Hi,
When it comes to choosing a grad school do the rankings matter of the school?
When searching for jobs do the employers shortlist candidates on the basis of your grad school ranking?
or do they simply ignore the rankings and select people only based on their knowledge?
please please reply!!
IN A HUGE DILEMMA
Are you choosing between two programs?
The answer is “it depends.” It depends on the field, the rankings, and your career goals.
If you are getting a PhD with the goal of going into academia, then program reputation does matter. Graduates from top 10 programs have a much easier time securing academic positions and prestigious postdocs than graduates from mid-ranked or lower-tier programs. Those programs also tend to have the best resources, which makes studying there easier. But even within that, there’s some variation: in the humanities and arts, where the department as a whole affects you more, rankings are more important. In the sciences and some social sciences, where you work very closely with a principal investigator, the reputation of your PI/advisor may be more important than absolute ranking (although the best PIs tend to be at the best-ranked schools).
If you’re getting an MA with the goal of going onto a PhD program, they kind of matter but not as much. This is also field dependent, but lots of people go from mid-ranked MAs to top-tier PhD programs. If you can go to a top-ranked MA program that’s great, but if not (for financial or other reasons) if you work hard and get good recommendations, it can still work out.
If you’re getting a professional master’s degree, then usually rankings matter, but not always. For example, fields, like international relations, business, and public policy can be very prestige-focused fields - if you want to work at a top think tank, NGO, or agency after grad school a top-ranked program will make it easier for you to get there. Those companies recruit at the top schools and really try to get top talent into the field. Other fields - like nursing and social work - are not necessarily so prestige-focused because their markets are less inter/national. Hospitals and social work agencies aren’t trawling all over the nation to find the top talent; they’re mostly recruiting locally, and recruiting through student nursing/fieldwork placements. So a graduate of any Philadelphia-area nursing school might have a better chance getting into CHOP (a famous children’s hospital) than a graduate of Yale or Columbia nursing, just because your proximity means that might be where you intern or shadow nurses.
And every employer is a mix - your school’s reputation might matter, but so does your knowledge and skills and experiences. For academic jobs, a school will often prefer a mid-ranked school candidate with 15 publications over a top-ranked school candidate with 5. (That’s oversimplifying it; there are other factors; but you get the point). An mid-ranked IR grad who knows three language fluently and worked abroad in the country of interest for 2 years might have a better chance at a specific type of job than an IR grad from a top-ranked school who speaks one other language kind of brokenly and has no work experience.
So: it depends. Maybe if you give us the details of your dilemma we can help you more specifically?
@siliconvalleymom @juillet yes.i was comparing university of california irvine and northwestern university biotechnology programs.
While uni of california is an integrated course of biotechnology management,
NU’s course is only biotechnology.
Also since biotechnology sector is more concentrated in california, does that make uni of california irvine better?
also university of california is a little behind than northwestern in terms of rankings.
which to choose?
I take it you have admission to both schools? If you are after a Ph.D. then it really does not matter too much where the school is but, as @juillet says, the research advisor you have. Northwestern has plenty of good faculty and Irvine is a good school as well. If it is a M.S. then thequestion is whether the job placement is better in one program than the other. You should be able to ask that question, particularly if the university is expecting you to self-fund your studies.