low status graduate students
Over the last year, I have been asked this question at least three times:
What advice do you have for graduate students at low status programs? I’m publishing, I’m working with faculty who are publishing, but I feel like I’m at a disadvantage. What should I do?
A few responses:
1. You have to come to grips with the fact that academia is status oriented. People from more prestigious schools will get breaks that you won’t get. Once you have accepted that fact, move on with your life and stop thinking about it.
2. Overcompensate. Fortunately, there are a lot of good journals. In soc, we have 2 (or 4) lead journals, a number of specialty journals, and good journals in related fields that will be acceptable within sociology. Submit enough times and you will succeed.
3. Choose your mentors wisely. Lower ranked schools have heterogeneous faculty. Some professors are just as accomplished as those at elite schools, while others have not kept up. Choose advisers who remain active. Hang out with the winners.
4. Think long term. In a low information environment, people rely in status. In a high information environment, people rely less on status. As you progress in you career, you will find that people who are quality researchers and teachers are rare. And if you can bring in grant money, even better. Thus, there are chances to rise to the top if you are consistently good. Check the directories of leading programs and you’ll always see some graduates of non-elite programs.
5. Don’t do anything to reinforce negative impressions. Don’t settle for book chapters or publications in obscure journals until you have at least one or two publications in more highly regarded places.
Overall, there is an uphill battle to be fought, but there is a plausible long-term strategy that you can execute and it has a reasonable chance of success. Now get back to work – and buy the grad skool rulz book!
Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz
Out of curiosity, around what rank do the ‘low status’ programs begin at? Below 30? 40? 50?
undergrad
December 13, 2011 at 6:18 am
The premise of this question seems funky to me. It presupposses that there are giant residual departmental status effects on such outcomes as (let’s say) “getting a job.” But my sense is that empirically if residual status effects exist then there’s really nothing you can do about them, and in terms of size they must be tiny in comparison to the indirect effects (don’t want to discount the source of the question, but “feeling” like you are at a disadvantage is not the same as actually being at a disadvantage). Accordingly, if (as I think is more likely to be the case), the bulk of the status effects operates indirectly via negative effects on grad school productivity (and secondarily on such things as the choice of less prestigious specializations, choice of less than cutting-edge methods, etc.) then telling somebody who is currently enrolled in a low status program to simply “publish” is a bizarre sort of advice (like telling a working class kids who’s afraid that she’s being outdone by her higher-status peer to “simply finish college” [oh, wait...]). The point is that ultimately the departmental status effect operates via a set of cumulative advantage processes that begin early in the grad-school career, so that by the time we get to job-market time students in so-called low status schools simply are less competitive than the (best) Princeton, Harvard, Indiana, etc. students (yes, I am saying there is no such thing as the Oklahoma State PhD with an AJS article out of grad school, and if such a person were to exist they would not face insurmountable hurdles in the job market). Given this setup, the field can thus have its cake and it eat it too (select on so-called meritocratic criteria and reproduce the caste system). You can memorize all of the rules in the world and that still won’t help you.
Omar
December 13, 2011 at 12:13 pm
Omar makes a good point. If the problem facing students from low-status schools is that they don’t get the same training and mentoring advantages that students do in high status schools then I think the solution is for students in those programs to overcompensate by getting that training on their own. ICPSR, for example, provides tons of great training seminars where you can learn cutting-edge methods and research skills. In addition, you need to figure out where the pulse of the discipline is. Students in high status departments figure this out usually because their mentors help to shape and define what are considered important areas of research/theoretical problems. Students not in the middle of this hub of scholarly activity need to get that same information and feel for the field by paying attention to what is being presented at high status conferences, what people are publishing in ASR and AJS at the moment, etc.
One caveat I’d offer though to any aspiring sociologist is that you shouldn’t try to become just like everyone else in your efforts to “fit in.” Having been on the hiring side and hearing stories from my peers who are hiring in other departments, one of the frustrations we face is that we get too many job candidates who look too similar to each other. You can’t tell them apart because they’re all studying the same thing. They’re different from each other in only very incremental ways. People like this don’t stick out, even when they’re from high status programs. Yes, you should absolutely figure out where the hot debates and problems of the field currently are, but don’t try to become a carbon copy of a successful scholar from your favorite high status department. Pursue what you are passionate about topically and then figure out how you can create novel research projects in that area that speaks to an important and hot theoretical debate in the field.
