Graduate Study in Psychology:

How to Decide Between Graduate Programs

Once you've been accepted to two or more programs, you will face the very difficult decision of having to decide which program to attend. This is a very serious decision, and you want to make sure that you make the decision in an intelligent way. Fortunately, psychologists who study decision making have developed techniques to help you make important decisions like this. (Keep in mind that you can use the following technique for all kinds of decisions.) Here's how I recommend that you make your decision:
  1. First, identify all of the aspects of the various programs that you are interested in that you think are important. What do I mean by that? It's easier to explain it by example. If I was choosing between three graduate schools, I would want to think about all of the following aspects (keep in mind that these are the important aspects for me--yours are probably different):

    Again, these aspects are things that I made up--you need to think about the aspects that are important to you. Also, keep in mind that you can have as many aspects as you want, but the more aspects you have, the more computations you will have to do. And make sure that your aspects don't overlap (i.e., make sure you don't have two or more aspects that basically say the same thing).

  2. The next step is to rank order these aspects in terms of importance to you. This involves personal judgments, so the rank-ordering below represents my personal importance judgments only; yours might be very different.

    1. program has a history of placing students in good jobs
    2. program offers good financial aid package
    3. program is in an area where it is inexpensive to live
    4. program offers the kind of classes I am interested in taking
    5. program offers opportunities to teach courses
    6. program is prestigious
    7. program is in an area where I would enjoy living
    8. program offers opportunities to do external consulting
    9. other students in program are friendly

  3. Now, the reason that we rank-ordered the aspects back in step 2 is that we need to rate the importance of each of these aspects in some way. Now that each aspect is rank-ordered, it will be easy to rate them the importance of each one. The type of scale you use to rate the importance of each aspect can be of your own choosing, but in this example, I will use the following 5-point scale:

    1 2 3 4 5
    not at all important to me somewhat important to me extremely important to me

    Fortunately, because we rank-ordered the aspects in the previous step, these importance ratings can be done quickly and easily. It's just like completing a questionnaire in which you were asked how important each aspect is to you:

    1. program has a history of placing students in good jobs (5)
    2. program offers good financial aid package (5)
    3. program is in an area where it is inexpensive to live (4)
    4. program offers the kind of classes I am interested in taking (4)
    5. program offers opportunities to teach courses (3)
    6. program is prestigious (3)
    7. program is in an area where I would enjoy living (2)
    8. program offers opportunities to do external consulting (2)
    9. other students in program are friendly (2)

    These ratings are called "importance weights". They represent how important each aspect is to you personally (except that these are my weights--you should make your own weights for your own important aspects). Save these importance weights for later steps.

  4. The next step is to rate each of the three graduate schools you are interested in on each of the aspects you have been using in the previous steps. These are evaluative ratings, so you want to rate how well each school does on each aspect. For example, I would use the 5-point scale below:
    1 2 3 4 5
    terrible OK excellent

    Of course, you need to have a lot of information about each program in order to make these ratings. (So if you haven't done your background research, this process won't be useful. But this process also shows you what you need to find out before you can make a good decision!) But assuming you've read a lot about each program you are interested in, you can now evaluate each one using the 5-point scale above. For example, here are my ratings of SUNY-Buffalo:

    1. program has a history of placing students in good jobs (3)
    2. program offers good financial aid package (2)
    3. program is in an area where it is inexpensive to live (5)
    4. program offers the kind of classes I am interested in taking (4)
    5. program offers opportunities to teach courses (5)
    6. program is prestigious (4)
    7. program is in an area where I would enjoy living (4)
    8. program offers opportunities to do external consulting (1)
    9. other students in program are friendly (2)

    So think about what these ratings mean. They mean that, based on the information I have, I think SUNY-Buffalo is OK ("3") in getting students placed in good jobs, that it is excellent ("5") in being located in an inexpensive place to live, etc. Of course, you need to do this for every program you are considering.

  5. Now you're almost done! But you have to do a little multiplying and adding first. You've gotten the importance weights for each aspect, and you've gotten the evaluative ratings for each program. Now, for each program individually, you need to multiply each evaluative rating by each importance weight and then add them up so that each program gets a score. For example, to do this for SUNY-Buffalo, I would do something like this:

    (Notice that the first value within the parentheses is my importance weight, and the second value in parentheses is my evaluative rating.)

    1. program has a history of placing students in good jobs (5 x 3) = 15
    2. program offers good financial aid package (5 x 2) = 10
    3. program is in an area where it is inexpensive to live (4 x 5) = 20
    4. program offers the kind of classes I am interested in taking (4 x 4) = 16
    5. program offers opportunities to teach courses (3 x 5) = 15
    6. program is prestigious (3 x 4) = 12
    7. program is in an area where I would enjoy living (2 x 4) = 8
    8. program offers opportunities to do external consulting (2 x 1) = 2
    9. other students in program are friendly (2 x 2) = 4

    Then add up all the products: 15 + 10 + 20 + 16 + 15 + 12 + 8 + 2 + 4 = 102

    "102" is SUNY-Buffalo's final score.

  6. Now if you have gone through this procedure for each program you are interested in (say, SUNY-Buffalo, Penn State University, and Ohio University), deciding which program to attend is easy! Choose the program with the highest score! So, for example, if SUNY-Buffalo got a final score of "102", Penn State got a final score of "97", and Ohio University got a score of "87", I should definitely choose SUNY-Buffalo. Why? Because SUNY-Buffalo's final score shows how good a school I think it is on the aspects that are most important to me. SUNY-Buffalo scored the highest.

    Now, at this point, you're probably thinking, "Why should I go through all this trouble to make my decision?". The simple answer is that you are making an incredibly important decision. It is important that you attend a program that scores high on the aspects that are important to you. And that is exactly what these score computations will tell you.

    And besides, it's not as tedious as it seems! The importance weights only have to be computed once--you use the same importance weights throughout your computations. So the only thing that changes for each program is the evaluative ratings.

    And besides the previous besides, when people are faced with big decisions like which graduate program to attend, they spend hours agonizing over it anyway! Why agonize? Just spend 15 minutes doing these steps instead (after you have spent lots of time collecting in-depth information about each program)!

    A FINAL CAUTION: Remember that the utility of this decision-making process depends on a few things. First, realize that if you don't think carefully about what aspects are important to you, you might make a bad decision. You need to think carefully about what aspects are important to you in order to wisely generate importance weights. Second, realize that if you don't have good information about how good the programs are on the aspects that are important to you, then you might make a bad decision. You need good information about each program in order to wisely generate evaluative ratings. If either your importance weights or your evaluative ratings are flawed, you might make a bad decision.

    NOTE: If you are a decision-making researcher and have any comments or concerns about the procedure I have outlined on this page, please post a message on the Graduate Study in Psychology Message Board. I'm sincerely interested in your comments. The above procedure was adapted from suggestions in books by Max Bazerman (2001) and Howard Raiffa (1968).

    Return to Graduate Study in Psychology Home