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Given the Job Market, Should PhD Programs Systematically Limit the Number of New Students They Enroll?

Brian Leiter

A young philosopher at a PhD-granting department writes:

Given the decline in new tenure-track jobs available, shouldn't PhD granting departments cut the number of slots for PhD students?  It is perverse for us to collectively continue to produce the same number of PhDs as the number of available jobs declines.  I am not talking about temporary halts to PhD admissions – I am suggesting something more along the lines of collectively, as a discipline, recommending a cap on the number of overall PhD slots available.  Or, at the very least, the APA should issue a statement *discouraging* people from pursuing PhDs in philosophy if their ultimate aim is a tenure-track job (much less a tenured position!).   One reason I say this is that admission to a grad program implicitly signals to the admitted student that the department is confident that the student has a chance to get a tenure-track job.  But, except for the very, very best departments, there is, as far as I know, no basis for this confidence and everyone knows this, so the signal is deceitful.

 

For those who focus exclusively on their own pocketbooks: the more out-of-work PhDs we produce, the larger the reserve army of "teaching labor," which in turn will put downward pressure on wages for adjunct and temporary faculty positions.  For some schools – especially state schools that do not throw down large sums for star faculty – this downward pressure on wages at the bottom will in turn threaten wages of regular (non-star) tenure-track/tenure faculty.

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50 responses to “Given the Job Market, Should PhD Programs Systematically Limit the Number of New Students They Enroll?”

  1. Ryan M

    I don't think that an arbitrary cap (and it would have to be arbitrary) that essentially bars some highly-qualified students from obtaining philosophy PhDs is advisable or feasible. For one thing, it would simply divert these students into alternative but related programs (such as academic divinity schools or interdisciplinary humanities programs). For another, it would significantly weaken the field by allowing the question of who becomes a tenured philosophy professor to be settled by admissions committees before individual students have had the chance to compete in philosophy grad school, which is a radically different undertaking than the undergraduate years considered by admissions committees. Finally, capping the number of philosophy PhDs issued will essentially take philosophy out of the growing joint-degree market, thereby weakening demand for philosophy professors even more. At least some students have an interest in learning philosophy at the PhD level – joining the field of philosophy – for purposes other than becoming tenured philosophy professors. The field should actively court such students while being frank and honest about the limited opportunities for finding tenured work as a philosophy professor.

    An alternative idea: expand joint-degree programs and applied philosophy tracks within philosophy departments. Find out where there might be a place for some philosophers in the economy beyond the walls of the academy, and then enable philosophy programs to open the doors to these opportunities. In doing so, philosophy departments would be following the example of law schools, which have had to cope with sharp declines in the legal job market in recent years. Rather than cap the number of JDs offered each year (although some have suggested that and similar ideas), law schools have responded by encouraging students to think more broadly about their career search and what they can do with their training.

    In these discussions, it's important to ask about the aims of graduate education: is it really entirely and exclusively about producing tenured professors? If we cap admissions to or shrink humanities PhD programs because of a poor job market for tenured professors, that seems to be the message we are sending. But maybe there are or can be other valid aims of graduate education in the humanities – such as passing on high-level knowledge of a discipline to students seeking expertise in that discipline.

    Reply
  2. Michael Kremer

    Many departments have in fact cut admissions for the same purely practical financial reasons that hiring has been cut — for good programs admitted PhD students cost money. I know this happened last year and I expect it will continue this year.

    Cutting admissions is, however, a bad thing for any individual program. A good philosophy PhD program depends on interaction between the students. I always tell my undergraduate students who are considering graduate school that they will learn more from their fellow graduate students than they will learn from the faculty.

    But in any case this whole discussion seems a bit premature. The current slump in hiring is clearly tied to the recent financial difficulties (both due to the pain suffered by university budgets, whether from state budget cuts, loss in endowment, or both, and to older faculty putting off retirement in the light of crashing retirement accounts). Whether this is a short term phenomenon or a long term trend remains to be seen. If it is a short term problem, then the imbalance between jobs and job hunters now will not be addressed by reducing the number of new PhDs on the market 6-8 years from now.

    Reply
  3. Paul

    In response to Ryan N.:

    "I don't think that an arbitrary cap (and it would have to be arbitrary) that essentially bars some highly-qualified students from obtaining philosophy PhDs is advisable or feasible."