So my advice to students from low status departments is to 1) get more methods training than other people in your department have, 2) figure out what the pressing theoretical debates of the field are and learn as much as you can about them, and 3) figure out how the topical areas you are passionate about can be studied in such a way as to speak to those hot theoretical debates.
brayden king
December 13, 2011 at 4:05 pm
I’m with Omar but moreso. There is a lot of heterogeneity in students and in potential jobs. My advice:
(1) if you are working on a master’s degree and realize you have higher aspirations, consider the possibility of transferring to another school. See advice from both your current institution and potential receiving institutions about this.
(2) Study up on where the faculty at your current institution publish and where the alumni from your current institution get jobs. Look at their cv’s and compare them to the cvs for people at other places. Come to understand the variations in your current faculty and the variations elsewhere. There are typically some faculty at most graduate institutions who are publishing at rates comparable to anyplace else. Then figure out whether your research interests align with theirs, or not. General rankings are almost irrelevant. It is the specifics that matter.
(3) Where do YOU want to work? What kind of job do YOU want? Are alumni from your institution getting those kinds of jobs?
(4) Remember “frog pond” effects. For the same level of objective achievement, being the very best student at a lower ranked place can get you lots of attention, mentoring, and enthusiastic endorsements while being below average at a higher ranked place can get you ignored.
(5) Compare the actual syllabi for the courses you are taking with the actual syllabi for the courses from the “higher ranked” institutions. Are you getting a comparable education or not? The answer could go either way.
There’s probably more to consider but that is enough for now.
olderwoman
December 13, 2011 at 4:39 pm
Thank you to everyone for really thoughtful responses. A few comments:
1. @undergrad: It’s relative, but I think status groups in academic disciplines are elite (top 5), top twenty, the next twenty or so, and then it’s vague after that.
2. @omar: My observation is that there are big marginal effects. On the average, publication record drives job placements. But there’s a lot of people on the indifference curve. A lot of people may be co-authors on second tier articles. So which ones get the benefit of the doubt and get the interview? My hypothesis is that people rely on PhD school rank. Either directly, or indirectly through endorsements by high status advisers, who cluster within high rank schools.
3. @Brayden: I really doubt that it’s training. Unless you are in a very technical field, like network analysis, the research tools in sociology aren’t very high tech. Over the last ten years in sociology, there have been many strong job market candidates who do ethnography, experiments, and traditional survey analysis. You don’t need to go to ICPSR go get these skills. Most programs teach these methods.
Rather, as you suggest, there is taste. People at high ranked departments are driving the agenda and define what is successful. That’s why it’s important for low status students to keep submitting papers. They will get feedback that is not available from their network. Rejection hurts in the short run, but you can respond and improve your work.
Brayden also wrote:
“One caveat I’d offer though to any aspiring sociologist is that you shouldn’t try to become just like everyone else in your efforts to “fit in.” Having been on the hiring side and hearing stories from my peers who are hiring in other departments, one of the frustrations we face is that we get too many job candidates who look too similar to each other. ”
I agree, but let’s be realistic. We, the senior faculty, promote conformity when we insist that the only people who merit job interviews are people with publications in journals X, Y, and Z. If we don’t want conformity, we need to hire and promote people who publish in unusual venues. Otherwise, your call for diversity is cheap talk.
4. @o.w.: Agreed. If you think you can be competitive, you can definitely transfer, which will improve your chances more than outperforming in a low status place. Also, though I am a fan of frog pond effects, I wouldn’t bet on them for the job market. A well loved student at low rank school won’t get the love they may deserve when compared to an average student of a star prof.
fabiorojas
December 13, 2011 at 6:47 pm
I think the experience of students in “upper-lower” programs can be instructive for students who are in fact in middle-lower and even “lower-upper” programs (let’s pretend Sociology is Middletown), because you kind of experience the same status deprivation at a higher level of privilege. If the key mechanism driving any sort of dept status effect (presuming that it is really there empirically) is really a local/cosmopolitan process, then the main thing that’s going to hurt you in a lower status program is localism, exclusion from where the leading conversations are happening and by implication a trickle-down fashion effect (you learn that something is worth studying when the elites have abandoned it).
