in Canada? There is a scholar I really admire at the University of British Columbia. What are the implications of attending a school in Canada in terms of the job market?

I think Canadian schools are just the same as US ones. Usually you don't see them ranked amongst US schools since the main PhD program rankings, I think, only include US schools. I would say UBC is probably comparable to US schools ranked around 30 or so but depends on the field. In my field, it's almost expected that we Canadians spend at least one posting in the US -- usually either PhD or a post-doc before maintaining a permanent job in Canada. Overall, I think the big 3 schools in Canada -- UBC, Toronto, McGill, would be equivalent to attending US schools of similar quality (i.e. no difference because it's in Canada?) At least, that's the impression I got from American students attending UBC while I did my undergrad there.