About
Why Grad School Navigator exists.
Grad School Navigator grew out of more than a decade helping tens of thousands of students and families make life changing decisions. We are building the resource we wished every applicant already had: all the relevant information to make informed decisions, and the opportunity for every student to take their best shot at a life changing experience.
Our beginning
From private advice to a resource anyone can use.
Grad School Navigator was founded and built by Alan X. Chen, after spending more than a decade growing a global platform of over 2,000 consultants worldwide. Together, they helped tens of thousands of students win admission to leading programs globally, including more than 2,000 to Ivy League programs and 10,000 to Top 20 programs.
That experience made the scope of the information problem clear. Key facts were scattered across university sites and tedious to find, industry consultants were giving bad advice based on folklore, the good advice and its context were all behind closed doors. These are all issues that we hope to address with GSN, enabling every student and family to make a fully informed decision at a juncture they have spent years preparing for.
Grad School can be a life changing experience. The key work and decisions that determine this juncture deserve the same care as the years spent preparing for it.
The work
A workspace, not another directory.
Our Programs Explorer brings requirements, deadlines, costs, rankings and application intelligence into one place. Applicants can compare programs on a consistent set of facts, save their work and return to it as their shortlist develops.
The underlying repository covers 30,000+ graduate programs and 50,000,000+ data points. This includes evidence from 900,000+ real applications and advisor notes that add context that a standard program catalogue cannot provide.
Rankings
Why we publish our own rankings.
It was apparent from our years of advising that widely used global rankings were fundamentally skewed and reflected institutional incentives. They created misconceptions and were misaligned with applicants' interests. Given a vacuum for student-centric rankings, we decided to construct our own. Our rankings are therefore constructed based on a simple premise: student first.
For both our overall and subject rankings, we aim to rank based on long-term outcomes and value added for students. We combine industry-standard elements (research strength, employability, global engagement, and learning experience) with student-centric demand indicators such as revealed preferences and independent expert judgment to ensure alignment.