The answer to this question seems to be all over the map depending on where I view things online.
I still have about another year before I’ll even be applying to grad schools, but this is a nagging issue I have. The bottom line is that I go to a podunk CSU in southern CA, and I just want to know to what extent (if any) my school’s so-so stature will matter in terms of grad school admissions.
FWIW, my grad degree of choice is in Communications, and I’m basically going to be applying to the schools on this list that pay their grad students to go there.
I know that there’s loads of higher ed types on the Dope, so their insights will be especially appreciated.
The general guideline is that the reputation of your undergraduate school is of medium importance in the process. It does matter to an extent but not as much as some people think. The objective criteria graduate schools use for admission are grades and GRE scores (not necessarily in that order) but even those may not be the most important either. The ultimate plus for most graduate degrees is demonstrated excellence in the field especially if it has been published. If you can combine that with some truly great and customized letters of recommendation, those can put you well ahead of people with higher objective scores.
In summary, it is a combination of things. I went from a very well regarded undergraduate school to the Ivy League for graduate school. My scores were good but not perfect but I had excellent references and was well-rounded in research experience. My job as an undergrad was to process and do preliminary screening for graduate applicants into the Psychology PhD program. Specific schools didn’t matter that much and neither did high grades and scores on the GRE if something else seemed off. The admissions committee looked at the whole picture to evaluate applicants and they admitted people from all reasonable tiers of undergraduate schools if they were a good match for the program.
Putting together a customized letter about why they were applying to that particular program and why they truly believed it would be a good match for them was a huge plus if they made sense at all (some of them were incoherent or not applicable and they got canned for it as well).
Many of the schools on your list are highly competitive as is the general field of Communications at that level so plan to spend a significant amount of time tailoring your application specifically to each program you apply to.
The closer you are to your undergraduate years, the more your undergraduate institutions matters. If you were applying to PhD programs after having worked in some related field for several years, with great letters from your employers, you’d most likely have a better shot. Not necessary a good shot but a better one. If you’re applying straight all, college is likely all you’ve got.
Graduate admissions committees get tons of applications for fully-funded doctoral programs. So we take shortcuts. We’ll look at your GRE scores and your letters of recommendation first. It’s not just the content of your letters, unfortunately, it’s who wrote them. Have we heard of them? Have we read their work? Is yours a program we respect? Have we had good doctoral students from that program before? Then we’ll read your statement of interest–whatever it’s called, it’s where you discuss your intellectual and research interests. Really, we ought to read this first, but there’s close to a 1000 (or more) applicants. Do your interests fit with our faculty? Is it clear that you will succeed at research? Your GPA is not so very relevant if it’s high–we don’t know what a 4.0 means at your school. Maybe everyone has one. if it’s consistently low, that’s a problem. We’ll at least scan your writing sample. Just don’t send a really long one.
This isn’t how it should work and it’s not how I would like it to work. But it’s pretty much how it happens.
Question for you: why a PhD? Do you want to be an academic? If not, why a PhD. And yes, absolutely, without a doubt, only do a PhD if you have full funding.
ETA: I assumed you were referring to doctoral programs because of your list. If you’re applying for an unfunded MA program, none of this applies. We’ll happily take your money to fund our PhD students as long as you don’t have too many felonies.
My qualifications: AA from a podunk community college, BS from a podunk Cal State, PhD from a UC, made my way and got tenure in a top Ivy League Medical school.
Your undergrad institution matters if any other part of your application is borderline. I had top GRE scores, almost perfect GRE subject exam scores, high GPA and research experience with publications when I applied for grad school. When people knock the CSU system, my old PhD advisor says to this day that his best student came from a Cal State.
If you come from Harvard, you can often get away with lower scores, GPA etc…
Shortly before completing my BS, I decided to pursue a MS and PhD. I enjoyed the school I was at and I was not ready to commence a job search so, after talking my adviser,I kept going.
Sometimes it matters. I’ve personally talked to a medical school admissions officer while they were working their worksheet, and I saw they had a table, where schools were tiered by rigor. MIT is rated higher than some podunk school (they had 3 categories).
With that said, this seemed like a lot of work, and there were only 3 categories. There a still huge differences between schools. A 3.0 at Caltech probably means you are objectively a genius and would have a 4.0 almost anywhere else.
From what I could tell, and have heard, the numerical value of your gpa (and the standardized exam scores) matters a heck of a lot more. Go to an easy podunk school and get a 4.0? You’ve got it made. This is quite unfair, of course, but it’s how it works.
It matters a lot if you are coming from China, less if coming from a North American school. But it still matters. Recommendations from known people help a lot. But still your marks in your chosen subject (as well as your course selection) are going to matter a lot. At least in math, if most of your math marks are not A, you will not get in.
It seems unlikely that the discipline is heavily quantitative but what do I know? OP, as you will have gathered, the process is somewhat field dependent.
More to the point, why a PhD? In many fields, and I suspect Communications is among them, the job market is not nearly promising enough to invest so many years in a doctorate.
Yes, I would like to become a college professor, whether at a community college (which is the most likely option, and is also where my own college career started) or at a four-year school. The outlook for such occupations is actually pretty promising, too, though I wouldn’t actually secure the requisite degree myself until sometime in 2021 or 2022.
But I’ve been told by some of my own professors the exact same thing you said in your earlier post: don’t do it unless I’m paid to do it. It’s a tricky situation within the broader discipline because far more fully funded PhD’s are available to Communications students who have already attained the Master’s degree, yet virtually no MA programs (aside from the one at Ohio State University, which is the ONLY fully-funded Master’s program I’ve hitherto encountered) come with funding.
I should point out that my school HAS sent at least one student (that I know of) to Penn. State’s Annenberg School of Communication (arguably the most prestigious Comm. school in the US), though that student completed both her BA AND MA at my university before going to her PhD program. I, meanwhile, am basically relegating myself strictly to the doctoral landscape post-undergrad, at least for now.
Communications may well be one of the few areas in which the job prospects are above average. But I’d be very, very surprised if less than 20 percent of the advertised jobs were for non-tenure track, adjunct positions.
I never received a Masters. I don’t know of any fully-funded programs in my field that require an MA for entry, although some people do have them and therefore do less course work. I’d be wary of paying for an MA with the expectation that you’ll continue on to get a doctorate. That’s some pretty significant debt and academic salaries, especially at the CC level, are not all that high. Be wary of national averages–the range between a CC and a top-tier research university can be enormous.
Does your school have a 5-year BA/MA program? I’m not sure that sort of MA would help you get into a doctoral program but it’s worth checking out.
I don’t mean to be a downer here, just a realist. I’d encourage you to work for several years before embarking on a graduate degree. Most PhD program prefer people with some experience outside of academia, and you’ll have a much better sense of which degree, if any, you need to do work that really interests you. Again, this varies by field, but like you I’m in the social sciences. The average age of students starting in my doctoral program was somewhere around 28-30. And the average time to completion was 7 years, not counting the 50 percent of each entering class who didn’t complete the degree.
I served on a lot of grad admissions committees over the years.
To me, undergrad school mattered little. (Within reason. If you have a University of Phoenix degree or some such, forget it.)
But I was in the minority. Most were all to easily impressed by the school.
E.g., one time I went round and round with another committee member over two candidates: One was a “C” student from a Famous School, the other an “A” student from a lesser state school. I wanted the later. The former was clearly a very poor student. But my fellow faculty member only saw “Famous School” and that was it.
When I was the chair of the committee, I managed things so that I got my way. Ended up with really great students.
A lot of people go to less known schools due to finances, family situations, etc. This doesn’t make them lesser people.