When is PhD Admission Decision Available?

Again the credit goes to an applicant with the search item “when do admissions decisions come out for economics phd”. The deadline of application to the universities varies greatly from as early as 31^st of December to as late as 15^th of March. However, normally it’s a good idea to apply before 15^th of February to the universities where the deadline is 15^th of March. This increases your chances of getting admission with assistantship. Do not wait for the last date to apply.

After the application deadline, the admission committee sorts the application and start the admission process. Though I don’t really have much information on how an admission committee works but probably they sort the application first, according to GRE scores. Since a university gets much more applications than they can actually opt for and they don’t have enough time to go through all the applications, sorting the applications or the basis of GRE scores makes sense. They normally have a minimum score of GRE and they are not going to look upon the application with a GRE score less than that. This makes evaluation of applications a lot easier. One might ask why GRE score? The answer is simple: no other method of sorting is going to as easier as sorting according to GRE score.

Once they have sorted out the application on the basis of GRE scores, it’s very difficult to say what the most important factor considered for admission is. One of the admission committee members says ‘after we sort out the application on the basis of GRE scores, we look at all other factors very carefully’. That means they give equal weightage to all other factors. Depending upon the size of the program, it may take anywhere from 3 weeks to 8 weeks to be admission decisions to be taken and the successful students to be notified. They would also notify the rejected applicants and sometimes they are going to notify the applicants who are on the waiting list as well. Some universities display the admission decision of a particular applicant on his application account, however, almost every university will notify the applicant about their admission status by email or at least, notifying them that the result is available online.

The admission decisions begin to be notified to students by the second week of February. It would be probably a reasonable estimate to expect the admission decisions to be out after one month of deadline though. The waiting time for admission decision is indeed, anxious. However, to keep busy oneself if he isn’t already, can start preparing himself for the graduate school.

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