A philosophy graduate student at a mid-ranked PhD program writes:
I've been reading with interest the comments on your post aboutgraduate admissions yield. It strikes me that it might also beinteresting to discuss the way that admitted prospective students aretreated on their campus visits. A couple of issues are important:
1) Different schools do their visits differently: some have a group visit, where all admitted applicants are invited to visit at the same time, while others invite the candidates to come individually. Both models have their merits and their disadvantages. Group visits, it seems to me, obscure the way that the department actually runs on a day-to-day basis. Individual visits, though much better at revealing the department as it actually is, have the unfortunate disadvantage of giving students the impression that the department is less ambitious(or less attentive, or - even worse - poorer) than other departments to which they've been admitted. While I doubt this is generally the case, impressions matter.
2) This is related to a second issue: the behavior of students on group visits. In my program - and I suspect this is true of many programs -the other offers our admitted students have received are wildly different. Some have been admitted to the very best programs, while for others our very good department's is the best offer they have received. This disparity, it seems to me, leads to some extraordinarily infantile behavior on group visits. Those admitted to the top programs seem interested in little more than letting others know. And I fear that they poison the well: those who have no real intention of coming are able to influence others who have more meager options. I am confident in claiming that my department has lost a couple of prospective graduate students for whom our department was a terrific fit because of the ways in which one or two higher-profile admitted students laughingly compared our department to other, higher-ranked places.
All of this is encouraged, I think, by the recruiting process: we treat admitted applicants like rock stars. We throw them parties and takethem out to (sometimes quite expensive) dinners. We buy them plane tickets. And while they're around, we go out of our way to impress them at every moment. Every admitted applicant, no matter how arrogant, will presumably be put in his or her place in the very first week of a proseminar wherever they end up. But the disparity between what will happen when one arrives at a program and what faculty and graduate students put themselves through to get the students there in the first place is enormous and, to me, alarming.
All of this is just to say that I'd be interested to see if others havethe same impression I do. If you have the inclination, perhaps you'd start a thread on this topic.
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