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Campus Visits by Prospective Students: What are the Norms? What is the Ideal? What are People’s Impressions?

Brian Leiter

A philosophy graduate student at a mid-ranked PhD program writes:

I’ve been reading with interest the comments on your post aboutgraduate admissions yield.  It strikes me that it might also beinteresting to discuss the way that admitted prospective students aretreated on their campus visits. A couple of issues are important:

1) Different schools do their visits differently: some have a group visit, where all admitted applicants are invited to visit at the same time, while others invite the candidates to come individually. Both models have their merits and their disadvantages. Group visits, it seems to me, obscure the way that the department actually runs on a day-to-day basis. Individual visits, though much better at revealing the department as it actually is, have the unfortunate disadvantage of giving students the impression that the department is less ambitious(or less attentive, or – even worse – poorer) than other departments to which they’ve been admitted. While I doubt this is generally the case, impressions matter.

2) This is related to a second issue: the behavior of students on group visits. In my program – and I suspect this is true of many programs -the other offers our admitted students have received are wildly different. Some have been admitted to the very best programs, while for others our very good department’s is the best offer they have received.  This disparity, it seems to me, leads to some extraordinarily infantile behavior on group visits. Those admitted to the top programs seem interested in little more than letting others know. And I fear that they poison the well: those who have no real intention of coming are able to influence others who have more meager options. I am confident in claiming that my department has lost a couple of prospective graduate students for whom our department was a terrific fit because of the ways in which one or two higher-profile admitted students laughingly compared our department to other, higher-ranked places.

All of this is encouraged, I think, by the recruiting process: we treat admitted applicants like rock stars. We throw them parties and takethem out to (sometimes quite expensive) dinners. We buy them plane tickets. And while they’re around, we go out of our way to impress them at every moment. Every admitted applicant, no matter how arrogant, will presumably be put in his or her place in the very first week of a proseminar wherever they end up. But the disparity between what will happen when one arrives at a program and what faculty and graduate students put themselves through to get the students there in the first place is enormous and, to me, alarming.

All of this is just to say that I’d be interested to see if others havethe same impression I do. If you have the inclination, perhaps you’d start a thread on this topic.

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21 responses to “Campus Visits by Prospective Students: What are the Norms? What is the Ideal? What are People’s Impressions?”

  1. Sarah

    As a prospective in 2007, I enjoyed the group visits because I had the opportunity to see how the members of the department interacted. This was vital at one department, where some of the relationships between students and professors were obviously strained. Yes, I feel like I could have made a more informed decision if I'd had the chance to experience the department without all the excitement of preview weekend, but you can't have everything, and I think my visits gave me more than enough information to make my decision.

    I do have one campus visit regret. I was offered admission at the last minute to a school that was an entire tier above any of my other offers, but I didn't have the means to make a campus visit and the school didn't offer any assistance. If I'd had a chance to visit the department, I might be studying there today. As it is, I already knew I loved the school I chose, and I'm very happy to be here today.

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  2. Sandy Goldberg

    Writing from the other end — as one who participates as a faculty member in recruitment efforts — I would be interested to hear what prospective graduate students would find useful to them on recruitment visits. (I am interested as well in what prospective graduate students who have been on these trips found helpful — what are the "best practices" out there? — and what they found unhelpful. No need to name programs, of course.)

    One other thought: although each of our departments has a vested interested in showing itself off best, so as to successfully recruit our top choices, we also must recognize that prospectives have a vested interest in getting the most useful information about our respective programs. My sense is that getting the information about "best practices" out in the public — assuming that there is some consensus on these matters — would be a good thing overall. For to the extent that every recruiting dept followed "best practices," then arguably the prospectives themselves would be in the best position to make meaningful comparisions between the various recruiting departments — and each department should recognize some value in that. (The "best practices" information might even help programs that don't have lavish budgets for recruiting — they might maximize their bang for the buck.)

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  3. anonymous

    I have a question which arose this year concerning on-campus visits. One of our students was accepted at a mid-range (PGR 30-40) Ph.D. program which offered to have the student out. This was a good program for the student and fit her interests quite well. However, shortly thereafter, the student recieved a nice offer from a significantly higher ranked school (PGR top 10) which was also a very good fit.

    After discussing the issue, the student and I couldn't really see any way in which the she would accept the offer from the lower-ranked school. On that basis, the student decided to decline the fly-out in the interest of saving the department unnecessary expenses. However, it ended up that it wasn't entirely clear that this is what the department preferred. So the question is, "Would departments prefer students who would almost certainly not go to the program regardless of an on-campus visit, turn down the fly-out offer?" It seems obvious to me that they would. But, again, having just gone through this it wasn't at all clear that this was the preference. Any thoughts?

