I do agree that the match is definitely very important for your sanity and happiness while dating, but, as many have mentioned, a hot (i.e., ranked higher, better reputation, etc.) girl tends to hang around with a lot of other hot girls and friends. In academia, hot, high-maintenance girls do have more substance, in general.

If your goal is to become a professor at a kind of college you attended as an undergrad, you can just see whom your former professors have dated — mostly smoking hot girls or very pretty girl-next-door types. Who’s better to date for your goal? No brainer there.

Once you leave academia, your potential employers in industry, without any appreciation of your work, often measure your coolness by whom you dated in the past. And they only look at how good-looking they were, and none of substance, unless you develop good skills relevant to the employer while dating your girl.

I feel that some well-meaning people are not very honest in undervaluing the great advantage that students with the hottest girlfriends enjoy. These people ignore the fact that most beginning graduate students do not have sufficient experience and expertise in the field to know what their great matches really are to begin with! They figure that out after they score, at which point they might learn better matches are elsewhere — reason why abstinence can be bad.

In general, hotter girls give you more opportunities or values for your future success one way or another, especially at an early stage of career when you need help most. I do strongly agree with Julianne’s recent post that in the end your can always control your own destiny to a great extent, by working even harder and being goal-oriented than your peers with hotter girlfriends. However, beginning students often need to figure that out themselves or be well-informed by those already in the know when deciding on which girl to date. Most average, matching girlfriends wouldn’t frankly tell you that you might end up needing to crawling up so hard in struggle, once your good days together are in the past. And who knows some might even transmit you an STD without telling you about it…

Good thing students now have Google to gather a lot of information these days.

Also, I disagree that playing around with boyfriends in between undergrad and grad schools can be awkward. Experimenting with boys helped me tremendously in figuring out that I do prefer girls, hot or not. And I’m a guy.

Top places are good for a simple reason, they are good. Tons of smart people around to talk to, students are good, postdocs are good, etc. Research wise there is no comparison, lots of seminars, visitors to talk to and learn from.

That being said, having a fun advisor and a good research project counts as much as hanging around with the Ivy league. If you do well, you’ll be fine and get a postdoc and faculty job in a good place you’ll enjoy your life and do good job at. Smart people are recognized no matter where they are, but there are a lot of smart guys out there, and not that much to share, so sometimes it boils down to the fine print…

G

On Wall Street, I am guessing they would tend to go for the prestige value of the school — and that is probably the prestige of the school as a whole, and not the department or subfield.

The bottom line is that is not an inherently foolish move to accept an offer from a somewhat less prestigious place — but you should have a good reason for doing so. (And this is what happens in practice — most students with an offer from Harvard and a second tier school DO go to Harvard).

The one complicating factor here (at least in my post), is that we have cast the decision in terms of your fit to the PhD program. However, if you are thinking of declining Harvard not because your specific interests are better met at some lower-ranked school, but because other factors in your life (your actual girlfriend or boyfriend, children, family, a fondness for sunbathing, etc) then you possibly ARE trading off more explicitly, I think. And that is indeed a tough problem, since you are not asking “What is the best school for me?” but “How do I balance these two competing desires?”

Question to Richard E and Sean: If two good but not stellar people with comparable research records are competing for a job at a 2nd/3rd tier uni or at a Wall Street firm, and one has phd/postdocs from Decent U. and the other from Top-5 U., do you dispute that the latter will have a big edge? (assuming they are more or less similar in other regards)

Having been in a position to offer positions at both postdoctoral and faculty level at a couple of “second tier universities,” I can say with some confidence that where the applicants obtained their PhDs is not something I really even consider. Apart from making sure that their research area is a good match and that they are capable of delivering a lecture with some degree of competence, my main criterion for offering the job is their publication record. That is not to say that there isn’t a strong correlation between the quality of PhD institution and who gets the job offer, but, as I am sure you are aware, correlation does not imply causation. In this case, as argued above, it simply shows that top schools do quite a good job of selecting good candidates and training them reasonably well.

