Just wondering if you were planning on an “Incompatible Arrows V” with Merlyn from The Once And Future King. It was the only example I knew of before the series. Thanks!

Oh, and you are right on with your advice. Out of high school, I turned down a “top 10″ school (and all the debt that comes with it) for a free ride at a great public school. Out of college, I turned down a “top 10″ grad program for a better fit. I’ve never regretted either decision.

It is also important who Cindy’s friends are. Playing Devil’s Advocate, you might like Alyssa now, but five years is a long time, and by the end if the payoff is not there you might regret not going with Cindy. A good measure of whom you will still like in five years is who their friends are now. Cindy isn’t in the in-crowd for nothing (and even if she is, it’s not like people are going to snap out of their elitist stupor in five years). And yes, people will be your friend because you are Cindy’s friend.

I had to make very similar decisions to “B” when applying for grad school, and my reasoning was also very similar. I was faced with a very good match with a very good offer from a lower tier school, and a not quite as nice offer from a higher tier school. I didn’t want to be the type of person who would make a decision based on rankings, but I also knew I had to fight for myself. So I did a little informal research and found the proof was in the pudding. Basically I scanned the list of faculty members at both schools and where they got their PhDs. What I found was that regardless of the school, if it had a decent research program at all about 50% of the faculty members got their PhDs from top tier American schools (most of those from the top 5) and about 25% from second tier and the remainder from foreign universities and other lesser known PhD granting universities. It would be nice if somebody could post some real statistics, but this is what I found informally. So naturally I felt I had to put probability on my side. It turned out well for me, but I can’t say whether I made the right decision or not. The sad part is that students have no power to change the system because they have to watch out for themselves, and most faculty are too apathetic or indoctrinated to do anything about it. Maybe this can change–suggestions?

Interesting choice of names that your subconscious dug up there, Sean. I am pretty sure that Cindy S was before your time, but I will be sure to pass the good news on to our mutual graduate school friend Alyssa G.

I really hope that NRC update their ranking
I do not know what defines “the top 10″ top 10 in what sense? seems to me an illdefined category, as far as I understand the top 10 should not be strictly 10, the top 10 should be effectively mean the top 35 places or something
There are many good places in the states and they can not be restricted in just 10 universities

Jo

Is this struggle between good fit vs. higher rank really all that common? During my recent tour of grad school open houses, I met very few (if any) people having that struggle. Admittedly, it was rather common for people to judge schools based on the big names in the field they are interested in, but even that is considerably different from directly looking at rank. The vast majority of people I met felt like they had good “fits” at a variety of places for unique reasons at each place, and the real struggle is trying to compare, for instance, a great place in the area of past research and a great place in a less familiar but possibly more exciting area.

I agree that it’s a problem when people are putting too much value in rank, but I’m just not convinced it’s actually happening.

A couple of additional tidbits of advice from a psychologist. 1) Keep in mind that, whatever your choice is, you will tend to prefer it after you’ve made it and 2) We are poor at introspection and explaining just what it is that makes us happy. Just because sparks are flying now doesn’t mean that the relationship won’t fizzle out just as quickly after the honeymooning and great sex is over. Generally speaking, I tend to agree with &E. Stick with the p/(1-p), otherwise, you risk fooling yourself. YMMV

It’s easy enough for someone with a Harvard Ph.D to recommend others to choose their school based on personal match rather than its perceived prestige level, but as someone with a Ph.D from a “lesser institution” i have to say that, generally, turning down a top-ranked school for a lesser one will make things more difficult for you in future. If you do well and produce some good papers you’ll still be up against people with comparable records from top schools when applying for postdocs, and, with other things being more or less equal, the jobs (or at least the best ones) will generally go to the folks from the illustrious places with their big-name recommendation writers. It gets even tougher when applying for faculty positions. For the top places I don’t think it matters so much — they just want “the best”, regardless of their background — but for the lesser places (more numerous, and hence where most of the jobs are) hiring people who will make them “look good” is a big consideration. The places where you did your Ph.D and postdocs count a lot here. (Amusingly, the only time i ever received an unsolicited invitation to apply for a faculty position it was from MIT, whereas my applications to lesser places have always generated zero interest.) In any case, the best advice when deciding on a school (which was alrealdy mentioned in one of these threads) is to look and see how its previous graduates have fared; whether or not a number of them went on to good postdocs and faculty positions.

