another user

Pretty much anything business-related falls in the scope of economics. Besides that, I think Operations Research or Finance are what you're looking for. I don't think any of these programs are focused exactly what you want but you'd probably be able to pursue your interests. I also think management wouldn't be quantitative enough for you.

I agree, the letter of recommendation would be more important than the working paper. Maybe you should ask his opinion about this and whether he would write you a letter and what he thinks about your chances in a top 15 school, conditional on you doing a great job as his coauthor.

I'm pretty sure the publication will help even if it's in a lower ranked journal, but it's very unlikely to get it published in time. Also, it may not help that much, and going from a top 30 school to a top 15 is not worth the risks and the additional year. I wouldn't do it.

Yes, but we're talking about the average students not special cases of a UCLA/USC/WUSTL/Cornell graduate with top pubs against a MIT/Stanford/Harvard graduate without pubs. Everything else held constant, prestige makes a difference. Also, choosing to hire and choosing to attend are not completely different as students often take a look at placements when choosing the school, and they tend to choose those which give them the best chances of being hired at top schools. I'm not saying that WUSTL, UCLA, USC, Cornell are not great schools, they are. I just can't see them at same level of MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale and I don't think I'm alone here. I believe this is the common perception as people never choose them over MIT/Stanford/Berkeley etc.

If I could build a perfect PhD ranking I would take into account placements and program quality, but we cannot make inference on program quality. The thing is, we can't build a ranking simply based on placements either, because how would we rank the placements in the first place? It would be a circular ranking. To solve this problem, I'm assuming placements are a function of school prestige (using MBA rankings) and research quality. I'm also assuming that research productivity as measured by UTD is a good proxy for the quality of research done by PhD candidates. I simply mixed the rankings I mentioned with equal weights. If a school is missing from one of the rankings, I remove it. Also, I know that some of the schools don't have PhD programs but the idea is simply to build a B-school ranking that measures research and prestige. It's not completely different from yours, but the thing is, I think you got the groups wrong probably because I disagree to where to draw the line for each group. For example, nobody would choose UCLA, USC, WUSTL, Cornell over Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Yale. These schools can't be in the same tier. Besides, Toronto, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota could be chosen over UCLA, USC, WUSTL, Cornell, and vice versa. So, in my opinion, they should be in the same group (that is, if we believe in the 'wisdom of the crowds'). I understand that some of the schools seem a little off in my ranking as well, probably because our perceptions of ranking are not linear in prestige. For example, I expect people to feel like Berkeley should be higher in my ranking.

I made my own ranking based on prestige (as measured by US News MBA ranking and Bloomberg-Businessweek rankings), research productivity (as measured by UTD ranking for the journals JM, JMR, JCR, Mkt Sci) and student selectivity (as measured by average GMAT). Only US schools. This is the result and I think it's better: [TABLE] [TR] [TD]University of Chicago (Booth School of Business)[/TD] [TD=width: 64, align: right]1[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Pennsylvania (The Wharton School)[/TD] [TD=align: right]1[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Harvard University (Harvard Business School)[/TD] [TD=align: right]3[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Stanford University (Graduate School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]4[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan School of Management)[/TD] [TD=align: right]5[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Northwestern University (Kellogg School of Management)[/TD] [TD=align: right]5[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Columbia University (Columbia Business School)[/TD] [TD=align: right]5[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Yale University (School of Management)[/TD] [TD=align: right]8[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Duke University (The Fuqua School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]8[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (Ross School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]8[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Cornell University (Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management)[/TD] [TD=align: right]11[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of California at Berkeley (Walter A. Haas School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]12[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of California at Los Angeles (Anderson School of Management)[/TD] [TD=align: right]12[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]New York University (Leonard N. Stern School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]14[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Southern California (Marshall School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]14[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Washington at Seattle (Michael G. Foster School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]16[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]16[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler Business School)[/TD] [TD=align: right]18[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Texas at Austin (McCombs School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]19[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Washington University at St. Louis (Olin School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]20[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Emory University (Goizueta Business School)[/TD] [TD=align: right]21[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Georgetown University (The McDonough School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]22[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Pennsylvania State University at University Park (Smeal College of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]23[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Florida (Warrington College of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]23[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Wisconsin at Madison (Wisconsin School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]25[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Maryland at College Park (Robert H. Smith School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]26[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Boston University (Questrom School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]26[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Ohio State University (Fisher College of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]28[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Boston College (Carroll School of Management)[/TD] [TD=align: right]28[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Texas A&M University at College Station (Mays Business School)[/TD] [TD=align: right]28[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Minnesota at Twin Cities (Carlson School of Management)[/TD] [TD=align: right]31[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Indiana University at Bloomington (Kelley School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]32[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Georgia (Terry College of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]33[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Miami (School of Business Administration)[/TD] [TD=align: right]33[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Gies College of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]35[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Pittsburgh (The Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]36[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of South Carolina at Columbia (Darla Moore School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]37[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Colorado at Boulder (Leeds School of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]37[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Arizona (Eller College of Management)[/TD] [TD=align: right]39[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Cincinnati (Lindner College of Business)[/TD] [TD=align: right]40[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]University of Kentucky (Gatton College of Business and Economics)[/TD] [TD=align: right]41[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Can you share the data?

