Importance of A in Real Analysis

[Econhead]

This was an interesting rule of thumb, so I ran the numbers on last year's job market candidates. Out of 24, we had 1 T5, 9 T10-30, 5 T50+, 8 Private, 1 Public. So one lateral, and most people in the next tier down.

 

That is actually really good placement from a top 5 and an atypical year unless it is MIT. Only MIT consistently places that well - Harvard does it every other year or so. The rest of the top 5 (Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley) would probably place five or less students at top 30s on average.

 

It's clear that the quality of your work and what you are producing while in your Ph.D will be a factor in your placement on the job market. That said, how critical are your advisors in your placement? Are they more critical if you are coming from a T40+ than from a T20?

[econ girl]

Thanks everybody for the input – ultimately, I can only do my best, but I will absolutely try to make my best an A. I appreciate the reassurance that there are other factors that go into admissions decisions. And, I can keep taking more math classes. Hopefully I'll get an A in probability this semester and maybe in math courses next semester.

 

I will say that I go to a college that has absolutely no grade inflation – the median grade for this real analysis test was a 61, which we consider a D-. There's no curve for this test or for the final grades. And all my math classes have been like that – I got an 87 in intro to proofs and just missed B+. And my multivariable calc class that I got a B+ in only had one A final grade (which I know should have been me, but, it wasn't). Should I say in my SOP that I come from a school that has no grade inflation? Or is that going to sound whiny?

[Catrina]

Thanks everybody for the input – ultimately, I can only do my best, but I will absolutely try to make my best an A. I appreciate the reassurance that there are other factors that go into admissions decisions. And, I can keep taking more math classes. Hopefully I'll get an A in probability this semester and maybe in math courses next semester.

 

I will say that I go to a college that has absolutely no grade inflation – the median grade for this real analysis test was a 61, which we consider a D-. There's no curve for this test or for the final grades. And all my math classes have been like that – I got an 87 in intro to proofs and just missed B+. And my multivariable calc class that I got a B+ in only had one A final grade (which I know should have been me, but, it wasn't). Should I say in my SOP that I come from a school that has no grade inflation? Or is that going to sound whiny?

 

My school was similar. While not that extreme, many classes did use strict letter grades, and most of the classes that curved only did so slightly. I once got a B in a class that I had an actual 89% average in (my school had no plus/minus grades).

 

I don't think that you should mention it in your own SOP (I didn't), but what you should do is see if your LOR writers will mention it. One of my letters writers said that she always mentions this fact when writing letters.

 

The concern in this case needs to be showing that you can in fact write proofs and understand basic concepts in analysis. Is there a second-semester real analysis course you can take.?

[Noodles]

So using myself as an example, I have an A in both PhD level Measure Theory and Functional Analysis (the Real Analysis Sequence at my school which is ranked, at worst, top 40 in mathematics), and I barely got into my MA Doctoral Stream at Toronto. There are many students in my school who got into better programs by having a stronger economics and research background. So in my case, the A in Real Analysis wasn't a significant plus on my application. So, as others have said, there are other aspects to the application than your grade in Real Analysis.

 

That being said, having the knowledge has been immensely helpful in my Master's studies, especially in metrics theory (i'm a metrics kinda guy). So do your best and don't dwell too much on Real Analysis determining your life/career - it won't .

 

Edit: for grammar

Edited October 4, 2014 by Noodles

[Team3]

It's clear that the quality of your work and what you are producing while in your Ph.D will be a factor in your placement on the job market. That said, how critical are your advisors in your placement? Are they more critical if you are coming from a T40+ than from a T20?

 

Advisors are pretty helpful in two ways: 1) improving the quality of your job market paper, and 2) helping you get interviews. However, you're on your own from the interview forward. I couldn't comment on whether they're more handy at one kind of school or the other.

 

Also, as the mathemagician points, out the placements I posted came from an above average year (solid students + faculty making a concerted effort to improve placements).

[e130478]

There's a handy rule of thumb: as an American undergrad, to get into a doctoral program at the same ranking as your undergrad institution, you should probably be around 90th percentile in aggregate performance in relevant coursework; this provides a rough conditional mean of your target with most of the rest of the variance (which is very high) coming from LORs. So if you're 90th percentile in a top 40 undergrad with an economics major and decent amount of math, you can probably land somewhere around #40 economics PhD.

