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I've received some e-mail reports that some PhD programs are cutting back on PhD admissions becaues of the financial situation. Signed reports/links on this subject are welcome in the comments.
I have noticed that U.C. Santa Cruz, unfortunately, is on the list. I did not survey much, but I know Berkeley and Irvine are fine. Please see the link: http://philosophy.ucsc.edu/graduate/no_admissions.php
There are at least two ways to look at this. (1) As a bad thing, for a host of reasons that I think most of us understand; or (2) as also a good thing, since it may allow backlogged waves of unemployed graduate students to finally find placement. In about five years, clearing out the market queue will take pressure off of the bottleneck in the job market.
UCSC's shutting down admissions completely is rather extreme, but I would not be surprised if next year's cohorts were on the smaller side pretty much across the board.
I've heard from two different students that Duke is no longer accepting applications. Does anyone know whether this is right?
I'm sure that things are tough all over, including in Florida, but here at USF we've been given three extra Teaching Assistants for next year. Our administration thinks that it is a good time to be investing in new faculty and to be finding even better Ph.D. candidates.
I heard the same rumor about Duke, so I emailed Karen Neander for clarification. Here is the reply I received:
"The Department of Philosophy at Duke might not be accepting new PhD students in Fall 2010 but this hasn't been definitely decided yet. A decision will be made on December 1st. If the decision is made not to accept new PhD students for Fall 2010 , application fees will be refunded to those who have already applied. If the decision is made to accept, then applications will be processed into mid-December. The question has been raised due to a temporary budget pinch, combined with an exceptionally high acceptance rate over the previous two years. In general, Duke's budget is relatively healthy, but even they are feeling the economic downturn a bit. For more information, please check the department web-site after Dec 1st, or contact kneander@duke.edu. Karen Neander Director of Graduate Studies Department of Philosophy Duke University"
So look for an update on December 1st.. well tomorrow.
I believe we applicants are just as interested to learn whether (and to what extent) departments plan to curb the number of spots they offer, as Aldo suggests.
If the top twenty departments admitted, say, 200 applicants last year (given varying yields), but only plan to admit half (or three-quarters) as many this year, I would consider this Big News.
As far as I can tell, Colorado is not facing cutbacks in graduate admissions. In fact, there's a distinct possibility that we will be able to improve our funding packages for graduate students. Although we, like most other state systems, are facing fairly frightening budget cuts, the administration seems to be committed to maintaining or even improving the situation for graduate students.
I don't know what the situation is like there this year, but last year I passed on an admission to ASU, where I had been in the MA program, and bailed for the greener pastures–literally–of Kansas, due to the fact that I was told by the former that no funding would be on offer for ANY incoming Ph.D. students. A student from a different institution, whom I met while we both happened to be visiting yet another institution as prospectives, reported being told the same thing by ASU Philosophy ("You're in, but we can't fund you). I hope the situation is getting better over there, but it shows that the problem mentioned here stretches farther back than just this admissions season (though I suspect Arizona's public campuses are harder hit than many others due to the especially sharp loss of property taxes due from the housing crash).
I spoke to Karen Neander today, and it is true – Duke is not accepting PhD applicants for the Philosophy program for 2010-2011.
What Maryland has done during the past two years, and may in the future, is to divert some of the funding we could have used to take in new students and use it instead to support a few of our recent PhD's as postdocs, to help tide them over during this horrible job market. This was an internal, departmental decision, not something forced or even suggested by the administration, and not a response to budget cuts. We saw it as a way of standing behind some of our best recent graduates, who had already invested quite a bit of themselves in the field, rather than spending all our available money to put new PhD's in the pipeline when the market is already saturated.
At the University of Georgia we did lose one teaching assistantship due to budget cuts, but since the numbers of students on various kinds of university-wide fellowships fluctuates, the loss of one ta-ship is only a minor blip. The policy of our upper administration remains to expand graduate education across the university, and the Philosophy Department is always looking to increase the number and quality of its MA and PhD students. In recent years our MA program has been underutilized. Prospective philosophy graduate students wanting to postpone entry into PhD programs until the admissions cutbacks blow over would do well to consider doing an MA with us in the interim. MA students in our two-year program are eligible for teaching assistantships and often receive them. And two of our recent MAs are now enrolled in the PhD program in philosophy at Ohio State. Another is enrolled for a PhD in philosophy at Rutgers, with a fourth in the PhD program in philosophy at Chapel Hill.
Hooray to Prof. Horty and the Maryland Department! There are about 180 jobs listed in this year's JFP and there are about 400 or so people on the market, as far as I know. Do the math.
This news suggests that yield rates will be high again this year – and potentially higher than last year. I am curious to see if those departments that do admit students admit fewer students in light of this reasonable expectation. If so, there could be a dramatic dip in the number of admittances overall.
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