A final warning: there can be a depressing aspect at (some of) the lesser schools — the “if you were any good you wouldn’t be here” syndrome. This typically arises when almost all the faculty are Ph.D’s from illustrious institutions; then there can be a tendency for them to regard their own grad students (and postdocs!) as losers who couldn’t get into the same schools as them. Beware of such places and avoid them if you can — research is hard enough already without having to do it in that kind of depressing environment. A common clue to such places is that the grad students are expected to address faculty as “Prof./Dr. So-and-so” rather than by first name.

If someone can provide the reference for the study I am thinking of, I would appreciate it; I just don’t remember where I saw this.

The study I am thinking of looked at the academic career success (based on tenure, research funding, and awards, I think) as a function of where academics went to school, the research success of their graduate advisers, and the academic career success of other students with the same adviser. The conclusion was that the last was not only the most important, but that (because of the correlation between the three), the last is the only factor that need be considered; once you consider the success of common advisees, school choice and personal research success of the adviser offer no additional information.

This suggests an approach: look for people doing the sort of things you want to be doing after grad school, and find out who there advisers where. Consider a school simply as a means to the end of getting the specific adviser you want.

This seems fairly intuitive. A good school is good only because they have good faculty. If someone is skilled at research but a poor adviser, their advisees will not be helped much.

Thanks to Richard for gently pointing out something that I tend to lose patience while explaining, as this topic more than any other tends to make otherwise intelligent people forget everything they should know about correlation and causation. I don’t have anything against top-five schools — I’ve spent much of my life in them. There is a reason they are in the top five — they’re pretty good! They probably have good potential advisors there, and they certainly attract more than their share of good students. If you are a good fit to one of them, then by all means go.

But even if the only difference between school #5 and school #50 were reputation, and not real scholarly achievement or ability at training students, we would obviously expect that school #5 would churn out more future faculty members, because talented prospective students will very often default to the school with a better reputation. The point is, it’s also possible to be a great success coming from a school with a lesser reputation, if it is a good fit to what you want to do and you make the most of it while you are there. If you truly feel that you would be better trained and write more interesting papers and become a better scientist by going to school X than school Y, and yet you choose to go to Y because it’s ranked higher by US News, you’re making a terrible mistake. But if you feel that you would get better training at the higher-ranked school (which is statistically more likely), then by all means go.

Oh come on. What do you mean by choosing a graduate school is like choosing a woman you’d like to date? And what’s this about whether our prospective student would like a boyfriend of girlfriend better? What exactly would be the difference?

I think you really could have been more sensitive to avoid gender stereotypes. You actually explained your point better in comment #19. And some commenters went ahead and stretched the analogy even further to include sexual intercourse. This really isn’t helping.

I agree with a lot of what Richard E (#18) wrote, and don’t see much contradiction with my #15. Of course it is not simply the name of the top-5 institution that makes the difference, but rather the default assumption that those with PhDs from there are better than those from Decent U. Which they generally are. So if you choose Decent U. over Top-5 U., people in the future are going to assume that, other things being equal, you are less good than the other guy with the Top-5 PhD. Of course, if you can ensure that other things *aren’t* equal — by doing great work and outcompeting the Top-5 folks — then all will be well. But that’s kind of tough, and not something you can count on doing from the beginning. Or if Decent U. has a group at the forefront of a hot topic and you join it and do very well then that can also set you up nicely. The problem with this though is what happens if you end up being good but not stellar. Like i said before, the “best” people won’t have trouble finding faculty jobs regardless of their background. But if you end up not being one of them, then the places where you did PhD and postdocs will really count for a lot as far as your opportunities go.