When I was a grad student there, Arizona was the perfect example of an upper-lower department: incredibly outward looking, always trying to connect to what was happening outside (endless guest speakers) and adamant that grad students followed suit (ASA was essentially mandatory since year one). My sense is that while “upper-upper” departments can afford to be insular, anybody outside the true elite cannot. So (as Brayden and OW note) you need to access outside resources (whether in terms of general knowledge or training or whatever) get in the face of the leaders of your subfield (shake their hands, email them your papers, etc.) so that by the time you are a fourth year grad student, you already have had routine social contact with those people regardless of where they are (likely Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, Stanford, etc.). The point is that by the time you go on the market they know who you are regardless of where you happen to be at and you are working on a set of problems and issues that they recognize to be central, important, etc.
Omar
December 13, 2011 at 6:54 pm
Once again, a good point, Omar. Get your work out there!
fabiorojas
December 13, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Fabio – I completely disagree with you on the methods point. I think this is increasingly becoming a differentiator of quality in the soc market, not just for who gets the jobs now but also for who can retain them in the future. Although it’s true that sociologists lag behind economics in using cutting edge statistical techniques (although demographers certainly hold their ground and we’re often better at using cute regression models like event history), sociologists who know how to match the method to the research question at hand are often better able to publish in top journals. I think this holds across methodological types. Cutting edge techniques always give you a leg up over your competitors.
This is not to say that we are on the verge of fetishizing methods to the level that economists in the identification movement have done, but using the right theory-methods package gets you a long way to getting published in the top journals.
The problem I’ve noticed is that many students don’t even know what they don’t know and this problem tends to be more concentrated among students from lower tier schools where methods courses aren’t as emphasized. They don’t even have the tools to be able to talk about endogeneity problems, let alone know how to address them should reviewer F raise the concern during the review process. That’s just an example of how someone with really good methods training can influence an outcome.
I think the big advantage that many top tier programs have (e.g., Wisconsin, Berkeley) is that there are many people on campus who students can go to to learn new techniques and new ways to address research questions. This gives these students enormous advantages in being able to tackle problems creatively.
brayden king
December 13, 2011 at 7:28 pm
@Brayden: Ok, let’s get nitty gritty here. How many job candidates in a mainstream soc program or (non-econ) management program got published using methods that are not typically taught in a standard social science graduate curriculum?
At Indiana, we are in the middle of hiring people and we just processed 300+ applications for 3 positions. I can tell you that very, very few people have the high tech identification methods. The candidates from elite schools tend to use very traditional methods but apply them to new ideas. The exceptions are the Matt Salganicks of the world. There is a sub-market for high tech methods people. But the typical person uses traditional methods,
Look at the orgtheory bloggers: Omar uses IV and log-linear methods (decades old methods) on GSS data; Kieran does qualitative and traditional quantitative work, as does Sean; Teppo does old skool social theory; my own work uses regular linear models on survey data and archival work. These methods are all taught in regular departments.
I suggest we count the job candidates and their methods. My hypothesis is that (a) there is a sub population of high tech people but (b) most sociologists do traditional work. The elites are determining the variables you can use, not the methods.
fabiorojas
December 13, 2011 at 8:26 pm
My view is that elite-ness is more expressed in how problems are formulated and talked about than in the statistical methods used. Whether you are in an elite department or not, if you want to learn how to write for “top” journals, part of the learning curve is to read the journals you want to publish in to absorb the world view and style.
olderwoman
December 13, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Two novel suggestions:
1. Get a mentor. Find someone who has made the kind of transition you seek to make, and preferably (a) in your field, and (b) in the recent past (last c. 10 years in sociology). Reach out to them, confess your ambition and your admiration of them, ask for advice. If they give you some, ask for permission to ask again, in the future.
