A professor writes in with some questions that arose during the recent season of graduate admissions.
They write:
How are departments putting up their prospective graduate students during visits? Are they housing them with current grad students? In a hotel? In a hotel with other prospective students? An AirBnB? With faculty? Making them figure it out themselves?
To these questions we might add related ones about transportation: Are programs flying in prospective graduate students? Asking students to make their own transportation arrangements and then reimbursing them afterwards? Offering neither planning nor pecuniary travel assistance? And what about local travel?
Comments and additional related questions welcome.
When I was being recruited, I had two first-round offers. One school arranged for me to stay with one of their current graduate students. The other paid for a hotel.
As a graduate student 10 years ago, I was invited to two prospective weeks, one on the East Coast (R1, top 20) and one on the West Coast (R1, top 10). In both cases, the schools arranged for me to stay with graduate students of the same gender.
Now, as an assistant professor (R1, top 30), we pay for hotels for our prospectives. It is more expensive and less warm, but safer for everyone.
I stayed in a B&B during my visits, and I would strongly preferred having a space to myself for downtime.
I’m was an applicant this year. I was invited to visit 4 schools and I visited 3.
1) Reimbursed for flights and taxi to and from airport. Program booked the hotel room and handled transportation on the visit day (grad students giving us rides).
2) Program booked flights and hotel. Hotel had airport and campus shuttles. Financially, them booking everything was best because I didn’t have to wait months for a reimbursement.
3) I booked flights and will be reimbursed. I stayed with current graduate students on their couch. They hosted one other prospective. Transportation was mostly rides from current graduate students, including airport pickup. They offered to book a private hotel room.
4) I didn’t visit. Offered to reimburse up to a set amount for everything (flights, ground transport, and accomodations). I didn’t think the amount would be enough, but maybe I could have stayed with a current student.
My thoughts: It sucks waiting for around $1000 in reimbursements. I understand why programs don’t book all our fligths for us, but it still isn’t ideal. This number could have been much higher if I’d visited one or two more programs.
I liked the visit where I stayed with current students the most. I got to know the program, students, and town better. My hosts were great and we chatted in the evenings. This probably wouldn’t have worked in a city with very expensive housing though. They had a spacious living room. Staying at a hotel was nice because I didn’t worry about things like breakfast, when to shower, and when I came or left.
When I was at UT Austin they insisted on pressuring the grad students to host the prospective students (and pick them up from the airport, etc.) without any reimbursement for the grad students. Most of the prospective students stayed for several days and expected to be fed and shown around, so this was not a small ask! The meager grad stipend added insult to injury. Hopefully they’ve since changed that practice, but who knows.
I’d never heard of departments providing or reimbursing prospective grad students for travel/accomodations, except maybe at particularly fancy and well-funded programs. In recent years, my grad department had zoom info-sessions for prospective students, and would certainly welcome students who wanted to visit in person, but there wasn’t any formal arrangement for doing so. I’d be interested to hear if this is really a common thing?
Yes, this is common, even at not-that-well-funded departments.
At Illinois (aka UIUC), there are bureaucratic factors that make it impossibly difficult for the department to cover travel costs for visiting prospective students. This year, as in the past, all visitors were housed in (individual) hotel rooms and their meals were paid for throughout their stay.