Here’s a link to an article that just appeared in Inside Higher Ed on a new book that examines how PhD programs review applicants. Some interesting insights that might be valuable to those who are considering this route after graduation:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/new-book-reveals-how-elite-phd-admissions-committees-review-candidates
Very interesting article, thank you for posting. I am surprised that no mention was made of the importance of personal connections in the process. Unlike undergraduate admissions, faculty who are not on the graduate admission committee can influence the chances of a prospective student if that student has established communication and expressed interest in the professor’s program. Likewise, connections between faculty on the graduate committee and mentor faculty at the undergraduate institution of the applicant can play a huge role in acceptance.
Yes, very interesting. Thanks for the link. I would guess the book may go into more detail regarding existing relationships between committee members and applicants. I was hoping to find a little more about the types of UG schools they tend to favor. I’ll have to check out the book for this as well.
All of these observations should be taken with a huge grain of salt since every single department is different.
For example, it says that GRE scores have a heavy priority. I know for a fact that my top-ranked department barely glances at GRE scores and absolutely does not have a minimum cut off.
With that said, it might be an interesting insight as long as people don’t take observations from 6 departments and generalize it everywhere. PhD applicants should get to know the particular departments they’re applying to by talking to current students and faculty members (for different perspectives).
In fields where writing is essential, the research paper used as a writing sample is by far the most important part of the PhD application. Outstanding GRE scores won’t salvage a weak writing sample, but an outstanding writing sample can make slightly weaker GRE scores meaningless.
This part was interesting:
It often comes up here on CC whether a student who graduates from a religious college might be disadvantaged in seeking employment and grad school admissions. This is a data point.
That section really made me cringe, brantly. I have two friends who were forced by their parents to go to super religious universities even though they were not religious. (By forced I mean that their parents would only pay for those schools so while they could’ve taken an alternative path, that was the one of least resistance.)
Now, if it was a science field and the person wrote his/her essays about why the earth was really 6,000 years old, ok I can understand. But otherwise? Quite sad and I think says a lot about that department. (And I say all of this as a not-of-fan-of-religion atheist.)
I am happy that this book is coming out, and wish I had this type of resource when I was applying to grad schools. When I applied to colleges, I relied heavily on all sorts of resources, including CC and books about the admissions process at various schools. The resources available for graduate schools aren’t as extensive, and are seemingly contradictory. Even after going through the process, I am not sure what the right answers are. For example, one common piece of advice is to contact professors whose research you are interested in. But many professors have explicit warnings to not to contact them as a prospective student, and even state that this would be useless as admissions is decided by a committee. But then it turns out their students include brand new first years who presumably have not been in the program long enough to choose an advisor (this is for programs that don’t have rotations). And so on.
Perhaps “sad”, but hopefully not surprising that biases exist in academia, which is focused on preftige at the top levels.
"One professor told Posselt: “I have impressions that some of my faculty – senior members – were simply looking for the GRE. They have a threshold such as, ‘If it’s not over 700, I won’t read anything.’ And that cuts usually two-thirds of applicants.”
“Over 700?” Either the author did her research some years ago or the professor quoted hasn’t served on an admissions committee for a long while. Because the GRE changed it’s scoring from the 800 per section to 170 per section back in 2011.
More than a data point, if this is a public grad school, the committee is possibly breaking federal law.
I’m curious about selection bias in the departments the author chose.
I can only speak from my experience, but even though I’ve spent most of my faculty career at masters-level programs, I was for a few years in a PhD-granting one (and felt a bit guilty about it, since it’s in a field that overproduces PhDs and that made me part of the problem). In my experience, no level of graduate-school admission operates quite like anything from the quotes in the review. For one thing, the personal statement wasn’t really mentioned, and that’s huge in my experience (and others—I’ve talked to others who have been part of graduate admissions at conferences about this), because if a student has a plan in their personal statement that the program can’t reasonably support, that student won’t be admitted out of simple fairness to them. (And if the student doesn’t have a coherent plan, they won’t be admitted out of fairness to the program.)
Also, it occurs to me that my wife was directly recruited into her PhD program from industry (a fairly common route into doctoral education in her field). I wonder how the author would have spun that kind of clear “favoritism”, you know?
Megan McArdle has commented on this story.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-07/academics-are-so-lefty-they-don-t-even-see-it
But does it really matter? I mean, from a cynic’s perspective, why should we care if ‘Studies’ departments are left of Bernie Sanders? In essence, you have like-minded students applying to like-minded grad programs.
I’m not sure taxpayers, employers or parents much care about Grad* admissions (unless they have a kid applying, but those numbers are really small; and many Masters programs are cash cows, so they are not that hard to get into).
*I use the term Grad separate from professional school admissions (Med, PH, Law, MBA…), which generally work how you would expect them to (and not much different than highly selective undergrad): GPA+Test Scores+Essay+Recs and ECs, with a plus factor for having a hook.
We’re going through this now while S waits to hear about his grad school apps. The programs he is trying to get into are extremely competitive.
Please try to understand not everyone writes a “help” book (or “insider view”) as a public service. I do notice Harvard published this, but try to remember how spin gets attention. An applicant is still safer doing the legwork than assuming one book is his ultimate guide to how it works. This reminds me of how everyone went nuts and started assuming when they heard about the chicken mcnuggets essay.
I notice some of the conservative press is latching on to this, throwing around the term, “discrimination.”
What if you’re not a “like-minded” student who’s applying to a Linguistics program? Would you want your politics or religion to be a factor?
“Left-wing” bias has been an on-going item of discussion on the right. This is just another data point, so it’s going to get pulled into that discussion.
Interesting article. I have a couple of comments based on my experience doing graduate (PhD) admissions in a social science field.
First, one omission from the study (or the report). We read the personal statements of the applicants very carefully. Since a PhD at a major research institution is mainly preparation for a career in research and teaching, we want to see what motivates the student, whether they have done good research as an undergraduate, whether they have a good idea what PhD study is all about, and whether they have an idea what kind of subfield (specialization) they might want to follow in the PhD program. We were also looking to match PhD applicants to the faculty specialties in our own department, i.e., with an answer to the question, “Who (if anyone) could best supervise this student?” In some cases, an applicant’s background (research and interests as an undergrad) showed a good potential fit to ongoing faculty projects, including their funded research.
Second, we were always actively seeking to increase the number of women and ethnic-racial minorities. We also welcomed international students. Here’s the main issue that we had with Chinese students: we did not trust the scores, especially the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). There have in fact been some scandals in the testing. An important reason why this mattered to us is that the main way we could supply financial aid to PhD students was for them to work as teaching assistants (TA’s). To do this well, they had to speak and read English well. But most of the time we were unable to interview these students prior to admission. At my university, international students were automatically sent to an English language center for testing (oral, reading comprehension), and quite often we found that the students were not ready (were not permitted) to serve as TA’s until they had completed some training. This problem hardly ever occurred from international students from countries in which there was wide training in and exposure to English language, such as most countries in the Middle East and South Asia.
I may comment more when I have time later.
I’ve been on PhD admissions for a quantitative social science discipline. GRE scores mattered a lot. Having had a particular set of math classes was important. Letters of rec seemed more important than the personal statements, which all seemed to be pretty similar to me. Chinese students who had a letter of rec from a faculty member in the US who had been visiting in China and could vouch for their English skills were preferred.
Religion should almost never be a factor. But attending a no-name school in the bush that happens to be religious is problematic. Being a top student from Notre Dame or BYU will not.
Politics can be a factor in many programs, and that can be easily assesses by looking at what the faculty research, which is partly a factor on what gets funded…