What statistical evidence? I'm just saying that (1) Rochester is an example of school with a great program but only 6 professors and therefore it's difficult for them to have faculty as Chief Editors. I believe UCSD is a similar case. This happens a lot so just by looking at where Chief Editors work or where they got their PhD is not very informative; and (2) rigor of curriculum is very subjective thing and cannot be measured.

What statistical evidence? I'm just saying that (1) Rochester is an example of school with a great program but only 6 professors and therefore it's difficult for them to have faculty as Chief Editors. I believe UCSD is a similar case. This happens a lot so just by looking at where Chief Editors work or where they got their PhD is not very informative; and (2) rigor of curriculum is very subjective thing and cannot be measured.

I'm not saying that economics training is the most important thing in marketing; I'm just pointing out the fact that measuring rigor of curriculum is nearly impossible and depends on other things such as the quality of the Economics/Psychology/CS/Stats departments. I just used Economics as an example, the point is that marketing is a multidisciplinary field and the courses are often taken in other departments so if you want to measure how difficult and complete the courses are, you should take that into account. The school can't be responsible for what happens to former students during their whole lifetime, it doesn't make sense to talk of a "tenure placement" or tracking the publication record over their entire career. The value added by the PhD ends with the program and culminates in the initial placement. To look at tenured people of today and where they got their PhD is at best a lagging indicator of program quality. Same goes for Chief editors and where they got their PhD. Those guys graduated 20 years ago and rankings change (if you're from economics you probably know how Rochester, for example, went from top 10 to top 30 in 20 years). Also, like I previously said, they can be outliers and this is 1 observation per journal, hardly informative. You should at least look at the whole editorial board to get more observations. Moreover, some programs simply graduate more people and increase the chance of having a former student in the editorial board. The same goes for current professors and department size: Rochester, for example, has only 6 professors while other larger departments such as USC have over 20. Becoming Chief Editor of a top journal means to be an outlier even if they came from, say, Stanford. It's not a normal thing to become Chief Editor, this is definitely not the trend. I don't think anyone should go to a PhD program thinking they will have the best initial placement (or in the case of Chief Editor, the best career outcome). So looking at the initial median placement still makes more sense to me. I understand that people may rank schools according to different criteria, but I really don't think you're measuring the things you said your ranking would (competitiveness to be admitted and rigor of curriculum).

