Grad School Rankings

juillet
Sun, 28 Jun 2015 18:25:10 +0000

The answer is “it depends.” It depends on the field, the rankings, and your career goals.

If you are getting a PhD with the goal of going into academia, then program reputation does matter. Graduates from top 10 programs have a much easier time securing academic positions and prestigious postdocs than graduates from mid-ranked or lower-tier programs. Those programs also tend to have the best resources, which makes studying there easier. But even within that, there’s some variation: in the humanities and arts, where the department as a whole affects you more, rankings are more important. In the sciences and some social sciences, where you work very closely with a principal investigator, the reputation of your PI/advisor may be more important than absolute ranking (although the best PIs tend to be at the best-ranked schools).

If you’re getting an MA with the goal of going onto a PhD program, they kind of matter but not as much. This is also field dependent, but lots of people go from mid-ranked MAs to top-tier PhD programs. If you can go to a top-ranked MA program that’s great, but if not (for financial or other reasons) if you work hard and get good recommendations, it can still work out.

If you’re getting a professional master’s degree, then usually rankings matter, but not always. For example, fields, like international relations, business, and public policy can be very prestige-focused fields - if you want to work at a top think tank, NGO, or agency after grad school a top-ranked program will make it easier for you to get there. Those companies recruit at the top schools and really try to get top talent into the field. Other fields - like nursing and social work - are not necessarily so prestige-focused because their markets are less inter/national. Hospitals and social work agencies aren’t trawling all over the nation to find the top talent; they’re mostly recruiting locally, and recruiting through student nursing/fieldwork placements. So a graduate of any Philadelphia-area nursing school might have a better chance getting into CHOP (a famous children’s hospital) than a graduate of Yale or Columbia nursing, just because your proximity means that might be where you intern or shadow nurses.

And every employer is a mix - your school’s reputation might matter, but so does your knowledge and skills and experiences. For academic jobs, a school will often prefer a mid-ranked school candidate with 15 publications over a top-ranked school candidate with 5. (That’s oversimplifying it; there are other factors; but you get the point). An mid-ranked IR grad who knows three language fluently and worked abroad in the country of interest for 2 years might have a better chance at a specific type of job than an IR grad from a top-ranked school who speaks one other language kind of brokenly and has no work experience.

So: it depends. Maybe if you give us the details of your dilemma we can help you more specifically?