Prospective Graduate Students

Placement for 2011

Usually, we have 3 or 4 students to place in programs each year, and we have had pretty much 100% success in getting them into good programs. This year, we were seriously worried, because we had 10 students to place.  Here are the placement results:

Harvard, Brown, CUNY, Duke, Rice, Madison Wisconsin  (two students), SFU Psychology

Two students did not get in anywhere, alas, although we hope that they will do better next year when the field is less crowded.

Our students turned down 3 acceptances at Toronto, two at Indiana, plus Columbia, UCLA, and Washington University, and a number of wait-listed positions .

Placement in PhD Programs

There are two kinds of relevant placement data when applying to MA programs with a PhD in mind. One kind comprises the various success rates:

Of the students who start the program, how many finish it?
Of those who finish, how many apply for PhD programs?
Of the ones that apply, how many get accepted?

Most departments don’t publish these statistics. We don’t have reliable data going back very far, but that is probably just as well (for us, that is), as our program has been improving and our success rates have been increasing.

The other important data is where students have been going. Again, we have detailed data for recent years and a list of successes in the past.

The MA Data as of Summer 2011 (“Q” denotes a qualifying student):

You can see how many students are still working on their degree for any given year by subtracting the withdrawals and the completions from the admissions.

What the table only hints at is that our program is accelerating. We have three students who have only started last year applying for PhDs. This used to be a rare occurrence, but we are working toward making it a standard.

In the years listed, we’ve had precisely 2 students who did not succeed in getting into a PhD program and both got in the following year, which is why the table does not show this fact.

We don’t have complete data on what happened to the students who chose not to apply for PhD programs. They seem to be divided largely between law, various public service jobs, and IT related companies.

The table does not list some other measures of our success:

• Some SFU Undergraduates go directly into PhD programs. This is relevant because it shows that our undergraduate program, which partially overlaps with our MA program at the advanced course level, has long enjoyed placement success. Also, past admissions of SFU students into good PhD programs enhances our reputation, and thus the chances of future placement. In the past few years, we have placed undergraduates in USC, CUNY, Cornell, Toronto and Cambridge.
   
  
• The table also does not show all the acceptance our students got, only where they actually went. The schools that accepted our students, but lost out to other programs in the period listed include UNC, Arizona, Oxford, Warwick, King’s College London, Western, Toronto, McGill, UCSD, Pennsylvania, and others.
   
  
• And, finally, the efficiency and success rates of our program have been improving, but the quality of our placements has been there long before. Previous acceptances and placements also include Columbia, UCLA, Wisconsin, Princeton, ANU, MIT, Chicago, Stanford, Irvine, and more. Relatively recent graduates are now in tenure-track jobs at Toronto, Buffalo, Duluth Minnesota, Dalhousie, and the University of Kentucky.