Looking Ahead

UPDATE: I have all of my recommendation letters now. I am really relieved to have that part done with! (Actually, one prof still needs to complete an online one, but I feel confident she'll get it done this week.)

Yesterday I picked up the recommendation letters from Professor #2, and I will pick up the last batch from Professor #3 this afternoon. She should also have comments on my statement of purpose (SOP). Somehow, I have almost reached the end of this grad school application process. The hard part is over. I hope this weekend to finish the online applications, finalize the SOPs for the various programs, get my other supporting materials (C.V., etc.) together, and mail off my packets to 6 programs. (I have one additional program with a late application deadline that I will put together later if I haven't heard from one of the more-preferred programs already.)

Last "weekend" (Thurs - Sun), because I was at a standstill with these masters program applications, I turned my attention again to PhD programs and a little bit beyond. I have a list of 40-odd marketing programs I am working with. I had already put together information on research fit with professors in these programs.

Another piece of the puzzle is program quality. Unlike MBA programs (or psychology PhD programs) there is no standard ranking list of marketing PhD programs. However, there are several sources of rankings based on faculty publications, with programs having a greater number of publications, and publications in more prestigious journals, given a higher rank. These rankings cover different time periods (e.g. based on consumer psychology publications from the 1990s, based on general marketing publications from 2001) and give a sort of mixed result. For instance, UT-Austin is a top 10 program by some of these lists, but comes in at #66 using another one. So it's not entirely clear to me how to weight these rankings, though I suspect I will be able to generally place them in tiers such as Top 10, Top 30, Top 50, etc. Other programs have strengths in niche areas. For instance, I know (from reading it in a thousand places) that the University of Florida is a very top program in consumer behavior, though their overall marketing or business school rank is lower.

A very important aspect of a program's quality is its placement record: where do graduates of the program get their first academic job? Depending on whether you are interested in getting a position with the highest-ranked program you can, a job at a research-oriented university, a teaching college, or heaven-forfend industry, you need to be more or less selective about the PhD program you attend. Programs often mention placement on their web sites, but this is usually a selective list, in which they cherry-pick the best placements and say things like "In recent years, our graduates have found positions in excellent universities such as X College, Y University" etc., with the emphasis on "such as."

I happened across a thread on the Business Week forums from 2004-2007 that included over 6500 posts (!) from various business PhD applicants, students, and a handful of professors, that took forever to read but did have some interesting information and perspectives that got me thinking about several things:

1. The Great Age Debate

Most of the applicants on the forum were trying to get into top tier (top 10 or perhaps top 20) business PhD programs. There was a lot of furious debate over to what extent top programs prefer younger over older students. There was a consensus that for top programs, being as ancient as 30 is a serious disadvantage and being over 35 will hugely reduce your chances at getting in (and your chances are pretty bad to begin with, given the strong competition for a very few slots). While this was felt to be more significant the more math-oriented the field (e.g. finance being very mathy and strategy being less so), it's a concern for all fields.

Of course, I am already very familiar with the age discrimination of other academic (vs. professional) programs, but had thought that this was less of a factor in business schools. But it would make sense that the top business programs would function a lot like their counterparts in economics, psychology, etc., since they tend to prefer students with undergrad credentials in one of the foundational academic subjects from the elite universities.

It's a bit hard, though, to say whether fewer older applicants are admitted to these programs due to age discrimination (or a preference for younger students among faculty) or at least in part because older applicants tend to be less competitive on dimensions that matter.

Since my age is the aspect of my application that I have the least control over, there is a limit to how useful this information is, but I do think it's helpful in targetting programs to realize that I may have an even tougher time getting admitted to certain places, especially the Stanford, Cornell, Northwestern type programs. Whether ultimately this will influence me to avoid certain programs, or only impact my expectations of success, I don't know. It does suggest that looking at the ages of current students might help identify programs that indicate a willingness to admit (exceptionally qualified) older applicants vs. a tendency to prefer fresh 22-year-old Ivy League undergrads. It also means that I should probably be especially careful to apply to a wide range of schools, since the age issue is less problematic the farther down the rankings you go.

2. The MBA Question

This brings up another controversial question they discussed - whether applicants with MBAs are seen as less desirable. I had noted before that students with MBAs were a lot more common among the mid-tier and lower programs than the very top ones. The commenters mostly felt that masters degrees in academic disciplines (math, stat, econ, psych, engineering, etc.) were more valuable than an MBA, which is a professional degree and not a "rigorous" program. This is in line with what I had already decided for myself.

3. The Placement Issue

As I've discussed before, the outlook for academic jobs amongst business PhDs is very good compared to most other disciplines. But this doesn't mean that graduating from a top 20 program guarantees you a job at another top 20 institution. There is the same "downward movement" in placement that you see elsewhere, only not as severe. Plenty of graduates of Wharton (the very best business school in the world) end up at less-than-elite universities. And apparently, some top schools are utterly notorious for making tenure nearly impossible to get. One school (Harvard?) was mentioned as granting tenure to only 1 of 7 people, so a lot of people work their asses off on research for the first 6 years and still end up moving down to a much lower school. Current professors talked about people they knew who were placed in a less highly-ranked program to begin with getting tenure easier and with less stress. People talked about how surprised they were to find that the status game, as played out by comparing who is at a better school than someone else, who is at what rank in the program, etc., is so much more important in academia than in industry. (This makes sense, though; in industry, people can feel superior through really high earning power, but the difference between the top paid and lowest paid professors is not very large, leaving prestige as the main way to differentiate yourself from others.)

The comments on this subject really got me thinking about what level of placement I would consider "good enough" or even preferable to getting a job at a top 20 program. I am fortunate that I actually just want to be a college professor, unlike some of the applicants who are only interested in doing it if they can get an elite academic job. I am not thinking about giving up the possibility of becoming a powerful, insanely-well-paid businessman or whatever by taking the academic route because I have no interest in the kind of career that getting a Harvard MBA instead of a PhD could make possible for me. I am not motivated by the desire to be a professor at Wharton so I can feel like a major hot-shot and be well-connected for lucrative consulting opportunities that arise. I just like the idea of getting paid to do something I really like doing.

Although I am sort of an academic snob, I basically view getting a PhD and then an academic job at any kind of decent university as pretty elite. And I'm not at all motivated to do something so that my grandmother can impress her friends at church by saying that I'm at Harvard or whatever.

And it does sound like life at the top of this academic food chain is really hard. You may not be teaching a lot of classes at Northwestern, but the expectations in terms of publication productivity is kind of insane. I might be happier at a more middle-of-the-road institution that puts a little bit less overwhelming publication pressure. (The publication pressure at any research-oriented university is going to be hard enough.)

While this doesn't necessarily mean I'd turn down the chance to attend a top program or get a job at a great university, it is sort of reassuring to realize that there is a pretty good range of outcomes that I would find satisfying - especially given that the probabilities are a lot higher for getting a job at the University of Georgia than the University of Chicago.