    I don't understand why it would have to be arbitrary. Were we to discover that a certain percentage of entering students never find employment, and could identify where most of them were coming from, and then we eliminated those positions— this would seem non-arbitrary to me.

    "For one thing, it would simply divert these students into alternative but related programs (such as academic divinity schools or interdisciplinary humanities programs)."

    Is there empirical support for this? Had I not been accepted to a philosophy program, I can guarantee you I would not have ended up in a divinity school. At any rate, even if everyone who was displaced by a cap did decide to go to divinity school, why would that matter? It might simply increase the quality of divinity students. Or not. But presumably these programs will NOT be increasing their size to accommodate the increased applications from rejected philosophy students!

    "For another, it would significantly weaken the field by allowing the question of who becomes a tenured philosophy professor to be settled by admissions committees before individual students have had the chance to compete in philosophy grad school, which is a radically different undertaking than the undergraduate years considered by admissions committees."

    This is only true if it is impossible to predict ahead of time which programs will produce professors that will make an impact on the field. But I take it that one of the reasons the Leiter Report exists is that one's graduate program correlates highly with success down the road. So, if you are admitted to institution X, and institution X never produces any philosophers that have an impact on the field, you can eliminate all of institution X's graduate student slots without having a detrimental impact on the field.

    "At least some students have an interest in learning philosophy at the PhD level – joining the field of philosophy – for purposes other than becoming tenured philosophy professors. "

    I agree with this. But it needs to be weighed against the significant downside of producing many more PhDs than there are jobs.

    Reply
  4. Wes

    I'm currently an ABD student at a department outside of PGR's top-50. When I entered the program, I wasn't aware of the realities of the job market for non-pedigreed students like me, especially in the incredibly bad market everyone is now facing.

    I've since gained a more realistic understanding of my prospects. Though I'll attempt to find a tenure-track position, I realize that my chances of doing so are slim.

    While this is extremely disappointing to me, I would not trade the past four years of my studies for anything. I've developed skills and understanding that have made my life more fulfilling. Will these help me become financially successful? Probably not. But there's more to education than preparing someone for employment, right? Rawls wrote (and I only know this because I've had the chance to study him), "… the value of education should not be assessed solely in terms of economic efficiency and social welfare. Equally if not more important is the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs, and in this way to provide for each individual a secure sense of his own worth."

    If I hadn't been given the chance to study philosophy, I think I would have missed out on something that I've found tremendously valuable.

    Additionally, I don't think that out-of-work PhD's are going to pose a serious threat to wages for everyone else. As many of us have realized the unlikelihood of academic employment, we've begun making contingency plans. I don't think you'll find a lot of PhD's willing to spend the rest of their lives as adjuncts. No one can make a real living out of that. Most of us will find other jobs in different sectors (we'll have to do so to support families).

    Reply
  5. Jonathan

    This is a question that all disciplines, not just philosophy, will have to consider. The answer however is by no means an obvious one. For one thing, the benefits of any reduction in admissions would only be felt five to eight years down the line, when a smaller entering class enters the job market for the first time. Reducing class sizes does nothing to alleviate pressure on the market now. Moreover, we should consider whether such a reduction should be across the board or whether weaker programs ought to be alleviated altogether. There is to my mind no obvious reason why weak departments should have graduate programs, apart from the mercenary interest in a cheap labor supply. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, reduction of class sizes should, I would think, be secondary to advocating for more jobs and postdocs. The depressed job market is not entirely out of our control.

    Reply
  6. Jonathan

    Pardon my under-caffeinated mistake. I meant whether "weaker programs should be eliminated altogether" (though perhaps that is a form of alleviation!)

    Reply
  7. Paul

    Wes said:

    "Additionally, I don't think that out-of-work PhD's are going to pose a serious threat to wages for everyone else."

    I am not qualified to assess this claim, but would be very interested to hear from someone who is. I had always assumed that having a nearly unlimited supply of people qualified to teach philosophy drove down wages and benefits. Maybe not so much for "stars." But for "everyone else."

    Reply
  8. prospective grad

    I think the problem might be less about how many new PhDs are minted every year, and more about this:

    "admission to a grad program implicitly signals to the admitted student that the department is confident that the student has a chance to get a tenure-track job."

    Really? The first year of grad school seems like a long way out to say something like that, to me. Maybe we should focus on giving ambitious undergraduate students an accurate and honest picture of what the situation is, rather than just arbitrarily capping admissions.