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  4. dru

    As an impending prospective, it seems difficult for me to have a clear idea of what a good visit would contain. My experience visiting undergrad schools showed me that it was a very subjective process, one school just dramatically outshined the others, though I couldn't describe why. There are a few things I know I would like/need out of a good visit though:

    1. A plane ticket. Yes, it might be verging on rock-star treatment, but a school doesn't buy me a plane ticket to come do a meet-n-greet or whatnot, I can't afford to get there. Thus, the plane ticket is sort of make-or-break for a successful visit.

    2. Some quality face-to-face time with profs. Especially for profs who I will be working with a lot (adviser, thesis review board, etc.). A large part of discerning whether I like a program or not is whether or not I (and my educational plans) fit with what's already happening at a school, and this is largely dependent on the professionals who I'll be spending 5 years with. I guess good experiences in this regard could come out of either group visits or individual visits, though I tend to think that a group visit would leave me less time to sit in a professor's office and chat for an hour.

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  5. Mohan Matthen

    This is an interesting set of questions. I am inclined to think that the most useful kind of visit for a student is when s/he meets individually with various faculty member with whom s/he will work, and with other graduate students in similar areas. I am not sure why a group visit is useful at all, except from the point of view of convenience. Perhaps to meet others who are considering the school, but given the comments about bad behaviour, isn't this a bad reason?

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  6. Future Grad Student

    I have recently accepted an offer at a top-ten PGR program. I think I can comment, at least a bit, on my visit experiences in response to Sandy's question about "best practices". I visited two top-ten programs before making my decision. Both were group visits rather than a visit by myself. I liked the group visit b/c it gave me the opportunity to meet my potential classmates.

    There was a dramatic difference between the two departments in how much time they invested in us during the visit. The department I chose clearly spent a lot of time coordinating the visit, whereas the other department was much more casual. The department I chose had one-on-one meetings with faculty for 30 minutes each. These meetings were great because the professors had each read my file (recently…they brought up things I had said in my statement of purpose and talked about my writing sample) and so we talked about philosophical interests rather than about the details of earning the degree. The department I didn't choose also had the same sort of meetings, but their professors didn't know my name, where I was from or any details about me; in fact, there 2 or 3 meetings w/ professors there where we went 20 minutes before they asked my name or interests, etc.

    The dept I chose also devoted an afternoon where the faculty got together as a group and told us about their interests. The dept I didn't choose did nothing like this.

    Now, don't get me wrong, the dept I didn't choose is an excellent department and nothing was negative at all about my visit. The reason I chose the other dept is because my experience was so overwhelmingly positive that the choice was clear. This dept clearly put a lot of time and effort into the visit and "selling" their dept, but the other didn't seem to take it as seriously.

    Reply
  7. Jon Cogburn

    I think that one of the most important pieces of information is the percentage of students that actually graduate from the program.

    Unfortunately, placement statistics are always given in terms of percentage of graduates that get jobs. But if the program weeds out 90% of the students (and this does happen at decently ranked programs) in a given year, it is absolutely meaningless to the average entering student if the one person who made it through got a tenure track job. If I was in charge of "best practices" having this information made public and available to all prospective students would be required. Could not the APA refuse to allow advertizing or interviewing at conventions to departments that fail to conform to such best practices?

    In any case, students I have advised are understandably uncomfortable with asking faculty members for this kind of information, but campus visits are usually a great time to find out from the graduate students in the program.

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  8. Michael

    As a student who just went through the campus-visit process, I'll comment.

    First, about the issue of mentioning other offers in front of other prospective students. I ran into this at least once from both ends, so to speak, during my visits. My experience was that while it was sometimes awkward, and sometimes influenced my view of other *students*, it never influenced my view of the departments in question. I would hope that most aspiring philosophers would have judgment independent enough not to be swayed in this superficial way. While it sounds like some of the braggarts mentioned in the quoted email were exceptionally rude, the other prospectives would, I think, have to be quite exceptionally insecure to decline offers from a terrific-fitting program just because they had heard it verbally slighted by one of their peers. I'm curious what the source of the quoted student's confidence on this point might be, as well as whether others perceive this as a substantial problem.

    I'm also surprised that paying for a student's food and transportation for a two-day trip is being considered tantamount to "rock star" treatment. I had viewed it more as a necessary condition on the possibility of the process (as well as, of course, a much-appreciated courtesy.) How else are we supposed to be able to afford to visit 3+ schools, as I imagine many students do in their decision-making processes? I know it would have been tough for me, and I work full-time. I have to think that for many still in undergrad it would be completely unfeasible. I suppose the dinners could be more humble or whatever (although I should note that the ones on my trips were hardly lavish) but I seriously doubt that many of us prospectives are deluded enough to think the solicitous treatment we are fortunate enough to receive as guests of the department will endure once we are students there.

