<p>Hello all. I've been trying to look for stats on each department in the GSAS and the acceptance rate for each one. However, I keep getting statistics that vary all over the board. I would like to get some accurate answers and thought you could help. Thank you.</p>
<p>This forum is for undergraduate admissions; you might want to post your question here: [Graduate</a> School - College Confidential](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/]Graduate”>Graduate School - College Confidential Forums)</p>
<p>(a) You will get statistics that vary all over the board. I think there are probably huge differences department to department, and year to year within the same department. It’s not like undergraduate admissions where there are a fixed number of slots to fill every year. In many departments, even large ones, the number of students accepted each year will vary a lot from one year to the next. Also, unlike with the Common Data Set for colleges, I don’t think there is any consistent, across-the-board data collection effort, and as far as I know no consistent publication of data.</p>
<p>(b) With well-funded, top quality PhD programs, it almost doesn’t matter what the numbers are. The admission rate is really, really low. I don’t know how it could matter to anyone that one department made offers to 3% of its applicants and another 4%. Larger programs like economics or biology may have slightly higher rates, but lots more applicants. Terminal masters programs, on the other hand, tend to be high-volume, low-cost moneymakers for universities like Harvard, and will have much higher admission rates.</p>
<p>
And, to extend – there is not a central admissions effort by GSAS, and each program is free to accept as many or as few students as it feels it can support.</p>
<p>The graduate school board on CC will not be able to help you much with this one – as JHS says, there isn’t really a consistent source of data.</p>