A reader writes in:

I am a faculty member at a (currently) unranked PhD department, and we’ve been considering numerous ways to improve our program. Some of these improvements will be internal – making sure we provide quality courses, excellent instruction, guidance on professional development, doing whatever we can for our job candidates to improve job placement, etc. Yet some improvements depend on us increasing our initial applicant pool.

In conversations with faculty at other (ranked) institutions, we’ve heard complaints that they receive far too many graduate applications. Meanwhile, we generally receive far too few. Some of this, of course, has to do with the rankings/quality of the relevant departments. But the rankings, while helpful in some respects, also function as a clearinghouse for what applicants’ options are, resulting in unranked departments not being “search engine optimized” to receive applications. Many undergrads do not know which grad schools they could apply to, or which ones they have a realistic shot at getting into, or just generally not having enough information about grad school options. I suspect that at least some of those applicants who are competing against so many at higher-ranked or ranked institutions would be happy to apply at other grad programs, including our own, if they knew about them and knew that their odds of getting accepted at these programs is much higher than at other programs. We imagine that it would be helpful if applicants could know which grad programs to apply to (if they were all linked or listed in one place, for example), and if they had some information about approximately how many applicants there are on average each year at each program.

One (infeasible) way to do this would require a huge amount of institutional uniformity, something along the lines of law school applications using SLAC, where all applicants could submit using a single portal, then pick which schools to send their application materials to. Another (more feasible) way might be having grad applicants self-report – something along the lines of how job applicants self-report on job-reporting threads. This led us to wonder whether this would be something to ask others about at the Cocoon. Maybe there is already something like this that exists that we aren’t aware of. If not, does anyone have any ideas about how something like this might be implemented? Is this something that other programs would be interested in, too?

Good questions – what do readers think?

Originally appeared on The Philosophers’ Cocoon Read More