Policy school can be a really good deal. The case for going and tips for applying

*Disclaimer: This post was written in a personal capacity and reflects my views, not necessarily those of my employer. I have not actually attended policy school (I plan to update this post once I have), so please read with a grain of salt.*

I recently applied to a few policy schools. Despite having read a bunch of great resources before applying, I learned a few things along the way that I wish I would have known from the outset. This post is a summary of what was new or unexpected to me. If you’re considering policy school and haven’t read Horizon’s excellent posts yet, I’d encourage you to read them. I would also highly recommend joining Horizon’s email newsletter.

The case for policy school

• At some programs, you get paid to attend.
  • Princeton gives all admitted students full tuition, healthcare, a $35K/year stipend, and $850/week for the summer break if the student takes an unpaid internship. There are opportunities to receive funding from the university for up to 10 hours per week of volunteer work throughout the school year, and there is generous funding available for professional development, including travel.
  • Yale gives all admitted students full tuition, healthcare, and stipends of up to $27k/year. There is also substantial funding available for international travel.
  • Other schools have discretionary, but generous, financial aid packages. A friend who was admitted to Howard University’s policy masters program received full tuition plus a $35k/year stipend, and used this as leverage to get a matching amount of financial aid at a different program.
     
• Most policy schools aren’t hugely selective, and the application process is quick and cheap.
  • Acceptance rates for top policy schools are usually between 15% and 50% (as opposed to PhD programs or law schools which can have acceptance rates under 10%), and GRE averages are significantly lower at policy schools than at PhD programs.
  • Many schools don’t charge a fee to apply.  

  • I spent ~40 hours^[1] (excluding time studying for the GRE) applying to four schools. I had previously worked on other grad school apps - if I was starting from square one, this might be closer to 60 hours. 
     

• It’s possible to work remotely while in school if you’d like to.
  • Each program is different and I would recommend speaking with students and program staff. Of the programs I looked at:
    • One dean said that some students work full time, and that working 20 hours/week is fairly common. Current students substantiated this.
    • At another school, students usually only work 10 hours a week, but school is only in session 24 weeks of the year and there are opportunities to spend academic time on real-world policy work.
    • It was widely acknowledged by students at the two schools I was considering that grades aren’t important (and that it’s nearly impossible to fail, even if you don’t attend classes). Students are free to prioritize what’s most important to them, be that certain classes, their previous work, a mid-semester internship, or meeting new people.
       
• The learning opportunities seem incredible.
  • I’m excited about the availability of world-class faculty. Class sizes tend to be small and policy schools have experienced, sometimes Nobel Laureate, professors with whom students can directly collaborate.
  • Many policy schools provide experiential learning rotations where students get to test their fit at a partner org of the university (e.g., the World Bank).
  • At many (potentially all) policy schools, you can take classes from other graduate colleges at the university for free.
  • Qualitatively, I’ve been surprised by the extent to which policy masters students have said their coursework has been one of the largest influences on their worldview and career goals.
     
• Policy students are great to spend time with! They genuinely care about public service and making the world a better place, and they come from all sorts of interesting backgrounds.

  • One of my biggest motivations for applying to policy school was to get outside the EA bubble and learn different perspectives on doing good (e.g., less measurable approaches for systemic change^[2]). I’ve really enjoyed speaking with current policy school students - they come across as curious, passionate, truth-seeking, and warm.
     

• Policy school can open doors in credentialist fields.
  • In the field I’m currently working (aid policy grantmaking), many employers (e.g., big foundation, various aid agencies) have a tacit or explicit mandate of only hiring candidates with masters degrees for senior roles. An applicant could view policy school as a two-year investment to expand the set of jobs they are eligible for over the next 40 years of their career.
  • Policy school alumni who graduated 10+ years ago have told me that the degree has opened more doors than they were expecting it would.

The case against policy school

• Especially for those with short AI timelines, spending two years in school may feel like a significant cost.
   
• A policy degree isn’t strictly necessary for many types of policy work.
  • E.g., a JD or PhD would likely qualify a candidate for many senior policy roles, and may come with greater flexibility and prestige.
    • On the flip side, policy school only lasts 1-2 years, and is usually much less academically intense than law school or a PhD program.

Tips for applying

Here are a few posts with advice about applying to policy school:

• Studying for the GRE
• Selecting schools to apply to
• The applications themselves 

Below are a few assorted tips from my application experience that I haven’t found in other posts:

Know your audience

My understanding is that application readers are generally low-EA-context, progressive, highly educated, busy people who spend ~20 mins speedreading long applications.

In general, it seems like the admissions committees at policy schools are looking for high-EQ, ethical people with proven track records, who will matriculate to the program if accepted, and who are likely to be employed shortly after graduating. Bonus points for candidates who seem like they would be pleasant to be around, and for candidates who seem like they will be engaged with their program after graduating.

• I've heard that engaging with the program before submitting your application (e.g., attending webinars) might slightly improve an applicant's odds^[3].

Provide social proof

One of the ways to de-risk yourself as a candidate in the eyes of the admissions committee is to paint a picture of what you’re going to use the degree to do and why your plan is realistic.

I did this by giving examples of program alumni whose career path I want to follow, and the deans of multiple policy schools told me that they found it very compelling to see alumni named in essays.

Tailor examples for recommenders

You should not write your own letters of recommendation. You should give your recommenders tailored examples of what they could choose to write about.

