A couple of correspondents raised the question of what prospectives should make of faculty at School X who say derogatory things about the program at School Y. In general, I think it's fair to say that faculty know more about programs than prospective students, so I would not want to say that, in general, such comments should be ignored. But they should certainly be discounted in proportion to the extent those faculty have highly interested reason for demoting their competitors. Students are clearly well-advised to investigate any claims about other programs made by faculty or students not at the program.
An anecdote will illustrate the point. Years ago, in the late 1990s, when the PGR first moved NYU into the top ranks of PhD programs, I was deluged with e-mails saying that, "Oh the NYU faculty don't care about students" and "sure the faculty are famous but they won't be able to train students" and so on. The comments were obviously ridiculous, given that so many of the NYU faculty had trained many students at their prior programs. And more than a dozen years later, it's clear how ridiculous these disparaging comments were. (I had a similar experience when the PGR first ranked Rutgers highly, though, again the reality speaks for itself.)
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