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BRIEF SNAPSHOT OF GRADUATE RECRUITING, ADMISSIONS, SUPPORT, AND PLACEMENT

The 2006 applicant pool was 15% larger than in 2005 and 47% larger than five years ago.  Approximately  6%  – 9% of applicants are offered admission, and of those approximately 50% accept.  With respect to academic qualifications, the applicant pool has remained roughly stable over the past five years.  However, matriculating students’ GRE scores have increased over this period (GRE-V: 605 à 643; GRE-Q: 667 à 719; GRE-Subj: 675à 718).  With respect to diversity of the applicant pool, applications from underrepresented groups have increased by 44% over the past 5 years in concert with the overall growth of the applicant pool.  Offers of admission to minority applicants have remained steady at about 10% of all admission offers made. In the most recent year, 9% of minority applicants were offered admission compared to 6% of non-minority applicants. Acceptance of admission offers by minority applicants has varied unsystematically from year to year (0% - 100%), with 50% acceptance in the most recent year.

Approximately 23% of matriculating students are supported with TA assignments, which has remained steady over the past three years.  In contrast, GSR/Training grant funding has declined from 62% to 47% in that period, while fellowships have doubled from 15% to 31%.  In September, 2005, we compared the level of graduate student support with 19 competitor institutions, and found that our department falls approximately in the middle.

There were 49 first authored publications and 93 publications as junior authors among the 46 students reporting most recently (49% of active students). There were also 150 first-authored conference presentations and another 122 presentations as junior authors. Historically, approximately 70% of first and second year students have been authors on submitted presentations or publications.

In 2000 there were 21 students in or beyond their 7th year in the graduate program.  By 2004, this had dropped to 10 students, and has risen slightly to 14 students in 2006, still well below previous rates.  The median time to degree has fallen from over 8 years in 2000 to under 7 years in 2005.

All of our graduates since 2000 have been placed in professional research, teaching, or clinical positions upon completing the PhD.  The majority have obtained post-doctoral training, with 40% taking faculty or research positions right out of graduate school. Our students have obtained positions in some of the nation’s pre-eminent institutions, including Stanford, Yale, Brown, Chicago, Penn, and Duke.  This is not a new phenomenon; in the department’s external review in 2000 we reported that over the prior 10 years 94% of our PhDs had been employed in positions for which their degree trained them, and 84% had obtained academic positions, including in top-ranked psychology departments.  Notably, this well exceeds the national rate of 72% of new psychology research doctorates obtaining full-time employment (APA Doctorate Employment Survey, 1999).