    On the point of finances, I will highlight one "best practice". It makes a big difference when departments can pay for plane tickets up front, as opposed to reimbursing after the fact. Again, put yourself in the shoes of a cash-strapped undergrad. If you are invited to visit, say, 4 campuses, the cost for plane tickets could total $1,000 or more. Some students simply won't have that kind of cash on hand, in which case they might make a decision to nix the visit to the one or two schools which are the least appealing on paper. I suppose that some departments (following the reasoning of anonymous, above) might prefer this, if the student thinks herself unlikely to attend given rankings, aid, and so forth; but I do not think it is ultimately in the best interest of either the department or the student. After all, isn't the main idea behind campus visits that some of the most pertinent information about prospective graduate programs can't be found on the web? I would think mid- and lower-ranked departments especially would view the visit a chance to remind students that paper factors aren't everything.

    As for format, although I didn't make any solo treks, I did enjoy group visits. Especially if you're able to attend a couple classes or seminars over two or more days, it gives you a sort of feeling-in-miniature of what it might be like to have a cohort. Even if you don't end up with most of those very people (and of course you probably won't) that is still something, and I found it helped me picture myself as a student in the department(s). And, it's just nice to be there with some people who are in your same situation, as opposed to as a lone outsider looking in on "life as usual" in the department. The proverbial mileage of others may, of course, vary.

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  9. Daniel Harris

    My approach to campus visits was to basically pretend that I was a student for a week: sit in on as many classes and meet as many faculty members as I could, get frank opinions from current students if possible (easiest at the pub), and make sure to keep my eyes and ears open for gossip about information the department might be unlikely to put on the website.

    I didn't experience a group visit, but I can imagine that it would give a more distorted picture of a department than I got. Maybe this is what some of the departments which offer group visits are going for, or maybe they are just trying to minimize the disruption caused by ten students showing up in the middle of spring semester.

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  10. Another Recent Visitor

    There is so much to say regarding campus visits. I'll restrict myself to what made the biggest impressions on me.

    First, I didn't have to pay for anything except alcohol on my campus visits, and I feel that's how it should be; I'm poor.

    Second, departments need to know their strengths. One of the schools I visited is on Leiter's unofficial list of "pleasant faculties to work with," and it shows. Faculty genuinely like each other and their students, the graduate students all like each other, and it's in their best interest for prospective students to hear that from them, and to see it. So group events are great. If your department isn't very internally congenial, you probably want to do more one-on-one meetings.

    Third, I like group visits precisely because one can talk about the likelihood they'll matriculate. If on a campus visit I met a couple of great people working in my area who are nearly certain they're going to attend, that impacts my decision a lot. I know that at least half of what I learn is going to come from conversations with students, and many of my papers will start from conversations and evolve because of them, so the graduate student community (including/especially those in my cohort) is incredibly important.

    Fourth, it's important to talk with 4th and 5th year students because they can give you the most information about a program. But it's also important to meet 1st and 2nd year students, because they're the ones who will be around to hang out with during your 5-6 years in a program.

    In the end, the choice comes down to where one wants to spend the next five years. The more information one has, the better equipped one is to make that decision.

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  11. Simon

    As an Undergraduate from a non-US university looking at grad school for 2009 the prospect of self funding campus visits is daunting. Those of us planing to apply for international grad school places usually spend 12 to 18 months saving for the campus visits alone. It would be terrific if Universities would indicate, on the web or elsewhere, if they are willing to provide any funding towards the visits or not. Unfortunately this is a major factor for international students deciding where they will study.

    Further, for international applicants there are specific details that must necessarily be addressed on campus visits that group visits could potentially hinder. Residency processes (including for the applicant's family), funding allocation for non-citizens, and the apparent differences in teaching, research processes and administration between US and non-US universities are fundamentally important for international applicants but may be less so for domestic applicants.

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  12. Anon.

    I visited a handful of programs this spring. Two observations: first, group visits are much more useful. This has less to do with meeting future cohorts and more to do with meeting a wide range of current grad students. When prospective students visit separately over the course of a couple of months, the grad students can't concentrate their recruitment efforts. Some of the most informative conversations I enjoyed during my visits took place at the parties, where the grad students could let their guards down and speak frankly about the pros and cons of their departments.