Ok then check out the last 5 years of placements (Marketing +Strategy) for Toronto, Michigan and Rochester which you put in group "A": Toronto: City University HK, New South Wales, Northwestern (2x), Dalhousie U., INCAE Bus. Sch., Southern California, UCSD, LBS, U. Groningen, U. Technology Sydney, Western Ontario, MIT, Duke, Queen's, Rochester, Ryerson, Paris Inst. of Tech, Penn State. Michigan: Duke, LBS, U. Tech Sydney, Arizona State, SKEMA Business Sch., National U. Singapore, U. Florida, Southern California, UC-Davis, Wisconsin, California State (Long Beach), U. Kansas, Oregon State, Georgia Tech, Iowa State, Facebook Rochester: Brandeis U., U. of Buffalo, Purdue U., Adobe, Wash U., Nielsen Marketing Now look at the following, which are also group "A": Florida: Oxford, Denver, City U. of HK, Renmin U. of China, Xiamen U., U. of Cincinnati (2x), Walsh College, U. of Mississippi Pittsburgh: their website is a mess, it's not in chronological order and some of the students listed under the "marketing" have something else on their CV, like the first person listed. His CV says he has a PhD in Information Systems and Technology Management despite his placement being listed under "Marketing" on Pittsburgh website. Just check out their placements (PhD Student Job Placements | University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business) and you'll see it's nowhere close to that of Toronto, Michigan or Rochester, even though your ranking puts all of them in the same group. Those are not on par with the first 3. Also, check out the placement for the following schools, which according to your ranking should be a tier above, "A+": Wash U: Pacific U., Ohio State, UBC, Rutgers, UT-Austin, UC-Riverside, Amazon, Peking U., Georgia State, U. Singapore, Illinois Urbana Champaign, U. of Alberta, Fudan U., Shangai U., Catolica Lisbon, UBC UCLA: Chapman, Columbia (2x), Catolica de Chile, Wharton, SMU Cox, Post Doc at CMU, No placement (2x), Michigan, Rutgers, Wisconsin, U. of Hong Kong, South Carolina, Boston U., Azusa Pacific U. How is this a better placement record than those of Toronto, Michigan, and Rochester? I don't see it. Furthermore, your ranking has way too many schools in each group, and ranking Quants + CB + Strategy all together is also weird since those are very different things (especially quant and CB). I think you just browsed Wharton, Stanford, Chicago, Harvard and whatever other schools you think are great to see where the professors got their PhD from, but you're not considering that those guys may be outliers. IMHO we should pay attention to the median placements, not the outliers. That's not the point. You said that your ranking is based on two things: first the competitiveness in admissions and second the rigor of the curriculum. Most quants take the microeconomics and econometrics sequences at economics department, therefore you should also look at the economics ranking as a way to measure coursework rigor (better-ranked schools attract better students and can afford to design more difficult/complete courses). Personally, I don't think you can measure how difficult courses are, and that's why I don't see how you can make a ranking based on something you can't measure. What I suggested is just a (lousy) way to proxy for coursework rigor. By the way, I used Toronto, Michigan and Rochester as examples but I'm pretty sure others such as Minnesota, Maryland and UT-Austin are also a tier above Florida and Pittsburgh. Also, at least for quants, I can tell you I'm pretty confident that it's way more difficult to be accepted at Toronto, Michigan, Rochester, Maryland than Pittsburgh,Boulder, UNC, Florida, TAMU, Indiana, Penn State...