One way to ensure the examples you provide are relevant for the questions your recommenders will be answering is to ask a recommender to sign into their LoR portal and share the prompts they are being asked. These might be questions like: “describe a time the applicant failed” or “provide examples that demonstrate the candidate’s leadership potential”.

Then, you can provide a list with a few specific examples. You might consider what would best complement the rest of your application, or what would mean the most coming from your recommender rather than yourself. E.g., if your organization under-titles relative to the level of impact or responsibility staff have, that is a lot more persuasive coming from your boss than from you.

Managing EA affiliation

I didn't go into detail about my connections to EA when applying; my involvement (conferences, virtual programs, Forum posts) didn’t add much to my application. It made more sense to talk about "improving global health and wellbeing" because that was my specific goal, while EA represents a broader set of areas.

I also avoided language about "maximizing" or "optimizing", which I thought might come across as arrogant or alienating to some readers, and I excluded side projects that might seem off-putting such as advantage gambling to raise money for effective causes.

To give more concrete examples, here are a few of the essays I submitted (1, 2, 3).

Using LLMs

I highly recommend reading each program’s LLM guidelines before using AI to edit your essays. Here were the takeaways from the schools I applied to:

What is not allowed:

• Feeding an LLM bullet points and asking it to write your essay (or a draft that you use substantial parts of).
• Asking an LLM to rewrite entire sentences or paragraphs of your essay and pasting these into your application.

What is allowed

• Pasting an essay draft into an LLM and asking
  • “Which parts of this are unclear or could be stronger”
  • “Does this essay seem to respond directly to the prompt?”
  • “I’m 20 words over the word limit. Which sections would you recommend cutting from?”
  • "Could you suggest an alternate word here that has a more positive connotation?"

Claude 3.7 is better than GPT4o in my experience, though it doesn’t hurt to use both.

Krystin Borgognone is very helpful

I had free informational calls with a dozen admissions consultants. I encountered a wide spectrum of helpfulness, from egregious snake oil (e.g., a company that charges over $50,000 for their “platinum” package), to consultants who add a lot of value.

The most helpful admissions consultant I found was Krystin Borgognone. I got introduced to her late in the application process, but even after I already had pretty polished drafts of my essays, she made some incredibly helpful edits and gave me actionable advice in just three hours. At the time of writing, she charges $125/hour (which is about 25% of what most admissions consultants charge).

If Krystin isn’t available, the other admissions consultant I would recommend is Oren Margolis. He’s a bit more expensive at ~$300/hour, but he’s a very down-to-earth and thoughtful person who gave me great advice. Had I not found Krystin, I think I would have hired Oren.

The value of applying wide

I think there is more variance in college and grad school admissions than most people expect. For this reason, and because you can reuse most of your essay content across applications, I think applicants should apply to a number of schools (including “far-reach” programs). Sites like Reddit show some (biased and self-reported) anecdata suggesting that it’s somewhat common for students at top policy schools to have been rejected from less selective schools.

Given that the fully funded policy schools are a great option for most applicants, I think that more people should toss applications to Yale and Princeton's programs (which cost $0 to apply to, and Yale’s application included just two short essays the year I applied). It's surprising to me that HKS’ MPP receives three times as many applications as Princeton’s MPA, and seven times as many applications as Yale’s MPP^[4]; I think most HKS applicants should also be applying to these other schools.^[5]
 

Please feel free to leave a comment or email me if you have any questions about policy school! I’m at sam.anschell (at) openphilanthropy.org.

1. ^{^}

    17 hrs on essay drafts, 8 hrs on editing with friends and family, 8 hrs on attending school webinars and asking people about policy school specific application advice, 5 hrs reformatting resume + other misc parts of the application, 2 hrs prepping recommenders and answering their questions.

2. ^{^}

    One person I spoke with said: “the large majority of the underlying pillars of EA come from outside the movement and predate it, in some instances by many decades—the thing that I think makes EA unique is around trying to put all of those points into a cohesive framework (or set of frameworks) and how it then operationalizes those pieces. But that’s also where there is probably more risk for groupthink and the comparatively very limited perspective/experiences of EA as a community can exacerbate that. [Policy school] is an opportunity to engage with people who use similar tools/approaches but come to those entirely outside of the EA community, so it may open up areas of growth and knowledge that are missed, simply by using certain approaches in a community that is comparatively small and homogeneous."

3. ^{^}

    I didn’t know this when applying, but a current policy school student who reviewed this post mentioned that some policy schools consider formal referrals from students when reviewing applications. They said that Yale’s Admissions Director sent a call for referrals earlier this year.

^{^}

 I’m inferring this from info suggesting that HKS, Princeton, and Yale have similar acceptance rates, and that HKS’ two-year early-career policy degree (MPP) has a class size of 243, whereas Princeton’s has a class size of 70 and Yale’s has a class size of 35. If we include HKS’ other policy degrees (MPA, MPAID, MC/MPA), HKS has a total class size of 616, Princeton SPIA has a total class size of 95, and Yale’s Jackson school has a class size of 60.

^{^}

 One factor I didn’t know going into the application process is that HKS offers considerably less financial aid than most policy schools. A dean I spoke with said that only eight out of HKS’ ~500 yearly MPP admits received full funding, and when I asked if they could match another school’s full tuition, she laughed and said “just go to the other school”.

Show all footnotes