    Second: one of the "best practices" — which so far isn't widely practiced — is mailing prospective students a representative sample of articles from the professors. One of the schools I visited actually sent a set of articles that were tailored to my research interests. It was a great way to discover that professors in other fields took serious interest in the kinds of philosophical questions I hoped to work on. (Logician X and philosopher of physics Y had both published articles in philosophy of mind — who knew?)

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  13. J. Adam Carter

    After having been a phil postgrad at several departments (quite different from each other), I've noticed one clear point of common ground: the 'true colors' of each department are on display on those occasions in which the department has a visiting speaker, an event that is–at least on my experience–always followed by drinks and dinner. What will be most useful to a prospective postgraduate is to see how the faculty and students interact on such an occasion, as none of the following will be hidden: (i) the philosophical acumen of the faculty and students in the Q&A session (and less formally); (ii) the way that the faculty members interact with postgraduates, and also with each other. This is, I think, a very important thing about which to get a sense. My experience is that departments diverge greatly on this score. Overly formal, stiff/reserved interactions should be a red flag (iii) the level of philosophical enthusiasm. If only a handfull of faculty and a handful of students turn up for a guest speaker, this should tell you something.

    The prospective postgrad would benefit greatly from the information that comes pre-packaged in an evening with a guest speaker; but also, I think it would be advantageous for faculty members to schedule prospective postgrad visits around such occasions. For one, there is less work; you already have to plan the dinner, drinks, etc. and have everyone there in one place for the purposes of the speaker, and so wouldn't have to do as much independent planning on behalf of the postgrad. Secondly, a department should WANT a prospective postgrad to see its true colours (or at least, be in a position to see them; obviously, not all guest speaker affairs present a department in an accurate light.) After all, you want the postgraduates who will be the best fit–and if a postgrad accepts an offer without seeing how the department 'really' functions, there's a good chance she might end up unhappy, and that's good for no one.

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  14. grad student

    As a grad student who has assisted with recruiting efforts several times now, I think I can safely say that in my experience the group visits are much better for both the department and the prospective students. For a group visit, the current grad students can make sure that they have scheduled time to be available to prospective students, it is easier to put together social events (even just a trip to the pub, where so much of the open, real discussion happens), and the prospective students have a chance to interact a bit with students who may wind up in their cohort. The year that my department had separate visits for each prospective student gave what I believe to be a distorted view of how our department operates – many of the grad students did not even meet all of the prospectives (and obviously vice versa) and some of the prospectives were relatively ignored or treated as afterthoughts while they visited. Most of them did not get to meet 4th and 5th year students. A couple of the prospective students that year met only one or two grad students who were signed up to host them – not a good way to go, no matter how charming those hosts might be. Of course this may be just a fault of my department that year, but I think that since the visits take place during the semester, there is only so much time that students, faculty, etc. can realistically set aside from work to answer questions, give tours, etc.

    And yes, at the group visits some of the students inevitably seem to play that 'mine is bigger than yours' game with the schools to which they have been offered admission – I guess I just think that the benefits of the group dynamic outweigh the pettiness of this sort of behavior.

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  15. L.M.

    There is a difference between showing a department and selling a department. I want to see a department's true colors because I'll spend 5+ years of my life there. After going on numerous campus visits, I think these are the best guidelines:

    1) Be hospitable, but don't go to the extreme of absolute excess. It doesn't do anything for me to be taken to a very expensive restaurant. (I think of those poor dears whose tuition is paying for my meal) It does not seem very authentic. I'd much rather go to a less expensive place that is a popular place for university students. Going to those places is not going to help me get a feel for the town; my income is going to be barely enough to get groceries every week and it's not like I'll frequently be going to those places, anyway. It seems very pretentious. I am not saying to not treat us to a good dinner but skip the super pretentious places.

    2) Let us sit in on classes. I went to one university and I sat in on a class. I am so glad I did sit in because I decided within two minutes that I did NOT want to attend. (it was such a bore) It saved me a lot of time and it ended up being the best thing for both me and the department.

    3) Give us opportunities to hang out with current graduate students without professors. A couple of those visits were far too scheduled. Give us some time to walk around the campus and talk with graduate students. I got a much greater idea of the departments talking to these students in the pub after they had a few drinks. Again, I'm very glad I had that time. It saved me from having a bad experience.

    4) Pick faculty to be there who are nice. This seems like an obvious point but at a few of the places I went, I was pretty shocked to talk to some of the professors. They might be great philosophers but they had bad social skills and, in one case, poor etiquette. We want to see the department for what it really is but in your own self interest, you don't want the face of your department to be someone who comes across as mean or has terrible social skills.

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  16. Anon.

