More on PhD Student Recruiting
On the subject of Ph.D. student recruiting, I really hesitate to give too many “trade secrets” away, but a few additional thoughts on this subject:
My previous article was specific to the Ph.D. program in the Computer Science Department. In addition to this program, the School of Computer has 6 interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs: Robotics, Language Technologies, Human Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, and “Computation, Organizations, and Society“. Any Ph.D. student in any of these programs can have any faculty member in the entire School of Computer Science for an advisor, but each program runs its own graduate admissions. And so the graduate recruiting I described previously was for only the core Computer Science Ph.D. program, and in fact the total number of Ph.D. students entering a School of Computer Science doctoral program is pretty large, well over 60 each year.
Now, my previous article painted a fairly rosy picture about our graduate admissions, and in fact we are in good shape. But when one gets into the details, some things have worked out better than others. For example, there is a lot of variation in our recruiting success, based on the area of research interest. Some areas, such as Programming Languages, have nearly 100% recruiting yields. Other areas are having a much more difficult time. Because the numbers overall are so small, the situation can change markedly from year to year. Since we allow students to choose their advisors (rather than the faculty dictating who works with whom), good recruiting becomes extremely important. It can certainly happen that a research area has a “dry” year, with very few new incoming students.
Looking to the future, I believe that recruiting the top Ph.D. student prospects will become even more competitive. According to the CRA Taulbee Survey, Ph.D. production has been on the rise:
But at the same time, CS Bachelor’s production has been falling off:
While it’s hard to know for sure, it looks to me like the pool of applicants might start to shrink, while our Ph.D. program (and others) will at least maintain size (if not grow). So we might all be competing a bit harder for our best applicants. I think it will be extremely important to keep improving the program and finding creative ways to do effective recruiting.
Peter Lee @ May 3, 2008