Ok then check out the last 5 years of placements (Marketing +Strategy) for Toronto, Michigan and Rochester which you put in group "A": Toronto: City University HK, New South Wales, Northwestern (2x), Dalhousie U., INCAE Bus. Sch., Southern California, UCSD, LBS, U. Groningen, U. Technology Sydney, Western Ontario, MIT, Duke, Queen's, Rochester, Ryerson, Paris Inst. of Tech, Penn State. Michigan: Duke, LBS, U. Tech Sydney, Arizona State, SKEMA Business Sch., National U. Singapore, U. Florida, Southern California, UC-Davis, Wisconsin, California State (Long Beach), U. Kansas, Oregon State, Georgia Tech, Iowa State, Facebook Rochester: Brandeis U., U. of Buffalo, Purdue U., Adobe, Wash U., Nielsen Marketing Now look at the following, which are also group "A": Florida: Oxford, Denver, City U. of HK, Renmin U. of China, Xiamen U., U. of Cincinnati (2x), Walsh College, U. of Mississippi Pittsburgh: their website is a mess, it's not in chronological order and some of the students listed under the "marketing" have something else on their CV, like the first person listed. His CV says he has a PhD in Information Systems and Technology Management despite his placement being listed under "Marketing" on Pittsburgh website. Just check out their placements (PhD Student Job Placements | University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business) and you'll see it's nowhere close to that of Toronto, Michigan or Rochester, even though your ranking puts all of them in the same group. Also, check out the placement for the following schools, which according to your ranking should be a tier above: Wash U: Pacific U., Ohio State, UBC, Rutgers, UT-Austin, UC-Riverside, Amazon, Peking U., Georgia State, U. Singapore, Illinois Urbana Champaign, U. of Alberta, Fudan U., Shangai U., Catolica Lisbon, UBC UCLA: Chapman, Columbia (2x), Catolica de Chile, Wharton, SMU Cox, Post Doc at CMU, No placement (2x), Michigan, Rutgers, Wisconsin, U. of Hong Kong, South Carolina, Boston U., Azusa Pacific U. How is this a better placement record than those of Toronto, Michigan, and Rochester? I don't see it. Furthermore, your ranking has way too many schools in each group, and ranking Quants + CB + Strategy all together is also weird since those are very different things (especially quant and CB). I think you just browsed Wharton, Stanford, Chicago, Harvard and whatever other schools you think are great to see where the professors got their PhD from, but you're not considering that those guys may be outliers. IMHO we should pay attention to the median placements, not the outliers. That's not the point. You said that your ranking is based on two things: first the competitiveness in admissions and second the rigor of the curriculum. Most quants take the microeconomics and econometrics sequences at economics department, therefore you should also look at the economics ranking as a way to measure coursework rigor (better-ranked schools attract better students and can afford to design more difficult/complete courses). Personally, I don't think you can measure how difficult courses are, and that's why I don't see how you can make a ranking based on something you can't measure. What I suggested is just a (lousy) way to proxy for coursework rigor.

Ok then check out the last 5 years of placements (Marketing +Strategy) for Toronto and Michigan, which you put in group "A": Toronto: City University HK, New South Wales, Northwestern (2x), Dalhousie U., INCAE Bus. Sch., Southern California, UCSD, LBS, U. Groningen, U. Technology Sydney, Western Ontario, MIT, Duke, Queen's, Rochester, Ryerson, Paris Inst. of Tech, Penn State. Michigan: Duke, LBS, U. Tech Sydney, Arizona State, SKEMA Business Sch., National U. Singapore, U. Florida, Southern California, UC-Davis, Wisconsin, California State (Long Beach), U. Kansas, Oregon State, Georgia Tech, Iowa State, Facebook Rochester: Brandeis U., U. of Buffalo, Purdue U., Adobe, Wash U., Nielsen Marketing Now look at the following: Florida: Oxford, Denver, City U. of HK, Renmin U. of China, Xiamen U., U. of Cincinnati (2x), Walsh College, U. of Mississippi Pittsburgh: their website is a mess, it's not in chronological order and some of the students listed under the "marketing" have something else on their CV, like the first person listed. His CV says he has a PhD in Information Systems and Technology Management despite his placement being listed under "Marketing" on Pittsburgh website. Just check out their placements (PhD Student Job Placements | University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business) and you'll see it's nowhere close that of Toronto, Michigan or Rochester, even though your ranking puts all of them in the same group. Also, check out the placement for the following schools, which according to your ranking should be a tier above: Wash U: Pacific U., Ohio State, UBC, Rutgers, UT-Austin, UC-Riverside, Amazon, Peking U., Georgia State, U. Singapore, Illinois Urbana Champaign, U. of Alberta, Fudan U., Shangai U., Catolica Lisbon, UBC UCLA: Chapman, Columbia (2x), Catolica de Chile, Wharton, SMU Cox, Post Doc at CMU, No placement (2x), Michigan, Rutgers, Wisconsin, U. of Hong Kong, South Carolina, Boston U., Azusa Pacific U. How is this a better placement record than those of Toronto, Michigan, and Rochester? I don't see it. Furthermore, your ranking has way too many schools in each group, and ranking Quants + CB + Strategy all together is also weird since those are very different things (especially quant and CB). I think you just browsed Wharton, Stanford, Chicago, Harvard and whatever other schools you think are great to see where the professors got their PhD from, but you're not considering that those guys may be outliers. IMHO we should pay attention to the median placements, not the outliers. That's not the point. You said that your ranking is based on two things: first the competitiveness in admissions and second the rigor of the curriculum. Most quants take the microeconomics and econometrics sequences at economics department, therefore you should also look at the economics ranking as a way to measure coursework rigor (better-ranked schools attract better students and can afford to design more difficult/complete courses). Personally, I don't think you can measure how difficult courses are, and that's why I don't see how you can make a ranking based on something you can't measure.

remove

duplicate post.

