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Take the thread in any direction, that is great. Certainly I could just count (9 out of 254 (3.5%) applicants to Harvard in my data with GPAs reported on a 4 point scale and over 3.8 were accepted). But I know this is wrong (I mention bias below). If you want to do your own analyses, I have a csv file with all my results, here. PM me if you want a codebook (you can probably guess the codebook, -1 is waitlist, 1 is admit, 0 is reject, the extra predictors are poor because it is hard to scan the profiles, but are not completely useless). Also, I don't think I know exactly which conditional probabilities are of interest. I'm happy to answer any simple questions I can in the meantime. I really just need to write up a good codebook and clearly publish the data on the set and people can do there own conditional probabilities, but... I'm hesitant to use my data to predict outcomes because it isn't hard to wait 6 months and find out your own outcomes, and my data is heavily biased. Posters at TM are highly above average (and probably above lurkers), so if I make a predict outcomes script, I will over estimate positive results for most applicants.

Hmm, I think I'm getting mixed signals. What do you mean whole profile is more useful?

Good idea. I could set it so clicking on the profile summary gives the whole thing (especially if I put in an "expand all profiles" button). Are those 4 factors the ones of interest for others? Yes, that would follow how they do it at lawschoolnumbers.com (my inspiration) and how they proposed doing it at thegradcafe. I think Erin once proposed doing something like that here, but it never happened. If anyone wanted to make pages for that, I'm sure we could talk to buckykatt or Erin about hosting. In the meantime, there are advantages in the current system such as convenience (users can post roll call and admissions decisions separately and my script stitches them together based on username) and TM synergy (people are more likely to post their info because they want to be a part of my page and upon posting info are more likely to take part in discussions here at TM and vice-versa).

Hmm, definitely curious about that. Are there very many people applying to grad school who don't know what TM is? Are there very many american academic economists who don't know what EJMR is? Are there many people who aren't applying to grad school who look at my site? I suspect the answer is "no", "no", and "no", but you suggest that at least one of those is "yes".

Please do, any criticism is much appreciated. I just made a thread soliciting comments, here.

Hello all. Since things are getting pretty busy around here I wanted to remind everyone that I am super open to ideas, comments, and criticism of the aggregate roll call, admissions and rejections, and profiles and results work, here. It was mentioned to me, for instance, that "the graphs for GRE scores for example only plot a few data points, and then there will be a huge list of profiles below that seem to have gotten missed." This is because the script doesn't find a GREQ score and/or a GPA for that person or that the GREQ/GPA is out of range. Taking, for instance, the Yale 2012 results, all of the accepted applicants I list are on the graph except lebatin. lebatin did not post on roll call or profiles or results, so I only have record of schools to which they posted acceptance or rejection. I still list them, because the correlation of accepted and rejected schools is useful and interesting even without the applicants profile. On the other hand, there are often small numbers of applicants who I don't find for other reasons. Please let me know if you find any examples, as I can often improve my code so that they are found. Also I (obviously) need to improve my presentation so everything is more clear. Let me know if you have any ideas about that (or anything else) as well.

econwiki.com is hosted/run by an old member of this site (buckykatt). The wiki at econsource.org fell apart, but econphd.econwiki.com (which I run) still exists as a mirror of econphd.net. My work aggregating roll call, admissions and rejections, and profiles and results is still there, too. The 2010 results mathemagician posted links to some pages of results which were lost in an outage. As far as summaries of TM information, beyond the aggregate profiles and results, its tricky. There is a lot of information in the stickies different people have put together, and more will be added as people see the need. I should update econphd.econwiki.com with more up-to-date stuff, though, you are right. Let me know if you have any ideas. This winter I'll update my aggregate profiles, results, etc script to be able to handle the new GRE scores.