    As a prospective grad student, I'm already very aware of the intense competition for slots in grad school — why should I believe that somehow I am suddenly entitled to a job by virtue of my getting into grad school? I can't help but feel like it probably isn't so good for philosophy to make it practically necessary that students be perhaps a little arrogant or narcissistic enough to ignore the warnings any of us will already see if we start researching the field and our prospects in it. Cutting back on the number of admits to grad programs seems like it would just make prospective grad students fight all the harder amongst themselves (which isn't useful or pleasant), and then perhaps believe themselves to be entitled to a job once they do get in (untrue, and might foster a certain laziness?)

    Reply
  9. Graduate Student

    I see two problems with this proposal.

    First, as some of you mention, a philosophy education is not just means to some occupational end.

    Second, the PhD students that would be accepted in such a system would not necessarily be those that would receive tenure-track jobs upon completion of the program. It seems common for students that come in on normal terms to "outperform" students that come in with elite fellowships. Presumably those students would not have been admitted in the first place if the proposed model for PhD admissions were taken up.

    Reply
  10. Paul

    I agree with everyone who is pointing to philosophy's being inherently rewarding. It is, of course, why many people substantially decrease their expected life's earnings in order to take it up as a vocation. But, this alone cannot be a reason to keep open all currently existing grad programs. Studying philosophy isn't free. It requires a substantial investment of resources. And, if it is true that having a glut of philosophers drives down wages and makes securing a well-paying stable job more difficult for everyone, then it makes sense to me to limit the number of slots available at graduate programs. These are serious considerations. And while I sympathize with those who want to be guaranteed 5-7 years of studying a discipline that they love, I just don't think that providing this can be justified, given the downside.

    Reply
  11. harry b

    There's no reason to believe that a glut of PhDs drives down wages. But given that a PhD takes 5-8 years to get, and most students are in their twenties, a time which, in most professions (including our own) is one when learns a great amount in part through immersion in the life of the profession, departments do have an obligation to consider the likely prospects of the students, and to calibrate numbers somewhat. I don't think there is a straightforward way of making this decision, but many departments admit and fund more students than they really can expect to find employment. Of course, there is some attrition, and some attrition is both inevitable and good. The point above about students being good for one another is correct. But here's a question to ask oneself when setting the numbers: have we arrived at this number (6, 8, 10, whetever it is) because it will benefit the students to be in a class of that size, or because we want students to justify us teaching the seminars we want to teach. If the sincere answer is the former, that's a legitimate reason. The latter is not a legitimate reason, and I suspect that it is the true answer in more cases than people would care to admit.

    Reply
  12. Daniel S. Goldberg

    Although I have advanced training in ethics, my PhD is in one of those "interdisciplinary humanities programs" Ryan M. mentions above. One of the reasons I did not pursue a PhD in philosophy was that the philosophy department at my undergraduate institution (a well-known private liberal arts college) actively discouraged its majors from going to graduate school in philosophy, and did so by providing the best and most current knowledge at the time of the woeful job prospects. So perhaps my case is an anecdotal point suggesting that those who do not pursue philosophy do pursue one of those interdisciplinary programs. However, such programs are much rarer then they seem, are not for everyone, and, if it is possible, provide one with even fewer TT employment options than a doctorate in philosophy. (This is not merely anecdotal: there is good evidence the political economy of American universities is not constructed to facilitate junior interdisciplinary scholars).

    I would be surprised if the original poster would go so far as to argue that students who are fully aware of the improbability of landing a TT job but who nevertheless want to pursue the degree for self-actualization should be systematically barred. I think rather the idea is that it is irresponsible for graduate programs — in philosophy or otherwise — to blithely keep accepting cohorts of students the majority of whom will have great difficulty landing a TT job.

    Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has raised similar concerns, although for fairly obvious reasons, there are serious disanalogies between English/literature graduate programs and philosophy programs (size, for one). I am unsure whether a hard cap on cohort size is needed, but I do firmly believe that it is completely irresponsible for undergraduate and graduate programs to do anything other than provide maximum disclosure and education regarding the improbability of landing a TT job. I might even support the idea of active discouragement of graduate study. If the student still wishes to pursue the degree, then that passion should be rewarded, assuming the passion is wedded to sufficient capacity.

    JMO.

