Do not apply to safety schools if you want an academic career.
Within any given field there are only about 5-50 top programs in the United States, and if you aren’t sure where those are for your field, your undergraduate faculty can tell you. These are the only programs you should apply to. There is a huge oversupply of Ph.Ds in almost every field, and consequently it’s a buyers market. Colleges hire fulltime faculty almost exclusively from a small percentage of the Ph.D programs. If you can’t get into one of those top programs, it’s better to reconsider your career choices now before you’ve invested several years of your life, than five years down the road when you have a degree that actually decreases your attractiveness to employers.
If you go to one of those top programs you have a much better chance of landing a tenure-track academic job at the other end. If you matriculate from a second rank program, you might be able to land a job at a third-rank or worse institution, if you’re lucky. If you go to a third rank institution for your Ph.D, get ready to adjunct at a community college.
You may well have gone to a better high school than grammar school. You almost certainly went to a better college than high school. The move from college to graduate school is your last chance to move up the ladder of academic rankings. Doing well as an undergraduate at a lower-tier institution can still get you into a top program like MIT or the University of Chicago. But doing well as a newly minted PhD at a lower-tier institution will not even allow you to be considered for a faculty position at a top institution.
It’s sort of an exception that proves the existence of the rule. It is indeed common for second rank school A to hire PhD’s from school A. My undergraduate institution (which I’d place in the second rank) did this too. However what doesn’t happen with nearly as high a probability is for second rank school A to hire PhDs from second rank school B. They’ll hire from Harvard or MIT instead.
Another confounder to watch out for is faculty age. Universities do change over time. When I was in graduate school, there were a number of tenured faculty in the department who would not have been considered as potential hires at that time, but who had been hired 20+ years earlier when there was not such a glut of PhDs, not quite so much emphasis on prestige, and when the university itself was not quite as prestigious as it had become.
Most of those folks have retired by now, though, and most departments I look at are even heavier with PhDs from the Harvard/Stanford/MIT/Chicago/etc. than they used to be.
Do not apply to safety schools if you want an academic career.
Within any given field there are only about 5-50 top programs in the United States, and if you aren’t sure where those are for your field, your undergraduate faculty can tell you. These are the only programs you should apply to. There is a huge oversupply of Ph.Ds in almost every field, and consequently it’s a buyers market. Colleges hire fulltime faculty almost exclusively from a small percentage of the Ph.D programs. If you can’t get into one of those top programs, it’s better to reconsider your career choices now before you’ve invested several years of your life, than five years down the road when you have a degree that actually decreases your attractiveness to employers.
If you go to one of those top programs you have a much better chance of landing a tenure-track academic job at the other end. If you matriculate from a second rank program, you might be able to land a job at a third-rank or worse institution, if you’re lucky. If you go to a third rank institution for your Ph.D, get ready to adjunct at a community college.
You may well have gone to a better high school than grammar school. You almost certainly went to a better college than high school. The move from college to graduate school is your last chance to move up the ladder of academic rankings. Doing well as an undergraduate at a lower-tier institution can still get you into a top program like MIT or the University of Chicago. But doing well as a newly minted PhD at a lower-tier institution will not even allow you to be considered for a faculty position at a top institution.
This advice is specifically for those who want to work at a University. Is this also true for jobs at other companies, or are they more lenient?
Companies are generally looking for skills and specialized knowledge, not the PhD.
Though having a PhD often helps to get a job from a PhD.
At my university, we have several professors who went here for their graduate studies. Maybe this circumstance is an exception.
It’s sort of an exception that proves the existence of the rule. It is indeed common for second rank school A to hire PhD’s from school A. My undergraduate institution (which I’d place in the second rank) did this too. However what doesn’t happen with nearly as high a probability is for second rank school A to hire PhDs from second rank school B. They’ll hire from Harvard or MIT instead.
Another confounder to watch out for is faculty age. Universities do change over time. When I was in graduate school, there were a number of tenured faculty in the department who would not have been considered as potential hires at that time, but who had been hired 20+ years earlier when there was not such a glut of PhDs, not quite so much emphasis on prestige, and when the university itself was not quite as prestigious as it had become.
Most of those folks have retired by now, though, and most departments I look at are even heavier with PhDs from the Harvard/Stanford/MIT/Chicago/etc. than they used to be.