I wanted to call to everyone's attention a discussion going on in the PhD physics/cosmology/astronomy world about... mental health(?) Basically, some faculty member apparently wrote a letter to the graduate students about how graduate students should work 80+ hour weeks and accept being treated poorly by faculty (as well as how they should try to be more like graduate students at a better school and other weird drivel and some not so weird good advice). The blog-o-reply's (ie here and here) have basically been about how bad of an letter this is. Another post that I liked discusses the importance of mental health in graduate students, here. On the other hand, there is some good advice, too, I guess. Anyway, I want to second the importance of putting mental health first. If you or a graduate student you know is having mental health problems, this is something that can be dealt with but needs to be taken seriously. I have little ideas how to help. Some (most?) schools have mental health centers, but these are often overworked and understaffed and more experienced with helping undergrads. I know there are a number of books about how to get a PhD, but these mostly deal with the nuts and bolts of motivation and goal setting. Does anyone have any good ideas or resources for dealing with stress and feelings of inadequacy? Also does anyone have any good ideas or resources for dealing with stress due to being an underrepresented minority in the department (ie being a women, being an ethnic or cultural minority, having trouble with English, etc)?

I saw this and wanted to pass it along as everything I read was applicable to econ PhD applicants. One note that I think deserves special consideration is: "it doesn't make sense to attend a PhD program without funding." I think this is slightly more true for political science than economics because economists job prospects are better than political science. That said, I would say that it might be true that it makes sense to attend a poli sci PhD program without funding 0% of the time, then it makes sense to do so for an economics program a little more than twice as often.

A little worse than the odds of getting into Carnegie Mellon but better than the odds of getting into Duke (12th and 13th most selective econ programs, see here).

If you remind me in late August/early September I can help run some analyses, but in the meantime a lot of my data can be looked at here. I've never written up a codebook, but if you let me know (here or pm) I can give you the definitions of the variables. You should be able to guess a lot of them.

Great, totally agree on all points then.

tm_guru is right about critic mass, the "stackoverflow.com" like site for economics failed. For statistics, try stats.stackexchange.com (I think there is another but the only other one I found I didn't like much). There are a couple for math: MathOverflow and math.stackexchange.com. As for the type of questions for this forum, I'm confused. In my opinion, the meta-question about where you can find homework help and data requests online is very appropriate for this forum. On the other hand, many questions deserve the response lmgtfy - including possibly this one. And certainly when a new-ish user asks a question of this sort, politeness is important. But I understand the urge to make non-admissions related announcements on the forum (I kinda do this once or twice a year), talk about random topics (such as the Clark award or some MR blog post about the field in general), and to ask econ questions (usually related to GT or RA but sometimes about data such as this one). Obviously this site isn't overrun by such questions and there hasn't been a moderator. But I usually don't look at these threads, so it may be that they are generally policed so there aren't many repeat violators. Is there a policy about this? I'm against creating one if there isn't (mostly because I don't want to see it in the stickies), but I'm for de facto policies. I'm just not sure where the line is.

You might be talking about Santosh Kumar, who had a post-doc at Harvard and is at the University of Washington now. Smart guy, but has almost no presence in the econ department I believe. Another way to look at it is the decision between focusing on publishing in health journals (ie in Lancet, JAMA, BMJ, PLOS, NEJM) or in econ journals (AER, QJE, Econometrica). If you talk about the latter with reverence to a Medical School Dean or at a Med School job talk you will be laughed out of the room as the low impact factor and slow turn-around time of econ journals are not accepted in health. On the other hand, the quality of the statistics in health journals is often atrocious. On the other hand, economists too often accept mediocre data (for instance: GDP estimates in nations with large informal sectors - public health does this, too)... In any case, the majority of econ graduates interested in health probably go into industry, policy, and/or advocacy. Then come smaller universities. Of those who go to research universities, the large majority go to policy schools, public health programs, and the like. Then comes regular economics departments.

Bjørn Lomborg is writing a series of articles at Slate about the Copenhagen Consensus 2012. Those of you interested in applied topics in development might enjoy it. Some friends of mine are involved in the papers on infectious disease and chronic disease and have asked that I tell everyone I know to read about the work and to vote for disease as a high priority for interventions. Other areas are population growth, hunger and malnutrition, water and sanitation, and natural disasters. If I were unbiased, I might vote differently. But the way things stand, I must say that the benefits of treatment and prevention of disease are quite clear and our ability to implement interventions is quite high in many cases, so pragmatically, I think spending on disease is likely to lead to great and immediate benefits. If you are curious if this is a big deal, check out the panel of experts who are judging the presentations of the different authors. Presenting there is rather like presenting to the Supreme Court of development economists.