Grad admissions process ends

Come every April, a blitz of stories and figures on university admissions hits newsstands and television stations across the country -- undergraduate admissions, that is. Yet while the last month saw high school seniors waiting breathlessly for the mailman, it also watched equally anxious college seniors pacing university post offices in nervous anticipation of graduate school notices. Last week marked the end of the graduate admissions process for the School of Arts and Sciences, as matriculation notifications -- a yes or no to SAS departments' offer of admission -- began trickling in for the April 15 deadline. SAS saw a decline of about 300 applicants -- 8 percent -- as the pool fell from between 3,800 and 3,900 applications for fall 1996 to 3,500 applications for fall 1997, according to Graduate Dean Walter Licht, also a History professor. Admissions rates across the various departments also dropped by 5 percent, falling of from 25 percent last year to 20 percent this year. But matriculation rates remained steady at approximately 33 percent, according to Licht, although he said he is hesitant to release any definite figure, since some notifications have yet to be received. "About a third seems to be about right," Licht conceded, noting that Penn traditionally loses a percentage of matriculants to other Ivy League institutions. "We have very small departments, although for their size, they do exceptionally well," he said, noting that SAS has 10 departments in U.S. News and World Report's top 10 graduate programs. "However, there just no way that, say, our Religious Studies Department, which is tiny, can compete with the Harvard Divinity School," he said. The importance of the rankings is a side-effect of an insecure job market for those with doctorates, Licht feels, as cuts in government funding and tight budgets combine to force down the number of tenured teaching positions universities can offer. "Students feel they'll have better job prospects coming from a higher-ranked department," Licht said. "Unfortunately, this often means they disregard which school is the better fit for them." At the same time, the glut of doctorate holders seeking jobs has led departments to cut back on the number of candidates they take, contributing to both the drop in applications and the drop in admissions. "There has been a conspicuous effort to decrease the number of Ph.D.s given out," Licht said, though he noted that the numbers varied from one department to the next. For example, Psychology admitted 29 percent fewer students, and Economics admissions decreased by 10 percent, while History bucked the trend and doubled the number of doctorate candidates it took. Licht cited two reasons for this drop, calling the first "quality control." "More and more, the very top tier of potential Ph.D.s is being thinned by the pull of industry," Licht said. "Given the job market, many students just don't feel secure [career-wise] about going into academia," he added. "Med school, law school, business school -- they're all much more stable options." The second reason involves SAS's constrained budgetary situation, which has hurt departments' ability to give scholarships for doctoral candidates, creating a financial gap too great for most students to hurdle. "We like to be able to give our students the [monetary] means to get through grad school," Licht said. As for the application drop, Licht mostly blames the insecure job market, although he won't know how other school's pools fared until their graduate deans meet later this spring to compare data. A "Penn effect" might also have contributed to the decrease in applicants, with this year's crime wave scaring away potential students. In addition, Licht noted that Regional Studies and American Civilization, which together have historically accounted for about 100 applicants, stopped offering graduate programs.