.

 

This is the kind of pedant, cloying garbage that makes this website such a cesspool of information. By that logic, someone who graduates in the top 75% of his or her class from the University of Michigan, a school reputed for its incredibly rigorous and quantitative curriculum, but which also happens to be nominally ranked around #30 for undergrad, shouldn't expect to be taken seriously by a top ten ranked econ phd. program. Anyone who knows a damned thing about the reputation of Michigan would understand this is pure nonsense.

[chateauheart]

This is the kind of pedant, cloying garbage that makes this website such a cesspool of information. By that logic, someone who graduates in the top 75% of his or her class from the University of Michigan, a school reputed for its incredibly rigorous and quantitative curriculum, but which also happens to be nominally ranked around #30 for undergrad, shouldn't expect to be taken seriously by a top ten ranked econ phd. program.

 

Yeah, buddy, I'd say that's true. I can't find data for PhD economics admissions from UMich, but here's admissions data that the UMich career center provides for law school admissions (which is similar but a magnitude easier than PhD economics programs, even for econ students - ask anyone).

UM grads’ law school admission matrix | Career Center

 

This is nice since law schools pretty much only care about LSAT+GPA, so we can pin down what they perceive as the percentiles of students pretty easily. 75% percentiles is around 3.45 GPA at Michigan according to this: University of Michigan

 

This gives you the expected (best) results of:

L, K, J

Hofstra Univ. Deane School of Law

Michigan State Univ.

New York Law School (

Pace Univ. School of Law

Penn State Dickinson School of Law

Rutgers Univ. Newark SoL

St. Johns Univ. School of Law

American Univ. Washington

Benjamin Cardozo School of Law

Brooklyn Law School ...

and so on

 

All that averages to about #60-#80 in expected law school ranking.

 

Here's an alternative if you really want to test my "garbage" metric. Go through the CVs of top 10 program job market candidates this year and find me one person who received his undergrad from a non-top 10 undergrad and isn't a summa cum laude or magna cum laude. Just one. I bet there are a lot of them applying for econ grad schools every year. I don't see them landing in top 10s.

 

The majority of students I've ever noticed that graduated outside of the top 30 undergrads or good foreign universities and are now at top 10 econ programs (which is about 1-2 per year in my program out of 20+ students) have something equivalent to "best student of the graduating class" on their CV, and the few I've talked to have credentials that essentially make them the best graduate their university has produced in decades. I can totally see why the "percentiles" talk makes people uncomfortable, but realistically in a world where only 3% of highly ambitious students go on to doctoral programs, where they compete with twice the amount of international applicants for a few seats, you can't be 75th percentile in an undergrad class and reasonably expect to place upward into a much more selective academic career. Lateral placement into a PhD program is already a major achievement, and should be perceived as such.

Edited October 11, 2014 by chateauheart

[behavingmyself]

This is the kind of pedant, cloying garbage that makes this website such a cesspool of information. By that logic, someone who graduates in the top 75% of his or her class from the University of Michigan, a school reputed for its incredibly rigorous and quantitative curriculum, but which also happens to be nominally ranked around #30 for undergrad, shouldn't expect to be taken seriously by a top ten ranked econ phd. program. Anyone who knows a damned thing about the reputation of Michigan would understand this is pure nonsense.

This is the kind of statement which reinforces why this site exists: Many people have substantial misconceptions about the admissions process. A Michigan degree does not command special respect relative to similarly ranked undergraduate schools, and I assure you from seeing many such students in person that you could not find 25% of econ majors at similarly ranked schools who are qualified to pursue a PhD at a top 30 school, let alone a top 10.

[aeea]

Then why don't you and all those who believe that only students who attend "top 10" schools are qualified to apply to "top 10" schools, what more being "qualified to pursue a PhD at a top 30 school, let alone a top 10" have the adcomm simply state boldly on the various top 10 (30) websites and application forms:

 

"Unless you graduated from a top 10 (30) school you are not qualified to pursue a PhD at our top 10 (30) institution. You are therefore advised not to apply. If you do apply, your application will be automatically rejected by the administrators and will not be reviewed by faculty. This is how the 'admissions process' works."