    Reply
  13. Laurence B McCullough

    There is a solution to the oversupply of PhDs in Philosophy, a problem that has existed at least since the mid-1970s. The current situation is worse, not new. That is for deans to collect data on placement of graduates. If a program, in any discipline, has not placed any graduates in some reasonable period of time (past 3 years, past 5 years), then the dean should simply de-fund the graduate program. Resources could then be put into successful graduate programs in other disciplines in a university. It will turn out that some less-than-top PGR programs will survive, because they have solid records of placement. Some top programs may find themselves in trouble. So be it. Deans should assert their power in this area, because departments that have not placed graduates or have placed only a handful in recent years and in numbers declining to zero do not routinely tell applicants that this is the case. Graduate programs have long had the opportunity to regulate themselves and have failed to do so. It is therefore past time for those with the power to do so to regulate graduate programs by cutting off funding for the unsuccessful programs. This would be an evidence-based approach and fair (to prevent waste of scarce university resources and the creation of unacceptable opportunity costs created by weak programs in a university for strong (=solid record of placement of graduates) programs).

    Reply
  14. mark lance

    Two things;
    When I went to grad school – even going to what was then the top program in the world – I forced myself to carefully and honestly (as best as one can) decide if I would want this even if I knew for certain there was no job at the other end. I was sure I did. I tell every single undergrad I speak to about the =profession that this is the only reasonable way to approach it.

    Second, the claim "But, except for the very, very best departments, there is, as far as I know, no basis for this confidence [that students have a chance of getting a job] and everyone knows this, so the signal is deceitful." If "very very best" is supposed to correlate with Leiter rankings, this is just false, in fact wildly false. Every student who has graduated from Georgetown (and we graduate about 90% of applicants) in the last 15 years and who has applied broadly (so excluding two who applied only in one city) has gotten a tenure track or equivalent position. And we are ranked 36-41 in the report overall. And there are many other similarly ranked programs which get most students jobs. (Whether our students are making an impact is harder to assess, but recent publications include Phil Studies, Philosophers' Imprint, Ethics, etc. so I think we are making some. And training people to teach in liberal arts colleges is surely a legitimate role as well.) Caveat – two students on the market last year are currently in non-tenure track jobs. They both have strong tenure track interviews this year. There is nowhere near as strict a correlation between placement and Leiter ranking as is commonly believed. (Note that Brian explicitly says things along these lines, but people seem not to pay attention to this and this myth continues to arise, impervious to empirical data.)

    I agree with the general point to some degree. Programs that regularly fail to place the majority of their students should say so openly and directly, and if they did I suspect fewer would apply. The APA should be much clearer about job prospects – though predicting what the economy will do is pretty hopeless. I'd love to see more radical changes in the way that graduate education is conceived – that is as an end in itself rather than merely professional training. It is also worth noting that one does not acquire huge debt in grad school. In fact, one can live on a typical fellowship with a bit of care. So the downside is not huge if you go in with eyes open.

    Reply
  15. BB

    I'm another prospective grad student.

    Cutting admissions to PhD programs solely for the reason that the job market is suffering is ungrounded, I think. I agree with "prospective grad". Part of going into PhD program should be learning what it takes to get to the next level. Now, if your program painted an overly enthusiastic picture, that discrepancy is the problem which needs to be addressed.

    Do we cut admission to undergraduate schools solely because graduate school last year was more competitive than ever? No, we do not. It's simply another consideration for an undergraduate applying to graduate school. Similarly, a graduate student must know the risk going in, and use this as a consideration for if he or she wants to be in a PhD program. Academics is competitive by nature – this is true at every level and this has always been true. Why the sudden shock?

    Reply
  16. Ryan

    Re: the concern about the arbitrariness of any cap number, is there any reason to believe that Ph.D. programs currently admit all and only qualified candidates? Of course not. At this point, departmental/university budgetary restrictions already influence the number of admits. If we aren't terribly concerned about this, why should we be concerned with the influence of considerations about job prospects?

    Reply
  17. Brian Leiter

    Let's slow down here a bit with the empirical generalizations! In fact, the correlation between PGR rank and job placement is rather good, and I have looked at the empirical data! But there are various ways of measuring success in placement, including: (1) how many get tenure-track jobs, (2) how long it takes them to get tenure-track jobs, (3) the quality of the tenure-track jobs graduates get, and so on. But the PGR is a measure of faculty quality, and faculty quality correlates rather nicely with job placement, but does not correlate perfectly, as I indeed have noted repeatedly. But information on job placement is a strictly backwards-looking measure, so faculties in flux may, in fact, do better or worse on job placement in the future.

