My earlier correspondent writes with a report of astonishingly bad advice from faculty mentors at an MA program:

“One of our faculty advisors said that [student X] had better take the offer [of admission from a top 25 PhD program, whose name is omitted here] because everyone gets exactly one shot to apply for PhD programs. He thought that reapplying was very unlikely to improve the outcome. He implied that the stigma of having been previously rejected would cripple any subsequent applications. Is that true? Another faculty member told her ambitious grad students that there was ‘no point’ in getting a PhD from any program outside the top 10.”

There’s much to be said for a “bird in the hand,” but the advice reported here is too absolute to be sensible. While there’s certainly no reason to think that applying another year with the same dossier will lead to better results, one question to ask is what can be accomplished in the intervening year. A publication? Some new letter writers? More coursework and grades? As to “stigma,” this may attach, and it may not: membership on admissions committees does rotate, and departments vary considerably in how well they keep track of who has applied before.

It is clearly silly to say there is “no point” in getting a PhD from a program outside “the top 10,” and I say that, obviously, as someone who thinks the quality of a program–overall and in the areas of most interest to a student–is VERY important. There was presumably a “point” in getting a PhD for these philosophers who didn’t go to “top 10” programs (at the time they went) but who are now employed as philosophers at top 10 programs:

Desmond Hogan (PhD, Yale) at Princeton
Matt Evans (PhD, Texas) at NYU
Kit Fine (PhD, Warwick) at NYU
Richard Foley (PhD, Brown) at NYU
Don Garrett (PhD, Yale) at NYU
Frances Egan (PhD, Western Ontario) at Rutgers
John Hawthorne (PhD, Syracuse) at Rutgers
Peter Klein (PhD, Yale) at Rutgers
Ernest LePore (PhD, Minnesota) at Rutgers
Howard McGary (PhD, Minnesota) at Rutgers
Brian McLaughlin (PhD, North Carolina) at Rutgers
Ted Sider (PhD, U Mass/Amherst) at Rutgers
Dean Zimmerman (PhD, Brown) at Rutgers
Edwin Curley (PhD, Duke) at Michigan
Peter Ludlow (PhD, Columbia) at Michigan
Joseph Camp (PhD, Brown) at Pittsburgh
James Lennox (PhD, Toronto) at Pittsburgh
John Norton (PhD, New South Wales) at Pittsburgh
Lanier Anderson (PhD, Penn) at Stanford
Allen Wood (PhD, Yale) at Stanford
Jeff Helzner (PhD, Carnegie-Mellon) at Columbia
Achille Varzi (PhD, Toronto) at Columbia
Peter Godfrey-Smith (PhD, UC San Diego) at Harvard and ANU
Alison Simmons (PhD, Penn) at Harvard
David Chalmers (PhD, Indiana) at Arizona
Thomas Christiano (PhD, Illinois/Chicago) at Arizona
Michael Gill (PhD, North Carolina) at Arizona
Rachana Kamtekar (PhD, Chicago) at Arizona
Uriah Kriegel (PhD, Brown) at Arizona
Chris Maloney (PhD, Indiana) at Arizona
Calvin Normore (PhD, Toronto) at UCLA
Sheldon Smith (PhD, Ohio State) at UCLA

And this, remember, is just from the top 10; you don’t have to go far outside the top ten to find many more examples, such as,

Jesse Prinz (PhD, Chicago) at North Carolina
Robert Kane (PhD, Yale) at Texas
A.P. Martinich (PhD, UC San Diego) at Texas
A.P.D. Mourelatos (PhD, Yale) at Texas
Michael Tye (PhD, SUNY-Buffalo) at Texas
Alan Code (PhD, Wisconsin) at Berkeley
Branden Fitelson (PhD, Wisconsin) at Berkeley
Brian Weatherson (PhD, Monash) at Cornell
etc.

Would any of these philosophers have been well-advised to forget about graduate school because they didn’t get in to a top 10 programs? Plainly not.

And there are, of course, dozens more successful philosophers at PhD- and MA-granting programs—as well as tens of dozens at liberal arts colleges, state universities, etc.—who earned their PhDs from non-top 10 programs. (Note, of course, that in the above lists, most of the philosophers earned their PhDs at top 20ish programs. But the list of graduates would become more diverse as we consider a wider range of institutions of higher education.)

UPDATE: A graduate student at a top 20 program writes:

“My case is a counter-example to the advice given by the MA faculty mentor. I initially applied for admission for the fall of 2003. I got in several top programs, but was wait-listed at [top ten program, hereafter X]. I visited anyway, and got on quite well with the faculty. I ended up not getting in, but received a few emails from faculty expressing their regrets. I went to [a top 20 program, hereafter Y] instead (about which, incidentally, I have nothing but glowing things to say – I can’t make much of a comparative judgment yet, but I’ve been very impressed with the program). This year, I reapplied to programs…primarily for family reasons. I got in to [X], and will be starting there next year. While I wasn’t present during the admission committee discussions, my guess is that I actually had an advantage this year because I was something of a known quantity.

“Everything I have heard from faculty suggests that there is little downside in reapplying. If you have demonstrated that you can succeed in a PhD program elsewhere, that can only help you. In my case, since I visited as a wait-listed student, they knew me personally. Granted, I wasn’t outright rejected at first so they did think something of me to begin with. But I can say that in general, as far as I can tell, the reapplication advice is simply wrong.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yet more on the topic here.