2. Cultivate a sunny disposition. People who seek higher status positions tend to come in two forms: hungry and mean (and resentful, and condescending, and minimizing, and gossipy), and hungry and curious. Be the latter.
Jenn Lena
December 13, 2011 at 10:43 pm
I graduated from a low status soc program. I did what Brayden advised – took more stat/methods courses than required. Worked with the only demographer in the dept. Picked up demography skills that allowed to me to land a public policy post-doc in a mid status policy program. Now doing tenure track in a lower status phd econ program. Switch to econ enabled by stat/demography training. Still catching up on math, but colleagues are mostly lower tech empirical types, and appreciate demog intuition.
Anon
December 14, 2011 at 1:41 am
Training effects and halo effects aren’t mutually exclusive. Either or both can sabotager a job candidate in a competitive market. Hiring committees can duck behind a status degree to cover idiosyncratic prejudices in hiring.
For the candidate:
You have to believe that your work will matter over time and you have to publish plenty of it. (I came from a bottom decile program.) My current inspiration is Elizabeth Warren, who earned an undergrad degree from University of Houston in speech pathology, and eventually a law degree from Rutgers Newark. Eventually she wrote herself into a tenured position at Harvard Law. Law schools are at least as status conscious as academic programs, and it was a long eventually.
David S. Meyer
December 14, 2011 at 1:55 am
It helps to be a good writer. That’s one thing (and I’m sure there are others) that David and Elizabeth Warren have in common.
Fabio – I don’t want to hold the orgtheory crew up as examples. We all came from middle to high status programs with great methods training. And by great I mean diverse and rigorous. And so it’s no surprise that we’ve all been successful at getting published. Most of the people I know who came from lower status schools and who have succeeded in the research game have done so because they went beyond their program requirements to receive additional training and mentorship. Some of them are now several standard deviations beyond the mean in their methodological training because of this.
My main point here is to say that just writing a bunch of papers and submitting them (over and over again) isn’t a smart strategy if you’re not doing high quality research. First, develop the quality and then become a prolific submitter.
brayden king
December 14, 2011 at 2:16 am
Brayden, good points, but it can be very hard to predict before hand what is good research. Sure, master the methods and work on your writing, but there’s more to quality research than clear writing and knowing the latest techniques. There’s assessing what is important, knowing what others will accept as important, and knowing how to respond to friendly and hostile reviewers alike. This more abstract level of research, in my view, can’t be taught before hand and can be learned through submission. Also, anecdotally, I know people who have succeeded by submitting many manuscripts and just improving through iteration. It’s nice to know before hand what works, but sometimes you just don’t know.
fabiorojas
December 14, 2011 at 3:42 am
The Fabio/Meyer recipe – “publish your way up” – is true, but trivially so. For every Elizabeth Warren and “upwardly mobile” sociologist, there are literally hundreds of individuals for whom that advice alone is a recipe for disappointment and, long run, despair and paranoia. Why? As Brayden put it, they “don’t know what they don’t know.” Coming to know what you don’t know requires recognition that, “departmental status effects operates via a set of cumulative advantage processes that begin early in the grad-school career, so that by the time we get to job-market time students in so-called low status schools simply are less competitive” (Omar). What is that process? In my experience, one part is training in methods (Brayden), another part is training in the research design and a certain élan with the formulation of problems (OW), another part is mentorship (JL and Fabio), another part is access to the invisible college (lurking behind a number of the comments), and so on. In other words, “publish” is always good advice, but it is a necessary rather than sufficient condition for success. In sum, I would tell your student to take the advice offered by Brayden, Omar, OW, and JL. What is the term of art for when a blogger concern trolls his own blog as OP? But seriously, Fabio sure has been lobbing some grenades lately!
Rich
December 14, 2011 at 1:43 pm
Rich is right, of course. But I think my first response pointed in that direction. Some people transfer in response to these concerns, and I pointed to some of the relevant questions. In particular, I pointed to the importance of researching different people’s profiles and of understanding your own goals.