 

If this is indeed, how the "admissions process" works, then this would be the best approach for all. In fact, it is the only moral approach; otherwise the schools are obtaining application fees from students under false pretenses - and that is the definition of fraud.

 

This is the kind of statement which reinforces why this site exists: Many people have substantial misconceptions about the admissions process. A Michigan degree does not command special respect relative to similarly ranked undergraduate schools, and I assure you from seeing many such students in person that you could not find 25% of econ majors at similarly ranked schools who are qualified to pursue a PhD at a top 30 school, let alone a top 10.

[behavingmyself]

Then why don't you and all those who believe that only students who attend "top 10" schools are qualified to apply to "top 10" schools

I don't understand why you think I believe this. People get into PhD programs which are higher ranked than their undergrad institution all the time. It's just that those people were usually very close to being the best students at their undergraduate schools.

[aeea]

I don't understand why you think I believe this. People get into PhD programs which are higher ranked than their undergrad institution all the time. It's just that those people were usually very close to being the best students at their undergraduate schools.

 

You said:

 

I assure you from seeing many such students in person that you could not find 25% of econ majors at similarly ranked schools who are qualified to pursue a PhD at a top 30 school, let alone a top 10.

[chateauheart]

Here's another step closer towards outing myself: I graduated from an undergraduate program that's clearly not ranked in the top 30, and I got into a number of top 10 PhDs two years ago. So yes, I know it's possible. On the other hand, there are a dozen people from my alma mater applying to grad programs in economics every year and I've been the only person to get a funded offer from a top 10 school in, at least, the last seven graduating cohorts. It's possible to place upward, but you probably won't place that high if even if one or two people, never mind a quarter of your graduating cohort (i.e. dozens or hundreds) is more competitive in their application than you are. The gap between the empirical reality and what aeea/e130478 seem to believe is immense - something like two orders of magnitude - which is one reason why this piece of information needs to be emphasized despite the indignation in the responses.

 

I'm one of those people who think the ranking of undergrad institution is not very informative on the limits that you can reach as a student, nor the value added you can receive from faculty. But the ranking of you among your undergrad peers and the ranking of your undergrad institution, combined, provides a good rule of thumb to how competitive you are. This is true regardless of what benchmark you use to get a rough estimate of your competitiveness - whether you want to look at the numbers on the demand side or the supply side. The logic is simple: unless you think adcoms have some reason to be strongly biased towards low-ranked applicants (the bias is, unfortunately, often the other way), then there are simply way too many people who look better than you for you to be picked, even assuming a lot of randomness and idiosyncrasies. There's no reason for them to pick a 75th percentile candidate from a #30 school rather than a 90th percentile candidate from a #30 school or a 75th percentile candidate from a #15 school, so on and so forth. And there are a lot of great applicants every year for not a lot of seats. The top 10 programs collectively take in around 250 students every year, and around 3/5s of those are foreign - so, only 100 American students per year. This is half the typical size of one undergraduate program. I'd venture there are more than 100 undergraduate summa/magna cum laudes from the Ivy league applying to econ grad schools alone every year. This ain't b-school, homies. The competition is incredible.

[behavingmyself]

You said:

I said that

[aeea]

Thanks for the post.

 

Difficulty is different from impossibility

 

Anyone applying to PhD Economics programs knows that NO ONE can be sure of admission even if you have a 4.5 GPA (on a 4.0 scale), perfect GRE scores and a paper in the AER and QJE.

 

What I am reading on this forum is not people stressing "difficulty", but people stressing "impossibility" and worse doing so with condescension, dismissiveness and elitism.

 

As I said previously, if indeed it is "impossible", for non top 10(30) applicants to get into top 10 (30) programs, then adcomms should clearly inform everyone up front - otherwise they are engaging in fraud by accepting the applications and the application fees.

