Application Status & Decisions

Application status

As the admission process proceeds, the department will be updating the status of your application online on the activity page.  Please do not email the department to check on your application's status; rather, you should continue to check your activity page for notes and information.  Note that the status of new materials is not immediately updated on your activity page after upload.  Once all materials have been received, the application will be marked "complete", and it will then be reviewed by the Admissions Committee.  Stanford University will be closed during the last two weeks of December, so do not expect to see status updates during this time.

Admission decisions

The Admissions Committee first selects the most qualified applicants from the applicant pool and presents this subset to the department faculty as a whole to review.  No single faculty member makes an admission decision.  Admissions decisions are generally made by the department faculty by mid-March.  Notices of admissions status are delivered to applicants around that time and responses from applicants should be received by the department by mid-April.  Please inform us if your mailing address changes by emailing our office at linguistics [at] stanford.edu.

Application feedback

Unfortunately, we cannot give individual feedback to our applicants.  We urge applicants to read the material on our admissions pages carefully as it represents our best advice to all applicants.

Deferral Policy

The department strongly discourages deferrals of matriculation, but it has granted one-year deferrals to admitted students in rare instances.  Deferrals are only granted when the educational benefits to the student are considerable or when there is a compelling personal reason for delaying matriculation; they are not granted to a student who simply wants a year away from academic pursuits.