Picking schools is a tough, long process. Given your overall undergrad/grad GPA, GMAT/GRE score, research experience, programing skills, your goal after PhD, etc., you want to strategically decide which school you apply. The acceptance rate is different among schools: the higher ranked schools they are, the lower acceptance rate they have. You should expect the top schools to have an acceptance rate of around 1% while the second tier schools accept around 5% of their candidates. Most schools admit only 2 to 4 students each year. This means that top schools receives 300+ applications while second tier schools will receive somewhere between 50 and 100 applications.
Some of you wonder how to rank schools. One time, I had a chance to talk with someone who was accepted to a few school. The person asked me my view of those schools while the person had an inpression (which was given by a professor of his university) that all schools are about the same level. While inputs from professors at your university are helpful, make sure that you do your homework. There are a few things that you should consider as you choose/rank schools.
Placement
Faculty publications
Faculty research/age
Faculty salary
When you go to school's website, many schools publish their placement of the students each year. Some schools may give a detailed list of who went which school/private sector while others may say "recent years, our students are placed at following schools" with a list of schools. Some people may say that the schools with the later form are hiding some information to attract students. In some case, it may be true, but not always. In fact, I know that some top schools have detaied list but they do not list students who went to a private sector. While the list is not something that guarantees your future, look it carefully to see what kind of placement each school has on average. Also you may want to see the trend of placement if possible. It is good to have about 5 years of data and see the trend to understand how things are going at each school. If it is not published, you may want to email the school's administrator to see if you can get a list. The question you want an answer for is:
Where do the graduate of this school heading to after graduation?
Unless you are going to lower tier schools, you are probably driven to be research faculty in the future. When you are hired as an assistant professor, you will have research obligations. Schools with a teaching load of 3-0 (one semester teach 3 sections and the other 0 section) require an assistant professor to publish 3 articles in one of the top journals in Finance or Economics (some school may be ok with one A- journal). Given the acceptance rate of the top journals are around 2%, it is better for you to go to a place where there are research activities. There are two schools that publishes ranking based on publications in top journals.
Both have different methodologies, but it gives you a good idea of number of publications from each school and its rank based on it. You may want to look at about past 5 years since people move around. For the UTD ranking, choose Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and the Review of Financial Studies to generate the ranking. When you check the rankings, you may want to check to make sure that those who are publishing in top journals are finance professors (sometimes accounting and strategy professors publish in finance journals), and not only one or two professors are publishing from the same school since PhD students want to have the ones with a good record as their advisors, but one person can advise so many. In summary, some of the things for you to know are:
How active is the faculty at a school in terms of research?
Are articles published in top journals consistently?
Are the studies published by a large group of professors or a small group at a school?
Faculty research is another important element that you should deeply consider. You want to find faculty who does some research in the area that you are interested in. You should go to school's website that you are interested in, go to the directory, and check each person's research interest and recent piblications. If you find that there is no professor who does something you are interested in, that may not be a good school for you to apply to. While I am not interested in discriminating people by age, you want to consider it as well. Some faculty may be very active in publishing in top journals, but the person's prime time may be towards the end, or he or she may retire soon. At the same time, if a school has a lot of young professors, you may want to check them to see the potential of them getting tenure.
What are the areas of interests of research active professors at a school?
How old is an individual professor: young, prime, or close to retirement?
Who are the big names in the school in terms of research?
Another thing that you may want to check is faculty salary, if possible. For example, you can see government employee salaries in Texas. You can check salary information in Tennessee as well. I did not do this much, but you can find a lot of information on website. Generally speaking, a school has a better research oriented professors if the school pays more to the professors. The best indicator for this is to check the salary for newly hired assistant professors. For example, in Texas, the highest paid assistant professors tend to be University of Texas Austin, and then Texas A&M, UT Dallas, followed by University of Houston, and so on. If you check the rank of schools, this is also generally the order of publication ranking.
How much on average the faculty in the department get paid?
How much does each individual earn as a professor?
Some people are more risk averse than the other. When you are actually deciding which school to go, one thing you want to remember is the job opportunity as you graduate in 5 years. In general, there are two job markets in the U.S. for PhD students: FMA and AFA. The schools that interview PhD students at FMA are normally lower-tire schools than ones do at AFA. You may think that if you are graduating a top-tire school, you can interview any schools you apply to. However, this tends to not be true. I had a few friends graduated from a mid/bottom of the 1st-tier school. They did not get many interviews at the FMA market (maybe) because of the school they were in. They had several interviews at the AFA market, which they were not successful of. On the other hand, students from schools like Texas A&M (and I think it applies to others like Penn State, Drexel, etc.) have opportunities at both AFA and FMA markets, depending on the quality of research of course. Yes, being in a decent school may not be easy to get into a very top school, but there may be more opportunities for the job.
The following list is the list of US universities that have a doctoral program in finance. While there are some good finance PhD programs in other coutries, majorities are in the US. All the names below are hyperlinked to the school's PhD program page.
Princeton University (Econ)