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In your opinion, which is more important when deciding where to do a PhD?

Choosing a top-tier university with a brilliant professor who is an excellent mentor or choosing a decidedly average university with a professor who you do not know the quality of their mentorship, but the subject matter is naturally more interesting to you?

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    I give you my two cents here. Do not embark on a Ph.D. program unless you enjoy the type of research you would do for your Ph.D. program. The Ph.D. itself is not an easy task even if you love what you do.
    – user2512443
    Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 8:00
  • Actually, it depends on what sort of career you want to have. Probably it will wind up more like that of the advisor you choose than the other. If that makes you happy, then it is what you want. Mentorship would mean a lot to me, though. Your choices might well be different.
    – Buffy
    Commented Feb 15, 2019 at 17:49
  • @Buffy The rather extreme editing omits an important point in the original question, where OP said that they would likely spend a lot of their time with the excellent mentor working on side projects that interested them more and then try to switch fields after graduating. Not many people could be an excellent mentor for a different field, and going it alone and switching fields after graduating is a really tough row to hoe.
    – Elizabeth Henning
    Commented Feb 15, 2019 at 18:33

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Some people are fairly agnostic about their choice of dissertation topic and are happy learning to become interested in whatever interests their advisor. The fact that you are posting this question suggests that you are not one of those people.

You'll be happier, do better work, and set your career in the right direction if you pick an area that genuinely interests you. It's true that an advisor's prestige has a lot of currency, but it's not worth so much that it makes sense to sacrifice what you feel is best for you in the long run. Grad school is tough enough without the stress of added friction.

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Lets talk about some statistics first-

  1. institutional prestige matters in hiring decisions made by committees. Getting your PhD or doing a Postdoc at a top 10 university matters. The degree in which it matters varies across fields. If you did not get your PhD in History from Harvard, you are at a major statistical disadvantage in obtaining a tenure track position. See Clauset, A., Arbesman, S., & Larremore, D. B. (2015).
  2. Publishing during your PhD career is highly correlated to your academic productivity during tenure track. Graduate students tend to have better publications records at elite institutes. See Horta & Santos (2016). Whether this is because of the more competitive culture, the increase in graduate student "quality", or the pressure from a demanding professor is unknown. Probably a combination.
  3. These above two factors depend on field. Fields that have strong cultures of scholars having been in the field prior to academia give less weight to institutional prestige (e.g. education and nursing) but they still care.

So in other words, grad students in an elite university tend to publish more. They also tend to dominate tenure track positions.

You dont have to go to an elite university for your phd, but you at least need to do so for your post doc or masters.

In my own experience, I had a strong publication record at graduation, did my postdoc at an elite university, and was hired for a tenure track position at an R1 university. My advice might very well be biased to my own experiences but I feel that the data and statistics say that my experience was the norm rather than the exception.

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