The American Psychological Association, that is. Should our APA adopt this model?
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
12 responses to “How a Different APA Handles Career Services for Academic Job Seekers”
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I emailed Brian, noting that the timing of his post was great. I sent him something that I'd been playing around with just a few minutes ago to see what he thought, and he recommended either sending it along to the APA or posting it here and getting some feedback first. Let's start by posting it here.
I've been worried about how the APA handles their job listings for awhile. I knew there had to be a better option, and after some digging I think I've found one. I found a free open source software that let's you create job listings. It's searchable. It's trackable via RSS. Since I already pay for server space, and I get domain registrations for free – it didn't cost me anything to set this up.
About a week ago I emailed a few philosophers so they could play around with it. Please keep in mind that this is merely a sandbox to sort of demonstrate that this can be done.
I was going to keep playing around with it, and wasn't sure if I would ever do much with it. But I thought since Leiter posted this question and we're about to have this conversation that it would be good to let everyone see the sandbox.
What do you all think should be done with this site (if anything)?
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The first thing that should be done with the site is let users rate posts. There should be a couple scales here. For example, how about a spam scale? If enough different users rate a post as spam, it gets dropped into the reject box (or severely downlisted). Then the morons who are currently trying to abuse the site get promptly rejected. (There are various ways of going about rejecting idiots like the morons spamming the site right now (e.g., requiring registration from an academic address, dropping adds to the bottom that get multiple upvotes from the very same IP address, etc…)
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Two comments.
About the Psychological Association website. I would not be in favor of a similar site in Philosophy. As I understand it, graduate programs in other disciplines do not have placement operations such as are standard in Philosophy. Psychology students who want academic careers are left to their own devices, with a bit of help from their dissertation advisers, if they're lucky. So the need for APA placement advice in Psychology is different from that in Philosophy. And the advice that Psychology students get from their APA website will not be as good as what Philosophy students get from their local placement advisors, because good advice in this area is highly dependent on context — on what kind of Ph.D. program one is in, what segment of the market one is applying to, and so on. Placement advisors in Philosophy can draw on a wealth of experience about what has worked in the past for students in their programs. How much does it help to have publications? How should a letter of application be structured? What works best as proof of teaching ability? What sort of presentation will be expected on campus visits? There are no universal answers to these questions.
About Andrew's website. Everything about the site seems good to me, except the online applications. A letter of intent and a CV don't fulfill the application requirements for a junior position. And it would be disastrous, from the perspective of hiring departments, if applications were completely costless to the applicant. As soon as an application comes through the door (or the wires) the hiring department is obliged to spend at least some time and effort on it. If applications were costless to the applicant, departments would be overwhelmed with frivolous applications. (By the way: these comments do not reflect the snobbery of a "high ranking" school. The problem is actually much worse, for example, in small liberal arts colleges, where there is less self-selection among applicants and the applications must be read by a department of 3 or 5 faculty.)
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Andrew, this is fantastic! I think the APA should hire you. I'd just say that integration with the APA seems important to me; running an independent site in parallel just complicates things, requires a multiplicity of submissions, and so on. Maybe it would be worth mocking up some real listings (e.g., from the summer web only ads) such that they could see how it would actually look/work? Great stuff.
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A question for David: There is a lot of material on the APsychAssoc website, but the most useful part is the searchable database of jobs, updated as soon as departments post them. This part:
http://jobs.psyccareers.com/search.cfm
This seems rather similar to Andrew's project. Is there something problematic about the way they set things up?
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Hi David,
I'm actually looking into how to disable that Apply Online feature. I don't like it either. There a bunch of different issues with having the job listing site handle applications.
Right now the Apply Online is coded into the default install. I've been playing around with how to remove it. I haven't had much luck yet. I wouldn't be comfortable having anyone use this site until these issues are worked out.
I'd love to talk to someone from the APA about incorporating this or handing it over to someone, but I would like access to it to be cheaper for the graduate students (e.g free and then you pay your APA dues if you get interviews and actually come to the conference). The point of setting this up was to emphasize to everyone just how cheaply you could get a site like this up and running.
Although, David's point about it costing something is a good one to eliminate frivolous applications. But even given that, I suspect some better option can be given to graduate students that's better than the current system.
