May 2011
Choosing a PhD in Political Science (and which program is best for you)
Arjun Chowdhury
This is not a substitute for the advice of your teachers and mentors. Seek out their counsel,
because it‟s likely better than mine. I am just providing quick answers to three questions:
1. Should you do a PhD in Political Science?
2. Which PhD program is best for you?
3. Once admitted, which program do you choose?
Should you do a PhD in Political Science?
1. Most PhD programs in North America prepare you to produce knowledge (research) and
disseminate knowledge (teaching). This means your job options are most likely in
academia, specifically a position in political science. If you want a policy-oriented job,
you are probably better off doing a masters degree in public policy or a related field,
which takes 2 years rather than the 5-7 years it takes to get a PhD. If being trained
primarily for an academic job sounds OK, proceed to the next two points.
2. This is a competitive business. Acceptance rates at PhD programs generally range from
5% to 20% (in 2010, Yale University enrolled 16 of 646 applicants, although Yale is
exceptionally competitive). Once you are in a program, you have to apply competitively
for grant money. Finally, and probably most importantly, the academic job market is also
very competitive – and is affected like every other business by the macroeconomy. There
are more qualified people than available jobs. This is why many excellent and qualified
people work in part-time positions off the tenure-track – known as adjunct or sessional
positions – which means in practice that they are paid by course ($1500-$5000,
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depending on institution), and are often not eligible for benefits, although this also varies
by institution.
3. If you do get a tenure-track position, it is a good, but not cushy job. Salaries are decent,
but not massive: the average salary for an assistant professor in the social sciences is
about $58,000 at four-year US universities (numbers for community colleges are
different).1 DO NOT TAKE THIS NUMBER TOO SERIOUSLY because it conceals
large variations due to type of institution (in an APSA sample, PhD-granting institutions
paid assistant professors an average of $65,547 in 2008, while BA-granting institutions
paid $47,083);2 location ($45,000 in Nebraska will buy you more than $60,000 in NYC);
and other factors. Now that you know that this is a competitive business without huge
payoffs, you can proceed to the next point.
4. I like my job, and feel very lucky to have it. I am fortunate to teach smart undergraduates.
I like studying interesting political problems like state failure. And I like that my job
involves learning new things, whether to teach my students or for my own work.
Which PhD program is best for you?
This depends on what sort of academic job you want. You want two things from your program: a
decent probability of getting the job you want (reflected in their placement record) and the
training to make you good at the job you do get (reflected in the program‟s course offerings,
faculty etc.). The best way of figuring out what program is best for you is to ask yourself where
you want to teach. Say your preference is to teach at a liberal arts college in the Midwest. Now
look up as many of these colleges‟ websites as possible to see where their faculty got their PhD‟s
from. This should give you a list of at least 15-20 PhD programs to look into.
1
CUPA-HR, 2010-2011 National Faculty Salary Survey by Discipline and Rank in Four-Year Colleges and
Universities (CUPA-HR: Knoxville, 2011), 25.
2
Michael Brintnall and Michael Marriott, “Salary Report for Political Science Departments; Update -2008.”
American Political Science Association, November 2008.
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Now look at the websites of these programs. PhD programs offer varying amounts of
information. Some, like UCSD, offer details on type of job, institution, for all their PhD
recipients. This sort of transparency is excellent, and also shows UCSD‟s great success in
placing its students. There is a lesson here: programs that place well have incentives to advertise
their success. The corollary is that programs that do not place well will provide very little
information. The existence of information may itself be an indicator of quality, as well as the
content of the information (who got placed where).
So now you have a couple of things to go on: where did the folks who work where you want to
work get their PhD‟s, and of those institutions, who seems to place better. This should allow you
to narrow down your list of 20 to 8-10.
Things to avoid while identifying a program:
1. DO NOT rely on rankings: US News rankings are a blunt tool (and the new National
Research Council rankings are useless). Obviously the University of Michigan will be
ranked higher than the University of Houston, and you don‟t need a ranking to tell you
this. You might think, however, that No. 9 (Duke) must be better than No. 15 (the
University of Rochester). This would be a mistake: if you are interested in game theory,
the University of Rochester is among the very best departments in the world, and may be
a better fit for you than even an excellent department like Duke.
a. Important caveat on the bad economy: you might think that joining any program,
even one of low rank, is a good decision in this horrible job market for recent
graduates. YOU ARE WRONG. There are fewer full-time academic jobs
available than there have been in past years – the American Political Science
Association, which runs the official listings of jobs in the discipline, estimates that
in 2009-10, the number of advertised assistant professor positions were at around
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60% of the levels of previous years (although this is improving somewhat).3 So
competition is more intense, and therefore there is likely an even greater premium
to programs with high reputation. Think of this as a PoliSci version of the flow of
investment dollars to US Treasury bills; a „flight to quality‟ caused by a situation
of great uncertainty.
2. DO NOT contact faculty members in your target departments: they have no incentive to
give you useful advice. Some may, others may not. More importantly, individual faculty
members in North American universities do not control admissions. This is up to a
departmental committee. You gain very little from contacting faculty members before
you are admitted, and you may in fact annoy them. Remember, until admitted, you are
not their student. By contrast, once you are admitted, they will contact you and be very
interested, because you are now their student, and they have professional responsibilities
towards you.
3. DO NOT go on blogs like Polisci Job Rumors: while some posters may offer useful
advice, many use anonymity to engage in all manner of defamation, rumor-mongering,
and the like. This means that even if someone did give you useful advice, you wouldn‟t
be able to tell it from the „trolls‟ who may actively be trying to mislead you. If you
wouldn‟t use a chatroom for facts for a research paper, you shouldn‟t use one to guide
your search for a PhD program. If you would use a chatroom for facts for a research
paper, DON‟T DO A PHD.
Once admitted, which program do you choose?
Admission offers generally come with tuition waivers and money for living expenses adequate to
support a single person without expensive tastes (funding is in the form of teaching/research
3
Michael Brintnall, “APSA Executive Director‟s Report, 2010,” Political Science and Politics 44(1): 2011, 170178, 170.
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assistantships and/or fellowships). Let‟s say you limited your applications to the better programs,
and have gotten admission in more than one. This means that each of the programs you got into
place between 40% and 60% of their completed PhD‟s in full-time jobs. So whichever place you
choose, you‟ll end up somewhere where at least the top 50% of students are likely to get jobs.
Some people say go the highest ranked program that will admit you, and that‟s generally good
advice. But there are other considerations, such as the faculty members you want to work with
and the funding you are offered. So this is generally a more complicated choice than relying on
rankings. That said, avoid the following:
1. Do not choose based on LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION: academia is not real
estate (no funny jokes about higher education bubbles please). DO NOT select an
institution because it is in hip Portland, Oregon, when you got into a much better program
in boring Columbus, Ohio. If you want to move to Portland, do so as a bartender. You‟ll
make more money, and meet more attractive people. If you want to do a PhD, do it right.
This means prioritizing the education and the program over the location.
a. There is an obvious caveat: you may have compelling family reasons to do a PhD
in a particular region. This is fine, but do keep in mind that when you search for
jobs, you will likely have to move. So if you really need to be in a particular city
for a long duration, you should consider a different profession.
2. Money: if they don‟t fund you, don‟t go there. You should not incur debt (beyond a few
thousand dollars, say) undertaking a PhD. Most good programs fund the majority of their
students. If you are not funded, your program is sending you a signal that they rate others
higher than they rate you, already a danger sign. Also, competing frequently for living
expenses does not lend itself to good relations with your colleagues.
Note on sources: all links and numbers are accurate as of May 31, 2011
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