If anyone’s leaving grad school choice to the very last minute, some quick advice. (Beyond “Change the past so you acted earlier.”)

As noted before, I agree with a large chunk of what “Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000913.html says on this topic, but there’s probably some differences of emphasis here.

_Get Lots of Advice_
Don’t decide on something very important to your life on throwaway suggestions from one or two people. Like me!

_Take What Current Students Say Seriously_
Faculty will always oversell their departments quality and potential. (For instance, did you hear Cornell is about to trade Lake Cayuga to NYU in exchange for their entire philosophy program? I think that should move us to at least number 1, maybe higher.) Unhappy grad students, however, will usually be very willing to tell you about their gripes with a department. Some students may exaggerate out of loyalty, but as a rule of thumb if all the grad students you meet say they’re happy, things really are pretty good.

_Don’t Put Too Much Weight in Rankings_
The difference between consecutive schools in the Leiter rankings is often barely discernible. Even between schools that are dozens of places apart, the actual difference in faculty quality can be small enough that it can easily be swamped in your decision making process by other factors. There are really talented philosophers, philosophers who would be an asset to any program, at departments all over the country, and you can still be working with very good philosophers even if you’re not at Rutgers, or Michigan or Arizona or Brown or some other big name school.

To take an extreme case, if your priority in a grad school is one with outstanding strength in history of philosophy, plus an active and exciting group of young peole working in MM&E, set in a rural college town with cheap housing and low crime, then you’re probably better off choosing Cornell over anywhere else even though we clearly aren’t as strong as several other departments. And a similar story could be told for plenty of other similar schools. This isn’t to say there’s _anyone_ with just those preferences, but just that it’s possible to imagine a case where it makes sense to choose Cornell over lots of other places.

In general, don’t be afraid to let quirky preferences guide your choice of school. There’s no such department as the one that is the best department for every student with every combination of possible values. Being ranked #1 on Leiter, as I think Rutgers should be next time around, doesn’t make you that department. Choosing to go to X over Y because it’s in the kind of city you want to live in is a much better reason than choosing Y over X because it’s ranked 1 or 2 spots higher. This is a five+ year commitment – you want to enjoy it.

(This is not to say you should _ever_ take a school from outside Leiter’s Top 40 over a school from his top 5. Maybe there are circumstances when this is wise, but I can’t think of any. And I think it’s easy to forget when you’re in the system how hard it is for prospective students, particularly prospective international students like us ignorant Aussies, to make judgments of even this level of ‘refinement’ without services like the Leiter report. For outsiders, having a guide like this that’s even approximately right is really invaluable. Obviously faculty quality matters, and Leiter’s survey is by far the best existing guide to faculty quality. My only point here, and I think it’s one Brian agrees with, is that it shouldn’t be the last word in your decision making process.)

_Don’t Put Too Much Weight in Old Placement Data_
One reason for this is that departments change. Another is that the differences between departments at placement is not always that significant. Yet another is that placement rates aren’t always a fair comparison because better departments attract better students so it’s only natural they will do better in job placement. And, relatedly, ultimately it’s going to be you that gets hired or not, not a letterhead.

There’s not a lot of evidence that some departments are just better at placement than others. My impression, based solely on anecdotal data, is that once you start looking at schools outside the top 25, the reputation of the school can start to weigh down an applicants chances of getting a job. But inside the top 25 it’s much harder to detect any such effect. (That doesn’t mean it isn’t there, just that with data so noisy as these it really is hard to detect.) And of course I went to a school that has never been listed as equivalent to a top 25 program, and I’ve done OK on the job market, so it’s not like top 25 is some magic number.

_Accessibility to Other Programs Matters_
It makes MIT much more attractive that you can go there and take occasional courses at Harvard. It makes Princeton much more attractive that you can go there and take occasional courses at Rutgers. Now you can easily exaggerate the importance of this fact. You don’t want to go to CUNY _just because_ you could sit in on other seminars in the NYC area from there. Ultimately your home school matters a lot. But so does location.

It’s very hard to tell how much difference this makes in practice to one’s grad school experience. Sometimes what looks like an easy commute to a nearby school is just impractical when you get down to it. I think a decent guide to how practical it is to sit in on courses elsewhere is given by the frequency that current students actually do this. But that’s even more of a guess than most things I’m saying here.

_Faculty Accessibility Matters_
This should be fairly obvious. But it’s worth noting how important it is to rely on up-to-date information about this. Stories about how many faculty were regularly around the place at Rutgers from before Ted, John and Dean moved there are going to be not that useful as a guide to what the place is now like, for example. Departmental cultures can change quickly, so be sure to have up-to-date information.

_Grad Student Quality Matters_
In my opinion this is one of the biggest factors that should be considered, so I’ve left it until almost last. At many schools you’re going to learn as much from your fellow grad students as from the faculty, and not because you learn very little from the faculty. So it matters that your colleagues to be are smart, are enthusiastic about philosophy, are active participants in seminars (you don’t want to always be the one turning a lecture into seminar) and there’s a culture of frequently talking about what’s going on in seminars and about each other’s work.

Now for a bunch of schools I have literally no idea how well the grad student body does by those criteria. Hopefully by this stage you’ve got a sense of what the departments you’re choosing between are like, because advice from outsiders on how good departments actually are in these respects is next to useless. And it’s a guess/value judgment about how important a factor it is anyway. But I’d think it is perfectly sensible to let considerations about how much you’ll enjoy and learn from the time you’ll spend with other grad students be a decisive factor in anything like a close case.

_When in doubt, choose Cornell_
Only half-kidding! By the last two criteria Cornell does very well, but that’s an absolute judgment, not a relative judgment since I don’t know how well other schools do on those criteria. I’d like to be able to judge from the armchair that we’re obviously better than other departments in these respects, but even my faith in a priori reasoning doesn’t go that far.

Good luck everyone.