I believe the quality of the work is very highly correlated with the placement. Consider the ranking I proposed in my previous post and check out their placements, you'll see that it does make sense (at least for quants). So school ranking should also be correlated with research quality, although it is not a perfect correlation. But if we consider a student's ability as given, I don't think it makes that difference being in A+, A or A- (my ranking). That's why I agree with this: It's definitely important to consider other aspects besides ranking, such as location, funding, program structure, research interests in common with faculty, and so on.

How do you measure difficulty on admission and rigor of curriculum? Not even admission rate is a good measure for this, you would need data on students choice and their possible choices (what school they chose when they could have chosen others) to make a revealed preference approach. Or at least have the enrollment rate of those admitted. Do you have this data or this is just your feeling? Maybe I have a biased sample here but I can tell you that I know lots of people who chose some schools from group A and A- over some of the group A+. To be more specific, I find hard to believe that UCLA, USC and WUSTL are in group A+ while Michigan, Maryland, UCSD and Toronto are not. Also, following the criteria presented, it's very weird to think that UCSD and Dallas are in the same group as Western Ontario and Florida State for example, and in the group below that of Boulder and Florida. From what I've seen for the two first groups it should be (in no specific order): A+: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Northwestern, Penn, Berkeley A: UCLA, USC, UCSD, Duke, Michigan, Cornell, CMU, WUSTL, Maryland... maybe UW, Rochester, Minnesota, Toronto (I think these are slightly below). A- should include Dallas, Emory, UBC, UNC, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Penn State, Austin ... maybe Indiana, Houston, TAMU. But I don't have access to any kind of data on admissions, so my ranking would be based on my perceptions about students' choices and on placements after graduation for quant. As for rigor of curriculum, this may vary a lot especially if the classes are taken with the economics students, because some of these universities have very different rankings in economics. For example, USC, UW, CMU, WUSTL have considerably worse economics programs compared to their quant program, Michigan, Duke, Cornell, UCLA have similar ranked programs (top 15), and Wisconsin and Minnesota are better ranked in economics. Also some schools have very flexible structure and students don't all take the same courses (Cornell and USC are examples). Nice exercise anyway, better than just take a look at UTD.

duplicate post.

I remember some schools sent me tons of emails asking me if I was close to make a decision, but nothing like this. Their terms are clearly unfair, if it was me I would just withdraw my application and keep the other offers.

Short answer is NO. Focus on GRE quant. If you're from an unknown school you get bonus points for acing the GRE, if your school is reputable you just have to pass the GRE quant cutoff (should be around 165 in top 30 departments). Focus on research experience to get better LORs from known professors. For the most competitive programs getting a master's first is a good option.

Nice to hear news about the program. Do you know if the flyouts were also for quant candidates?

Does anybody know about UCSD Rady Quant marketing program? I have a friend applying there but I gotta admit I didn't know they had a phd in marketing until she told me. There's nothing on gradcafe either even for past years information is really scarce. Any info about their process and how competitive it is? Anyone applying there?

Generally speaking, yes they admit more students than what they expect to enroll (but they have to be able to keep the offer, some schools can't and therefore make only the exact number of offers, even if it's one). Chances with waitlist depends on the school ranking and you can expect to hear back in the second half of March and even early April. I remember when I was applying I had 4 or 5 offers from similar schools and didn't know which one I should reject. I was admitted to a higher ranked school only late in March, so at a given moment I had 6 offers and in the next days I freed 5 spots. So I think you can expect a lot of action later in March and early April, but I'd email the programs earlier than that to confirm if the offers are still pending or if they just forgot to update you. EDIT: To this day, I'm still waiting to hear back from some schools that waitlisted me. That's why I advise you to email them in March.

Anyone heard from UCSD and Maryland for quant (or any other program since the timing may be correlated)?

People talk a lot about research fit but keep in mind that it's common that one's interests change a lot during grad school.