    Anyway, this thread is *not* about PGR rankings and job placement, so that discussion is at an end.

    On the other hand, and now this is *really* important, I must disagree with Mark: Pittsburgh was never, in any ranking at any time, the top department in the world! It has been, by just about all measures, one of the top 3-4 since the mid-1960s, which is impressive enough I should think.

    Reply
  18. Jonathan Hunter

    Some things to consider:

    1. Students who are smart enough to gain acceptance into a PhD program ought also to be smart enough to weigh the pros and cons of investing the better part of their 20s (and likely early 30s)in a field of study that is likely not to net them as much money over a lifetime (and especially over those crucial first few years of employment)as would another field of study.

    2. If the study of philosophy is inherently rewarding, there is absolutely nothing preventing someone from pursuing such study in his or her own spare time (assuming, obviously, that someone has spare time). One possibility even is to audit a graduate level course at one's local institution, since these courses are not infrequently offered in the afternoon/evening. A PhD in philosophy is mainly a professional degree anyway.

    3. Eliminating weaker programs is not generally a good idea. A particular program is considered weak in its current state, but may be able to move up in standing with funding and support from its institution.

    4. Academia is a business. Our complaints should be directed at the way academia does business and not at any particular programs.

    Just some thoughts. Nothing definitive.

    Reply
  19. Phil

    The phd program I attended made lots of offers despite the market crash last year and despite its inability to support its senior grads. There are two reasons this was done and a large incoming class was admitted: (1) the faculty wanted to continue to teach seminars and (2) grads at this program are cheap labor — they teach 3 classes of 30 and are not given any conference travel money either. So they stay at home and teach and grade, generating substantial revenue fot the department, while the faculty get paid six figure salaries and travel to conferences (and do not take their own students with them). This is an extreme case probably, but I think it's telling.

    1. Please define "highly-qualified." Isn't that a term that is relative to market pressures? Right now, if there are three times as many PhDs as decent jobs for them, this to me signals degree inflation, which in turn signals that admissions committees and programs have standards that are too low given current market conditions.

    2. "it would simply divert these students into alternative but related programs." First off, some people don't "simply" go into a related program. Instead, they decide that philosophy is then better left as a hobby and then proceed to figure out how to make a living. In any case, you should give students nondeceitful signals and right now it gets people's hopes up to only make them feel like failures, PhD in hand. The degree takes too long (I heard the median is almost a decade), longer than anyone anticipates, and then the degree means nothings.

    3. "it would significantly weaken the field". The theory that this kind of competition produces the best philosophers is simply false. Instead, it selects for people who have the resources to handle all the stress (financial stress, anxiety about funding beyond one's fifth year in a program, repetitive uprooting, being far from family and friends for too long and being too poor to see them, lack of proper funding to go to professional conferences at many programs).

    4. "Finally, capping the number of philosophy PhDs issued will essentially take philosophy out of the growing joint-degree market" This is just whack reasoning.

    5. " The field should actively court such students while being frank and honest about the limited opportunities for finding tenured work as a philosophy professor." That's a pipe dream. Who is going to be frank and honest. What phd program website says how long the program actually takes, what the attrition is, what percentage are dissatisfied in the program, and what percentage come into the program and have a tenure-track job within 7 years of starting the program? (Or anything remotely resembeling this.) It's just not how salesmanship and competition work. No one is going to say anything negative about their program. What program or recruiters say "come to this program but realize that half of those who start this program never make it to a tenure-track and the other half spend a decade in anxiety and uprooting before they get into a tenure-track position" (that's a stat for a top-20 Leiter program btw) What we have no is a bait-and-switch — students coming in with one set of expectations and having those expectations severely disappointed but by then, by the time demands have been increased — it is typically too late for them to pull out (identity formation issues, goals, a feeling of having worked hard and spent years in vain, etc).

    5a. You will also be fighting against undergraduate faculty encouraging their favorite students to join the profession, telling them how special they are and how they'll do great and how awesome it is. When someone of that rank (a "Professor") and someone who you respect professionally (a "Philosopher") is telling you are awesome, it's hard to believe you won't be God's Special Snowflake. People also have false beliefs about the ease of leaving the profession if it doesn't work out — it's difficult to imagine at 20 or 25 what it's like to be 30 or 35, which is why people get stuck in the adjunct loop I think.