 

Here's another step closer towards outing myself: I graduated from an undergraduate program that's clearly not ranked in the top 30, and I got into a number of top 10 PhDs two years ago. So yes, I know it's possible. On the other hand, there are a dozen people from my alma mater applying to grad programs in economics every year and I've been the only person to get a funded offer from a top 10 school in, at least, the last seven graduating cohorts. It's possible to place upward, but you probably won't place that high if even if one or two people, never mind a quarter of your graduating cohort (i.e. dozens or hundreds) is more competitive in their application than you are. The gap between the empirical reality and what aeea/e130478 seem to believe is immense - something like two orders of magnitude - which is one reason why this piece of information needs to be emphasized despite the indignation in the responses.

 

I'm one of those people who think the ranking of undergrad institution is not very informative on the limits that you can reach as a student, nor the value added you can receive from faculty. But the ranking of you among your undergrad peers and the ranking of your undergrad institution, combined, provides a good rule of thumb to how competitive you are. This is true regardless of what benchmark you use to get a rough estimate of your competitiveness - whether you want to look at the numbers on the demand side or the supply side. The logic is simple: unless you think adcoms have some reason to be strongly biased towards low-ranked applicants (the bias is, unfortunately, often the other way), then there are simply way too many people who look better than you for you to be picked, even assuming a lot of randomness and idiosyncrasies. There's no reason for them to pick a 75th percentile candidate from a #30 school rather than a 90th percentile candidate from a #30 school or a 75th percentile candidate from a #15 school, so on and so forth. And there are a lot of great applicants every year for not a lot of seats. The top 10 programs collectively take in around 250 students every year, and around 3/5s of those are foreign - so, only 100 American students per year. This is half the typical size of one undergraduate program. I'd venture there are more than 100 undergraduate summa/magna cum laudes from the Ivy league applying to econ grad schools alone every year. This ain't b-school, homies. The competition is incredible.

[aeea]

One more point. To be clear, adcomms can set whatever standards they wish. For examples, top 5 schools can declare they will admit only students from top 3 schools. It is their prerogative. I just ask that the standards be fully disclosed. So much time is spent (wasted) by students on this forum trying to divine the standards of adcomms. Would it not be better that that time be spent by the student in more productive ways?

[mathemagician]

One more point. To be clear, adcomms can set whatever standards they wish. For examples, top 5 schools can declare they will admit only students from top 3 schools. It is their prerogative. I just ask that the standards be fully disclosed. So much time is spent (wasted) by students on this forum trying to divine the standards of adcomms. Would it not be better that that time be spent by the student in more productive ways?

 

That is not what people are saying. Don't put words in other people's mouth. There are plenty of people that get into top 5's from all over the world. But do you know how many institutions there are all over the world? Is it unreasonable to suggest that you have to be among the top of your class to have a shot at admission? As an undergrad in an American university, you are competing with top students from Europe, Latin America, Asia. Can you even name the top 3 schools in each country on these continents? There are certainly more potential students than the number of spots at top 5s if we just chose the best student from each university (of course I know not all of them apply).

 

I am a faculty at a top 50 - our graduate students are not the best. They are still vastly better than a top 20%tile student from a school like the University of Michigan. A school like Michigan probably graduates 200+ econ majors a year. There are at least a dozen similar state schools. You do the math.

 

Yes, if the rest of a student's profile is similar to that of a typical top 20%tile Michigan student, then he/she would have no chance at admission even in my LRM institution. We would rather choose a top 5%tile student from a top 5 university in China, South Korea, or Japan. Trust me, there are far more of these guys than you may think and they don't usually post on this site.

[mathemagician]

I think Americans can be particularly myopic in their worldview. Americans make up less than 1/20 of the population of the world. Most people don't go far away for their undergraduate education. American undergraduate education is not vastly superior - there is perhaps the biggest gap in faculty and student ability in U.S. schools. This often doesn't translate to better education. For example, how I can make my class rigorous without suffering terrible teaching reviews if a significant fraction of the class have trouble with exponents?

 

However, Americans do have an advantage in Ph.D. admissions. We will almost always take the student from the U.S. over a foreign country if the profile is similar. There is more or less reverse affirmative action as a whole in Ph.D. admissions. I think the idea is there is less variance associated with taking an American student over a foreign student. Also English ability is a concern. But English education is improving worldwide and at some point won't be as much of an issue.