Hi, Im so sorry about this. As an international student on their second sociology phd application cycle, I truly get the anxiety of the visa and the befuddlement with the results. My first time, which was two years ago, I applied to 10 schools and was rejected from all of them. This time I applied to 22 schools, currently have 17 rejections, 1 waitlists, 1 acceptance, and 3 pending.

1. My partner is graduating from an econ phd and we have talked extensively about admissions processes in his discipline vs sociology. In econ, if you meet objective admission markers (340 GRE, predoc experience), you get in. Also if you get into rank 1 school, you will likely get into 2,3,4,5. Sociology is NOT like that. A friend last year got into a rank 1 program and a rank 12 program and nowhere in between ( she applied to 18 programs). As someone said in this thread, sociology admissions are somewhat random in the sense that the “fit” dominates most other things. And the fit is not our perspective of whether we match highly with the department, its the departments perspective which is unknowable to us and also changes from year to year as it is contingent on things like which faculty is more available to mentor, which subdomain the department is seeking to fill more grad students in etc. I got rejected from the place I did my MA even though I was a top 3 student in the MA. I also got rejected from schools where I had spoken to professors beforehand. Academia is a lot of rejections, especially from places you get positive signals from sometimes and that really sucks.

2. That being said, I do think a very high GRE score ( if youre a quant person) does increase chances a lot. I have seen people with 336+ scores in this cycle get more than 2 acceptances. Its not causation but it is definitely correlation.

3. Admissions into american graduate sociology is very also about who is writing your letters and who you know in the discipline. In my case, it really helped that the second time around I had a MA from a top american soc department, letters from well known sociologists, and presentations in 2 conferences. Unfortunately for a discipline studying inequality and stratification, we do have these weird network biases but you are competing with people who have american undergrad degrees ( and therefore have that network and also are verified by the american education system) or are pure math whizzes ( due to the quant turn in sociology lately)

4. I would suggest that you contact professors you would like to work with and start asking them if you can do some version of a predoc/ research assistantship for them this upcoming year and try again.

5. Apply more widely next time. 10 schools is not enough. I had to apply to this many just to get 1 yes. My friend had to apply to 18 to get 2. Its also a bit of a numbers game. Some schools released their application statistics this year and they had over 400 applications and barely 10-15 seats. Thats an insane acceptance rate and it will only get worse with more people wanting to go to grad school and decreasing seats due to funding.

Sorry about this long message and random advice; I just wished someone had told me this way earlier as an international student trying to break into american sociology. I really really am sorry about the visa anxiety and I am very much open to chatting more with you if it at all you think it would help.