Another self test: if you cannot tell the difference between the content of the publications in the “top” journals and the content of the publications in “third tier” journals, you are probably not going to ever be able to write for the top journals. There are lots of people who publish dozens of articles that will never be seen as “our kind of work” by the elite schools.Nor will zillions of submissions and collection of rejection letters solve the problem. Lots of people who publish a lot are pretty bitter about the arrogance & elitism of the elite schools.
If you can detect the difference in how people write for the different journals, then there is the possibility of absorbing the difference into your own writing/thinking. Similarly, if you are doing “interesting” work by these standards, there is a significant chance (not a certainty, but a chance) that you will get “noticed” by the people who care about “good work” and advancing the profession. Perhaps I’m especially rosy-eyed because long ago my own unusually good publication permitted upward mobility. And I do know of other cases. But I agree with Rich. It is NOT about quantity of effort and publishing zillions of articles, it is about what you have to say, which is a matter of class culture a la distinction.
However, publishing zillions of articles, especially if you can avoid bitterness and stay friendly to others, WILL likely lead to a lucrative career in the profession at one of the MANY schools that the elite view as “second tier” or “third tier.” So it is still a high-payoff strategy.
olderwoman
December 14, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Rich, I would never minimize the uphill battle of having a low status PhD. As others have said, there’s cumulative deficits of school status, training, funding, networks, and selection bias. One can overcome several, and still wind up screwed.
But the provocative question is what to do?
Transfer is a possible remedy for some people. The overcompensate strategy articulated by many, including me, is a very difficult option for some others. But it may be the best option they have.
As I read your suggestions, Rich, it’s closer to Weber’s advice to Jewish scholars who wanted academic jobs: abandon all hope. I’m not ready to sign off on that. Is it what you mean to advise?
David S. Meyer
December 14, 2011 at 2:49 pm
I’d like to summarize the excellent comments for students who may be reading this thread:
- All of us agree that publication is a prerequisite to moving up or getting a good job.
- All of us agree that publication is an actionable strategy. It is not a fantasy, it’s something that you can do.
- I don’t think anyone agrees that it is easy or that it leads to success 100% of the time.
- However, as o.w. points out, consistent publication will get you a good career outcome, even if it isn’t elite.
We disagree on how to reach the top journals and the types of skills needed, but we’d all probably agree that staying involved and keeping on top of current research can only help.
fabiorojas
December 14, 2011 at 4:27 pm
David, I am not saying that it is hopeless. Instead, I am saying that, in addition to publishing, the student should do the other things that have been suggested in the comments. I have observed the labor market in sociology long enough to draw, with great confidence, the radical conclusion that doing important and interesting work matters for getting a job. I have also observed the publishing process in sociology long enough to draw, with great confidence, the conclusion that most published work is neither important nor interesting. My point is that “publish” alone is unlikely to land your work in the “important and interesting” category, that landing in that category requires publishing AND doing the other things suggested in the comments, and, finally, that landing in that category is the best way to address the “disadvantage” of taking a degree from a “low status” program. As Fabio himself put it, “quality researchers are rare.” You want to be a quality researcher.
Rich
December 14, 2011 at 4:53 pm
There is an obvious exchange mechanism going on here. For people from low-status, they have to trade something unique/highly valuable for status, like in an exogamous marriage. And you have to really prove yourself with high-tech methods published in top journals. Learning more advanced methods is an effective way because today’s publication business looks up to methods.
John
December 14, 2011 at 7:58 pm
Assuming one ends up in a lower status graduate department, where would one go to obtain the skills of the ‘high-tech methods’?
undergrad
December 14, 2011 at 8:04 pm
In elite programs, they are readily available. But in low-tier programs, you may have to go to economics, statistics, or math departments. On average, I think it’s much more difficult and relies on some characters (confidence + efforts + strategy). But it can be done. As some of the previous posts indicated that first you need to know what’s hot and what’s going to be hot next. You may also want to check out top econ and stats journals. Also talk to and work with the right people. But again, methods require a lot of math and statistical programming. They are learnable, but the question is whether one will pay the price.
