The Insider Guide to Careers
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Most of the students I talk to care a lot about college rankings and use that to estimate where to apply for graduate school. In this newsletter, I will argue why rankings make little sense and how students should approach admissions differently.
How the racket began:
The university ranking model was started by US News, which began an endeavor to help students, which over time became a racket appealing to the prejudices and biases of students and their parents. While university rankings can give a general overview of academic reputation, excessive focus on individual ranks is highly detrimental to the cause of education. University rankings could make sense to undergraduate students who have no idea what to expect in university. US News rankings were created to cater exclusively to this demographic. It makes little sense for graduate school applicants.
There are three lists of university rankings – THES, QS, and SJTU rankings. From an academic perspective, rankings should not change year after year. If rankings change year after year, there is something suspicious about them. THES and QS rankings are run by private agencies that have vested interests. They keep changing the list of top schools every year to generate reader interest artificially. In contrast, SJTU recognizes that university rankings are generally constant, as a considerable weightage of the rankings is guided by a nebulous factor called university reputation. Most professors will not change their estimate of university reputation every year. Hence, the most regarded university ranking by most academics is the Shanghai Jiao Tong (SJTU) ranking. This ranking was started not by a private organization but by faculty at SJTU. They have decided to pause their rankings of late, as they realize that the rankings are relatively constant over time, and nothing changes year after year.
Who should apply to Harvard, MIT, and Stanford:
Many excellent students waste applications by applying to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, or Berkeley when they could get into other top schools. There are many reasons why this is a bad idea:
Expectations from companies
When it comes to job search, companies in the US barely care about where you graduated. As long you have the right skills, it is easy to get noticed. For example, companies in the US have many avenues to identify top talent across schools and give the same compensation to students irrespective of school reputation as long as skills are similar. When when progressing in career, your current skills are way more important than where one graduated from. For example, I have seen many pedigreed alumni languish in entry to mid-manager roles in every company I know. They are probably stuck there throughout their careers. They is because they do not bring the right skills for the next position to the table. On the other hand, people like Chuck Robbins rise to lead Cisco even when he just has an undergrad in Math from NCSU. This is because he has the leadership skills which no other person in Cisco possesses.
Indian companies are very fussy about recruiting only from the top IITs because they mistakenly think that all the best students are only in the IITs. These students typically get a 40% premium. The companies feel that good talent outside the IITs is too spread out to be identified effectively. My startup, Careerbolt, will help identify these diamonds in the rough and encourage companies to look beyond their traditional confines.
What matters for graduate school applications:
Students should not assume that graduate school rankings and where they should apply for tallies with each other. They should focus only on where the research happens. The reputation of graduate school has little to no correlation with where students work after their Ph.D. The number one criterion for Ph.D. students is the amount and quality of research they have published in tier-one journals in their field. These publications are heavily competitive, and students need a lot of mentorship from their professors to get published in top journals. A student will likely find a faculty willing to mentor them from scratch in a relatively not-so-well-known school than the highest-ranked school out there. Professors in top schools, as I mentioned earlier, can sometimes be too busy with industrial consulting, administrative tasks, and legal consulting to pay enough attention to students.
Any school in the top 20 is indistinguishable from each other when it comes to graduate school. Most programs in the top 50 have many faculty who have graduated from the MITs and Stanfords of the world. Faculty choose universities to teach based on where they can raise a family, proximity to their families, where they can get tenure, and many other considerations. Outstanding faculty can be found anywhere, not just in the top schools. You have to do the homework to identify the research history of professors in your area of interest rather than take the lazy route of identifying professors by university reputation. I have written a detailed post in my newsletter, listing how to identify relevant professors. The gist is that you have to look at tier-one journals, group research topics, and identify professors from there.
Any company which recruits at Stanford or MIT will also recruit at Wisconsin Madison, Purdue, Michigan, or UIUC. All these Mid-Western Schools are among the world’s best universities and second to none. You can check the faculty profiles of MIT and Stanford engineering programs and find that many faculty have doctorates from mid-west schools. For example, as per recent research in Nature, Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan can easily go head to head with Berkeley and Harvard for being the number one school for faculty placements in the US, and they beat MIT and Stanford easily.
I recommend mid-west and southern schools over east coast schools not just because of their lower costs and the ability to save a large part of your stipends but also because of their work ethic. These schools place hard work before entitlement. Grade inflation can be a problem at Harvard, where every student wants a perfect GPA, but never at Georgia Tech or Purdue, where you will stretch yourself in ways you never thought was possible. Your family reputation matters for little here; only your grit and determination can help you graduate. The mid-west work ethic teaches that everyone, irrespective of their level, must keep working harder and harder to stay in the same place. This is a valuable lesson; one can never look back at past accomplishments. One has to be modest, humble and only look at the future.
Where are the hidden gems:
Here are some schools you would never have considered.
The only time reputation matters:
Surprisingly, when it comes to academic placements, Professors are sometimes picky about who gets to be a tenure-track faculty at a top school. The problem is that everything else being equal, one has to be in the top 3 schools to stand a chance at being considered for a top 10 school. In the same way, one has to be from a top 10 school to be considered for a top 30 school. If one is from a top 30 school, they could be considered for a top 70 school, and so on. It was a bit surprising to me to see that a defacto caste system exists in academia. These effects are less prevalent in engineering programs (which are more meritocratic) compared to the humanities and business school doctoral programs.
Indian academia is equally bad. To teach in an IIT, one needs a doctoral degree from top foreign universities. I have friends who had doctorates from average US schools and solid research credentials but struggled to get interviews from IITs for faculty jobs. Even the NITs in India are equally demanding. Studying at IITs in India could get you a faculty job in the NITs and other private engineering colleges. Similarly, studying at the NITs and other top engineering colleges can only get you a job at a next-tier school. One of my good friends, who had an MBA from IIM Calcutta and a management Ph.D. from IIT Bombay, mentioned that none of the IITs would even grant him a chance at an interview for IIT faculty roles. This covert discrimination is the hidden secret of academia.
Disclosure: I had admits to Harvard, Stanford, and Cambridge for my Masters and MBA programs, but I chose to reject them because they didn’t make economic sense to me. I went to IIT Bombay, Cornell, and Wisconsin-Madison instead.
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