To KennedyAM- My app went out with the first SOPHAS mailing (10/17, I believe)
Re: applying to schools with higher name prestige and lower ranking rather than schools with higher ranking but less name prestige, here's my answer:
An MHA or an MPH in healthcare management is a professional degree, and in order to succeed professionally you need various personal capital: knowledge, hard skills, soft skills, the right experience, a broad and effective network, and a resume that can somehow pique the interest of hiring managers, among other things. U.S. news rankings can't possibly be the ultimate factor in deciding what the best school is for everyone. We all enter grad school with different experiences, skill sets, and needs that the rankings simply don't account for. All the programs I applied to I like for different reasons, certainly some more so than others, and as I move forward in the process my opinion changes.
So Yale will always have the Yale name. It's a validation. It says something special about you in every professional circle, whether it is health, business, journalism, or theatre. Then again, what are the big names in healthcare: Johns Hopkins? UCSF? Harvard? UNC? Names are beyond recognition, they are networks, they're an edge and edges are always important.
So Columbia and Yale and Johns Hopkins may not be in the top 5 but they have other attractors that set them apart, like 2 years w/a paid year residency for Hopkins, and many of your classes will be at the School of Management at Yale. They're also in the Northeast, which is an awesome place to live as a young adult and they have more connections to job opportunities in those respective areas.
U.S. News may have ranked University of Michigan as the #1 healthcare management school, but it just isn't for me. You honestly couldn't pay me to live there. Furthermore I'm not going to spend 2 years of my late twenties there when I could be somewhere else with a program that's just as good, and most likely fits my needs better. A #1 school doesn't guarantee you your dream job- You do that. It starts with a good education, but it's so much more than that. Work your connections, develop awesome relationships with your professors, land that internship that will get your foot in the door of that company you want to be working for when you graduate. Of course you still want to get into the best school possible, but I look at the rankings as more fluid than absolute.
So when I created my list of schools I took all of those things into consideration to create a collection of schools that represented the diversity of strong programs out there. If I knew I really didn't want to go to a school (regardless of their ranking) I didn't apply. I've lived places that really made me unhappy, so even though I know a program is amazing, if I'm not happy I won't do as well academically and professionally.
I suppose it just comes down to knowing myself, my limits, and my personal and academic ideal situations. I also know that my ideals may not be someone else's, so I would hope that in the best of all possible worlds, we would be able to self select into the programs that best reflect our individualities. And I seriously hope that isn't a pipe dream haha.
