Search Committees: What’s The Deal With Institutional Prestige?

[gael2020]

Study after study has shown that institutional prestige matters a great deal. But I've also heard that department prestige matters more than institutional. Is there a great difference between a Yale Princeton Harvard vs a Northwestern, NYU, or UCLA? If a SC is unfamiliar with your subfield or speciality, I.e you're not immediately legible to them - will your application only get a look if you're from Harvard or Princeton?

[spork]

http://thefora.org/index.php?topic=1215.0

[arcturus]

Seek, and you shall find...the other thread you started: http://thefora.org/index.php?topic=1220.0

[polly_mer]

I'll grant various people on these fora "these are unusual times for the near future so we can't know, even if we usually would know" for this particular topic.

What is much more knowable is the acceleration in closing programs/institutions and the loss associated faculty jobs that go with them.  There were only 5 TT jobs/year in the fields you desired during the good times.  There is no reason to expect that number to remain at that number or increase at any point in the future soon enough to help you get one of those jobs.

What is much more knowable are the hiring freezes, furloughs, revocations of faculty job offers and even revocation of graduate student funding announced right now.  Even if the number of TT jobs in your field returns to 5 by the time you graduate, there are plenty of people already qualified for those jobs with relevant experience who will be Johnny-on-the-spot as soon as those jobs are again advertised.

Now is not a good time to start a graduate program, any way one slices it. 

Also, formal acceptance of a graduate offer was due at most places 15 April just like every year.  While these are unusual times, top programs selective enough to maintain a waiting list generally kept to that schedule, especially as they looked at cutting funded positions in an ethical way and decided quietly to just have a much smaller graduate entering class for fall.