Question to Richard E and Sean: If two good but not stellar people with comparable research records are competing for a job at a 2nd/3rd tier uni or at a Wall Street firm, and one has phd/postdocs from Decent U. and the other from Top-5 U., do you dispute that the latter will have a big edge? (assuming they are more or less similar in other regards)

Also, what Aaron (#23) said is so true. Before switching to physics i started off doing a maths phd in one of the best math depts in Europe, and the inspiration value of being in such a place cannot be overstated.
Not just the people but the atmosphere as well — it’s like “great things get done here, and you could end up doing some”. In fact I’m sure it was only by internalizing some of that that i managed to keep going with research at the subsequent places.

If you posit two otherwise equal candidates, one of whom has a “Top 5″ PhD, and the other being from a second tier school, I don’t believe the Top 5 person has a big advantage. In fact, it might even go preferentially to the second tier person, as someone with a bigshot advisor (which is more likely for the Top 5 person) always raises the question of whether they are truly intellectually independent.

On Wall Street, I am guessing they would tend to go for the prestige value of the school — and that is probably the prestige of the school as a whole, and not the department or subfield.

The bottom line is that is not an inherently foolish move to accept an offer from a somewhat less prestigious place — but you should have a good reason for doing so. (And this is what happens in practice — most students with an offer from Harvard and a second tier school DO go to Harvard).

The one complicating factor here (at least in my post), is that we have cast the decision in terms of your fit to the PhD program. However, if you are thinking of declining Harvard not because your specific interests are better met at some lower-ranked school, but because other factors in your life (your actual girlfriend or boyfriend, children, family, a fondness for sunbathing, etc) then you possibly ARE trading off more explicitly, I think. And that is indeed a tough problem, since you are not asking “What is the best school for me?” but “How do I balance these two competing desires?”

It’s good to know that there are people out there who don’t let their judgements be influenced by the school someone attended, but i have to say that that is quite unusual from what i’ve seen. To give an example: Someone i know who is a temporary faculty at Faraway U. was involved in assessing postdoc applications for a position in the group he belongs to. (And if the “someone” is me i sure as hell won’t admit it since shouldn’t be talking about this kind of stuff on blogs, even under pseudonym.) In the group of candidates that were seriously considered there wasn’t a whole lot to distinguish between them as far as research goes — they had comparable productivity and comparably nice recommendation letters. (I expect this is quite common. The discussion above in this thread gives the impression that one can clearly differentiate between peoples research records, but in practice this is often not the case.) Two candidates stood out however. One, X, because his area of expertese was a good match for the group. The other, Y, worked on stuff not directly related to what the group does, but stood out on “pedigree” grounds — he had been a postoc at Top-5 U. and worked with big-name people. The prof of the group, himself a phd holder from a Top-5 U., was in no doubt about who he wanted: “Wow, look at Y, he was at Top-5 U, worked with famous dude A and then famous dude B…” At this point the person (P) that i know tried to point out that Y’s actual research record wasn’t any better than the others, and that X’s expertese was a better match for the group. But the prof just didn’t hear it. Literally — he continued as if P had not spoken “Hmmm, to get Y we might have to offer him a tenure-track faculty postion…could be complicated…but I expect he will get other faculty offers from elsewhere…”
The outcome was that Y withdrew from the shortlist because he did indeed get a faculty offer elsewhere. None of the other people, whose research records were comparable to Y’s, received any faculty offers themselves as far as i can tell.

Funny, but the analogy is completely off the mark. Tell the kid that, no matter how great his romance and how much fun he has with Alyssa, in five years she’ll tell him “buh-bye” … thereafter, his chances of dating anyone else are much better if he dates Cindy…

i agree with you(“b”) 100%, ALL THE WAY… Cindy wasn’t ready for you anyway!!!