    6. "Find out where there might be a place for some philosophers in the economy beyond the walls of the academy" I work in industry and I can tell you that hiring someone with a phd in philosophy is a pain in the butt. (a) the person is too old to retrain, (b) the person typically has lowered self-esteem and loss of motivation because of unmet expectations and because industry doesn't need people to do conceptual analysis really fast — the skill set is not very transferrable at this level. It's hard enough after a bachelor's degree. Though if you turn phd philosophy programs into engineering and plumbing programs, then yes, this would work.

    7. "In these discussions, it's important to ask about the aims of graduate education: is it really entirely and exclusively about producing tenured professors?" No, what we should ask is why people spend their 20s pursuing such education. Is it merely for self-development? I doubt it. A median person with a phd in hand in this field is over 30 years old and has never really had a real job or real career outside the ivory tower — the person has been in school for how many years of his/her life? That kind of effort and the sacrifice of uprooting and moving to a completely new place (for grad school) only to move again is typically for the dream and goal of becoming a college professor. No? It is true that philosophy education is not *merely* a means to some end, but it can't be a purely intrinsic end either. For one thing, it means that someone will be able to do philosophy and will become a philosopher and will then be faced with prohibitive conditions to continue what s/he is doing. Has anyone done statistical studies on how people do mentally, financially, and physically and whether they thought it was all worth it even when they didn't get a tenure-track job (or did get one for that matter)? I've seen studies like this done on physicists and it looks really bad. Is philosopher better? If, at the end of the day, everyone is happy with the outcome even if they don't get the job for which they were training and is forced to either adjunct or change field, then there is no issue. Otherwise, there is. Right?

    8. "Additionally, I don't think that out-of-work PhD's are going to pose a serious threat to wages for everyone else." False. Labor economics 101. Evidence: adjuncting and the disappearance of tenure-track jobs. Post-docing and adjuncting is becoming more and more prevalent and teaching loads are climbing, which is basically a wage decrease. There will be fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs and yes, wages and working conditions will slide. Either wages will go down or more will be demanded for the same wages, or both (or more uprooting will be demanded, etc). It has to give somewhere and it's basic facts of market competition.

    It's obvious that it's a collective action problem and the invisible hand of something akin to a lemons market. Having strict standards for department websites would be a start.

    Reply
  20. Elizabeth

    The difference, BB, is that undergrads do not typically enter a Bachelor's program with the specific goal of going on to graduate school. Some do, but very many others do not know what their future plans are at 17 years of age so a low number of graduate slots is not likely to be of great concern. Even for the student that does know they want to go on to graduate school, a bachelors degree is almost a prerequisite for employment nowadays and that student would need to go to university regardless of whether or not there is a place for them in graduate school 4 years down the line. On the other hand, most prospective graduate students do PhDs in order to land TT jobs. If there aren't any, many students likely wouldn't want to spend 6 years studying for a degree that is unlikely to contribute to their success in non-academic careers (anymore so than a BA or MA).

    Reply
  21. mark lance

    I don't really care, it isn't a matter of pride to me (partly because I found the ranking absurd), and I don't think such things are important in general, but Pittsburgh was ranked both 1st (philosophy) and 2nd (HPS) in the major national ranking that came out in the mid 80s. (In my view the fusion of the two was the single best department, but plenty of reasonable people think otherwise.) Obviously this is irrelevant to the point I was making.

    Aside from that, please note that "There is nowhere near as strict a correlation between placement and Leiter ranking as is commonly believed." is not imcompatible with "the correlation between PGR rank and job placement is rather good" … "but does not correlate perfectly". I stand by my empirical claims, because they are correct. (Both are true if many think it much better than "rather good". They do.)

    Sorry if my post struck you as off topic, but it responded directly to something that was explicitly claimed in the original post, indeed, to a claim that asserted that departments like mine are deceitful. Hard to see how what standard of salience would make it inappropriate to respond to a charge like that.

    Reply
  22. HckGGREN

    I don't know the situation in the USA, but here (at least as far as our institute is concerned) not all philosophy PhDs go on to apply for jobs in academia. There are decent jobs for philosophy PhDs outside of universities too.
    And: PhD candidates are adults. They are old enough (and hopefully wise enough) to decide themselves whether to go for a PhD in philosophy – or not.
    And: Doing a PhD cn (and should) be fun; even if you don't get a job in research and education afterwards.