    I won't name any names, but my undergraduate institution had a rather terrible situation while wining-and-dining their prospectives. I don't know how common this is, but a dearth of female graduate students and free alcohol led the current crop of (male) graduate students to "fawn" (to be polite) all over the handful of admitted female graduate students. Who knows what effect it had on their ultimate decision as contrasted with other factors, but it couldn't have helped.

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  17. JAF

    I think it is a bit ridiculous to claim that we treat prospective students like rock stars. Here at our top 5 department, we fly people out and take them to dinners–like everyone else I imagine–but that's because it would be insane to expect an undergraduate to take on those expenses, and we clearly have the funds. The dinners are social events, meant to help give prospectives a chance to loosen up and ask the kind of questions necessary to make an informed decision. We admit way more than we can accept, and we assume that a good chunk of them will go elsewhere. But once we find those who clearly fit, we hone in on them and try to make the case for them to come. I can't see anything problematic about this.

    As for those who feel the need to show up only to inflate their egos, they deserve your pity, not necessarily your anger. It is perfectly reasonable to put such a person in their place, or just ignore them altogether. I usually go with the latter route. Everybody hates that person who does nothing but blather about how they got into NYU. We bristle at it here as much as someone at UC Irvine presumably does. Let that person go to NYU and annoy everyone there, or, as you say, be sufficiently humbled in their first seminar. I doubt they have that much of an impact. I would suspect that people are simply glad they won't be around to annoy them in the Fall.

    The best any department can do is let prospective students sit in on grad seminars, come to talks, and hang out with grad students. This is what we do, because it gives people a sense of what things are really like. For a lower ranked department, the policy should be the same. But at the same time, a lower ranked department must realize that it will be much harder for their grad students to get jobs, and this more than anything else explains why people, at the end of the day, decline the offer. This is a fact of the job market, for better or worse, and no amount of fiddling with prospective visits will change this.

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  18. Matthew

    L.M. – Going to a very expensive restaurant needn't be inauthentic. If you end up at a particularly well-heeled program, such meals might be the norm after colloquia, job talks, and student visits. I'd also worry that sitting in on one class probably isn't representative of an entire program.

    JAF – I was in complete agreement up until you said that "lower ranked department must realize that it will be much harder for their grad students to get jobs."

    I see this repeated a fair amount by people at top ranked programs, but I wonder to what extent this is born out by the facts. Most of the people I know that have gone on the market from either a top program or a lower tier program have had some struggle in finding a job. However, they are often struggling in different places and not in direct competition. There are plenty of programs in the middle and bottom portions of the PGR that seem to do just as well as the top tier in placing their graduate students. (The same could be said for several unranked programs.) The difference seems to be in where these student end up.

    Graduates from top programs have a tendency to land at research institutions where graduates from lower ranked programs seldom get considered. However, it also seems graduates from lower ranked programs have an advantage at smaller teaching institutions. If I'm correct, I suspect much of this is because students from top programs are perceived as being unwilling to go to non-research institutions, and the worry is often expressed that, even if they do come they wont stay. I've also heard the worry that graduates from the large coastal cities are often unwilling to move to, or stay in, rural areas. This leads to graduates from top programs not being taken seriously as candidates at smaller institutions, which leaves open opportunities for those graduates at lower ranked institutions. Perhaps those from lower ranked programs spend more time doing some visiting gigs, but most of the ones I've known have still landed in TT positions in the end. If one isn't simply concerned with where they end up getting a job, then it seems like there are a number of considerations that factor into picking a program besides rank.

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  19. sacamano

    What does it say about Philosophy that it is necessary to wine and dine prospective students to entice them to attend their program? In most other fields it is the students trying to convince the Department (& supervisor) to accept them, not the other way around.

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  20. Derek

    Sacamano,

    At the application stage, it is the students trying to get departments to accept them. The stage being discussed here is for those student who were successful at the first stage. The successful students often receive offers of acceptance from multiple schools, and schools want the students they've accepted to accept them. I'd be quite surprised to learn that other disciplines somehow manage to avoid the second stage. (How? By only accepting students you know will choose to attend your program? By being indifferent about which and how many students accept your offer?)

    I'd also second Matthew's first remark above. The dinners we took our prospective students to were, if anything, less fancy than some of the places we (graduate students) get to go with outside speakers, for our graduate philosophy conference, and for other events. Of course the same is not true for all schools.

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  21. Recent Visitor

    Sacamano, it's the same in philosophy. That's why we spend months/years studying for the GRE, preparing the best writing sample we can, carefully tailoring our statment of purpose, etc. But once someone has convinced a department that she's a perfect fit, the department wants to make sure they get her. That's where the wining and dining comes in.

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