When it comes to Wall Street, however, I suspect that the story could well be different. They are really not in a position to judge an astronomer’s job application on its scientific merits, so could well use the fact that top schools are quite good at picking and training top people as an indicator of merit, albeit a rather crude proxy.

Question to Richard E and Sean: If two good but not stellar people with comparable research records are competing for a job at a 2nd/3rd tier uni or at a Wall Street firm, and one has phd/postdocs from Decent U. and the other from Top-5 U., do you dispute that the latter will have a big edge? (assuming they are more or less similar in other regards)

Also, what Aaron (#23) said is so true. Before switching to physics i started off doing a maths phd in one of the best math depts in Europe, and the inspiration value of being in such a place cannot be overstated.
Not just the people but the atmosphere as well — it’s like “great things get done here, and you could end up doing some”. In fact I’m sure it was only by internalizing some of that that i managed to keep going with research at the subsequent places.

I think you really could have been more sensitive to avoid gender stereotypes. You actually explained your point better in comment #19. And some commenters went ahead and stretched the analogy even further to include sexual intercourse. This really isn’t helping.

If you have ambition, take the hard option, or you’ll live to regret it.

But even if the only difference between school #5 and school #50 were reputation, and not real scholarly achievement or ability at training students, we would obviously expect that school #5 would churn out more future faculty members, because talented prospective students will very often default to the school with a better reputation. The point is, it’s also possible to be a great success coming from a school with a lesser reputation, if it is a good fit to what you want to do and you make the most of it while you are there. If you truly feel that you would be better trained and write more interesting papers and become a better scientist by going to school X than school Y, and yet you choose to go to Y because it’s ranked higher by US News, you’re making a terrible mistake. But if you feel that you would get better training at the higher-ranked school (which is statistically more likely), then by all means go.

Your performance at grad school is not entirely uncorrelated with your performance as an undergrad, so the likely outcome for a student who had an offer from Harvard AND TURNED IT DOWN to go to Decent U. for their PhD will not necessarily be same as that of a student from Decent U. who did not also have an offer from Harvard.

The second issue is that if you do go to (say) Harvard, your advisor is most likely (but not always, of course) having more impact than the person you would work with at Decent U — this is unfair to some extent but it makes the Harvard student look better when s/he applies for a post-doc since their papers are more exciting; it is not just the fact you have a PhD from a famous place.

(And there is a reason why Harvard professors are, on average, better than those from Decent State U — the Harvards of the world cherry-pick the good ones from everywhere else. Think of a senior hire as a Steel Cage Match between the Harvard endowment and the finances of Decent U — a process which is typically short and messy)

That said, if you can identify a specific professor or group at Decent U which is clearly doing world class work and they are enthusiastic about having you work with them, then go there — since the people reading your post-doc applications will know their quality, since they are in the same field.

#15 is right that having a PhD from a famous school can never hurt, but some of the bias here is rational, rather than simply a consequence of hiring committees being blinded by prestige. (And I work at a place considerably better known than the institution at which I gained my PhD — so YMMV)

The study I am thinking of looked at the academic career success (based on tenure, research funding, and awards, I think) as a function of where academics went to school, the research success of their graduate advisers, and the academic career success of other students with the same adviser. The conclusion was that the last was not only the most important, but that (because of the correlation between the three), the last is the only factor that need be considered; once you consider the success of common advisees, school choice and personal research success of the adviser offer no additional information.

This suggests an approach: look for people doing the sort of things you want to be doing after grad school, and find out who there advisers where. Consider a school simply as a means to the end of getting the specific adviser you want.

This seems fairly intuitive. A good school is good only because they have good faculty. If someone is skilled at research but a poor adviser, their advisees will not be helped much.

A final warning: there can be a depressing aspect at (some of) the lesser schools — the “if you were any good you wouldn’t be here” syndrome. This typically arises when almost all the faculty are Ph.D’s from illustrious institutions; then there can be a tendency for them to regard their own grad students (and postdocs!) as losers who couldn’t get into the same schools as them. Beware of such places and avoid them if you can — research is hard enough already without having to do it in that kind of depressing environment. A common clue to such places is that the grad students are expected to address faculty as “Prof./Dr. So-and-so” rather than by first name.