John
December 14, 2011 at 8:24 pm
One aspect of this discussion that has been somewhat hinted at but not stated outright (perhaps the “hidden college” Rich mentioned) relates to networking and professionalization. Going to ASAs, the regional conferences, special mini-conferences that happen throughout the year in your research area or on your specific topic, special workshops, and other such things throughout graduate school can lead to networking opportunities that can pay off in many ways, particularly when positions open up and students are on the market. Networking typically opens opportunities to work on papers, broaden research interests (if you are too narrow), gain access in various ways to the high-tech methods everyone loves, people who can serve as mentor figures while you complete your degree, colleagues to edit your papers and give you feedback to make sure they fit journals (even those top journals), serve as letter writers when you are on the market, and people who can give you insight and connect you with people at the institutions that have job openings. Being a graduate of a lower status PhD program, I can only imagine how bad things could have been if I didn’t network through grad school.
hillbillysociologist
December 15, 2011 at 2:36 am
My advice would be: 1) quit your curreny program ASAP, or 2) try looking for a job in other sectors (greener pastures always exist if you dare to find). I am a political scientist by training, so we are on the same boat.I came from a second tier program (ranks consistently around 16-20) that doesn’t even bother to offer those mainstream social science methodological/causal inference trainings and most of my colleagues who had aspired to enter the academic job market ended up teaching at community colleges or very low-ranked state colleges.
I was fully aware of my colleagues’ fateful ends and the brand-name effects on the job market, so I kinda changed the focus of my study in my second year by taking a bunch of quant courses with the stat and econ dept throughout the years and making myself proficient in at least 2 stat software. Most importantly, I extended my job search into the private sector.
Like many of you in this threads, I worked very hard to advertise myself by keeping publishing. By the time I received my now seemingly irrelevant phd degree, I have 3 pieces in print (one co-author piece in a mainstream journal, one in a semi-mainstream methodological journal and one in an obscure regional study journal). Sounds not bad, huh?
That year, my job search turned out to be a fiasco and just I was able to give up I got a call from a consulting company, hence marking the end of my academic career :-)
Not showing off here (actually there’s absolutely nothing to show off, the consulting job isn’t easy and the paid is decent but not as high as you would imagine), I just want to encourage people of my academic upbringing to work harder on some “market-conforming” skills and consider the pastures on the other side of the mountain.
Best of luck
passerby
December 15, 2011 at 6:20 am
How about people who graduated from a non-US university? Would that be super-low status and make it impossible for anyone outside of the US to land a job at a US university? Does that mean that the US academic job market is so parochial that it does not recognize that anything valuable can exists outside of the US? Wouldn’t that be a sad state of affairs?
Jim
December 15, 2011 at 10:40 am
Jim – There are only a handful of departments outside of the US that are equivalent to the US “Top 10.” Their graduates get jobs at the elite institutions in those countries or that region, they almost never come to the U.S. So, yes, the vast majority of those working on terminal degrees in sociology from non-US universities are “low status” in the sense discussed in this thread and the will never get top jobs in the US.
Brian
December 15, 2011 at 12:21 pm
Re non-US degrees, I think sometimes people with degrees from English-speaking countries (Canada, the UK, Australia) may get a serious look (especially the top schools people in the US would have heard of). But not English-instruction schools in other countries, in my experience, and definitely not institutions that do not teach in English, no matter how prestigious.
My department has over the years hired people with degrees from European institutions (e.g. Germany, Hungary), but in all cases they were senior scholars who had established a major reputations with publications in English, not new PhDs.
olderwoman
December 15, 2011 at 1:40 pm
OW,
i agree that it’s gonna be hard to get a job in the US w/o English language publications but it’d be interesting to disentangle the language issue per se from different paradigms. for instance, i think demographers are probably more readily bridgeable across the pond than are folks from fields like econ soc or culture where many Europeans are into ANT and other ideas that most of their Americans peers think are intractable and/or bullshit. i attended an econ soc workshop at an English-language continental b-school a few months ago and one of the things they told people was don’t use these theories in submitting to American journals.
gabrielrossman
December 15, 2011 at 5:33 pm