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I'm wondering if there is any empirical evidence for David's claim that we would get more frivolous applications if it cost nothing. I gather the point is that the cost of photocopying and mailing is what serves as the deterrent, but I'm far from sure. First, it isn't much money. Second, many departments pay these costs. Third, there are plenty of very quickly eliminated applications in the current system, so if we are imagining things further down the list than, say, the worst 10% of current applications, I suspect the time needed to reject them would be very little.
Fourth, there are many compensating advantages to having files electronically. There is no need to copy them. There is no need to go to one's departmental office to find a file in a cabinet, that some colleague may have taken home with him. You can search around it far quicker. So I would think there would be very significant time saving on the files that one spends lots of time on with an online application system. It is hardly clear to me that the extra time rejecting a few frivolous applications would be larger than the time saved by having all of them in a vastly better format. (And of course the environmental and economic benefits of online applications are obvious.)
I recently ran an interdisciplinary (not philosophy) search with all on-line applications. This is only one imperfect data point, but I got no more frivolous applications than we do in typical philosophy searches. I eliminated them myself before even forwarding the files to the committee and I found that by far the easiest part of the screening job. Of course it all depends on numbers. If I had 1000 such files, it would be a serious burden. But 50 or 100 seriously frivolous applications? I honestly think that amounts to half a day's work for one person.
PS: I agree with everything David says about advising.
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Hey, Mark,
When I spoke of "costs", I didn't necessarily mean economic costs; I was thinking of time and effort as well. Uploading a CV is just too easy.
I guess I disagree about the cost to departments of eliminating frivolous applications. Every application has to be logged in, filed, and (if once it's completed) assigned to a reader, who must at least give it a once-over — and, we hope, an unbiased once-over — before rejecting it.
I should have made clear that I'm not opposed to online applications per se. I would certainly like to see the volume of paper reduced. But designing an online application system is complicated. For example: whereas I used to give my letter of recommendation to a departmental secretary, who mailed it out to all of the hiring committees, I am now required to upload the recommendations myself to 20 different online systems, each with its own peculiarities. There are solutions to this problem, but they require a certain degree of coordination among institutions, somewhat like the "common application" at the undergraduate level. And if the profession begins to converge on a "common application", the costs to applicants will approach zero again, which in my view is problematic.
A former colleague of mine used to argue — only half jokingly — that there should be a token application fee for grad school admissions and entry-level jobs, to defray the costs of processing or (what he preferred) to be divided among the successful applicants at the end of the process. Now, don't jump down my throat: I'm well aware of the economic injustices of such a scheme. But the idea expresses a fundamental fact, that burdening a department's selection process should not be cost-free.
PS: I agree with everything Mark says about advising 😉
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Come to think of it, a better scheme would be to divide the proceeds among applicants one the short list. Rejection letters could then say, "We not admitting/hiring you, but here's a few hundred bucks for making the short list"!
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There is already more than a token application fee for grad school admissions — NYU, for example, charges each applicant $85. I spent the year before graduate school in Americorps, and applying to 10 programs cost me more than my monthly Americorps stipend…
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Andrew Cullison's website is on the right track, but if this is going to be done at all, it should be done right. For instance, job posts should be searchable by application deadline, AOS, AOC, publications required, area of the country/world, teaching load, salary, etc… Every element of an APA ad that is idiosyncratic to philosophy job posts should be included and be something by which postings could be sorted. So, I could do a search for tenure-track positions, AOS Ethics and value theory, AOC open, in the Northeast, for example. Otherwise we'll be dealing with another sub-par implementation of the things that already exist. Furthermore, it should be free to graduate students and other applicants to peruse postings, and free for departments to post ads. No student should need to pay an APA membership to get access to these ads. If the site is to generate income, it can be done through monetizing it with ad revenue (either targeted amazon ads, or google's adwords, or paid ad spots such as what Brian uses).
I agree with some that it should not be possible to apply from the site. But, down the road, it would be nice to have personal accounts so that individuals could store their searches, for instance.
I am actually getting together with a friend to discuss exactly how to implement this using MySQL and PHP on Monday, but these things might not be needed if Andrew's option is sufficiently customizable. Andrew, if you run into a problem leave another message up here and I'll email you personally to discuss it…
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Dear Interested in a Better Search Site,
I like all of the above ideas, and so far it seems that the software I'm using has the options you suggest.
For example: Search "Metaphysics" and all and only those jobs with Metaphysics listed will show up. Search "October 14" and all and only those jobs with October 14 in the ad show up.
There are a few other software programs that I was going to play around with. So far this is the first one I've tried out.
Send me an email and we can talk more about it.
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