    Heinrich C. Kuhn
    hck@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
    LMU Munich, Institute for Renaissance Intellectual History and Renaissance Philosophy

    Reply
  23. Brian Leiter

    The National Research Council report that came out in 1982 (that's the only major graduate program ranking I know about from the 1980s) did not have Pitt at #1, unless senility has already taken its toll on me. I mention this only in the interests of accuracy, since it is otherwise devoid of significance!

    Reply
  24. Mark van Roojen

    As seems to happen often, I agree with Mark Lance. It isn't as though admissions committees are omniscient about who will be a successful professional philosopher in ten years and who won't. Not even close. That's partly because factors other than being good at philosophy at the end of undergrad school have a lot to do with post graduate success.

    So the proposal is in effect to keep some qualified people out of the profession (along with some unqualified people) in order to reduce the competition faced by those who do get into it. Are the proponents arguing that they would have preferred that they themselves had been excluded from the profession for the greater good of those who do get in under the proposed suggestion? Or are they saying that they would have preferred that they themselves were prevented from making a mistake by paternalistic regulations keeping the less well credentialed out? I have the suspicion that when people favor the policy they think of themselves as the potential benefactors and the people excluded by it as the other people. I doubt that is the right perspective from which to think of it.

    I don't see how the proposal is preferable to giving everyone a realistic appraisal of employment prospects and letting them choose whether the gamble is worth it to them. Professional advancement is not the only reason to go to grad school, as Mark and others have said above. 20 some years ago my cohort got harsh warnings from programs we were admitted to and I went in thinking that I might not get a job, but I wanted to follow an interest and see where it led. It would not have been a mistake if I hadn't gotten a job at the end, though of course I'm happy I did. Myself, I think that no one should go to grad school unless they can think that not getting a job in the field would not make the decision a mistake. No career choice come with guarantees of later success and excluding others to provide a better bet to those who get in doesn't seem like an even marginally egalitarian way to deal with that.

    So there is a real complaint here if incoming students aren't getting notice of employment prospects as best we can determine. But the proposed solution won't lead to a healthier field, nor would it be fairer than the current system.

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  25. Jonathan

    I'd like to reiterate a point that seems to have been lost in the shuffle: Cutting admissions would not have any effect on the job market for 6+ years, no effect, that is, beyond the warm glow of having responded in some fashion, however symbolically and ineffectually, to a dire situation. Those of us fortunate to have jobs might actually have an immediate and positive effect, however, by actively campaigning our home institutions to hire more tenure track faculty and to rely less on adjunct labor.

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  26. Daniel Harris

    I think Mr. Goldberg is on the right track. The only legitimate excuse for overproducing PhD's is that many students may want to pursue graduate education for reasons other than furthering their career. Fair enough, but as it stands, we can only speculate about how many students enter programs with abysmal placement records (and prospects) for misbegotten career-related reasons and how many enter for personal reasons. Since the students are ill-informed enough not to know where they stand, I doubt that there is a clear distinction between the two.

    The only obviously unethical aspect of this situation is the engendering of unrealistic employment expectations in prospective students. One way to combat this problem would be to publish very detailed information about placement, and making sure that all students see it. I know that there is already plenty of vague information about the state of the job market available, and I know that many departments put some incomplete placement information on their websites (incomplete meaning, for example, lacking any mention of students who didn't get a job at all), but this information as a whole is difficult to find and easy to misinterpret.

    What we need is a place where a student who is thinking of applying to a program can find out (a) what percentage of students complete the program, (b) what percentage of graduates get TT jobs, (c) what the breakdown of those jobs are relative to qualities such as geographic location, (d) what percentage of successful job applicants coming out of the program get jobs at community colleges, or liberal arts colleges, or research focused schools, or post-docs etc. It would also be helpful if these data could be sorted by sub-discipline.

    Aside from all the work it would take, there are several disincentives for most departments to post this kind of information. They want good graduate students in order to make senior faculty's teaching more interesting, in order to teach or grade intro courses that senior faculty aren't interested in teaching or grading, and in order to increase the overall prestige of the department. Telling prospective students that only 10% of their graduates over the last decade have found employment, and even then only at community colleges, is probably not going to make it any easier for them to attract good graduate students. So why not just let false optimism reign?

    The problem will only be solved, I think, when a third party takes control of gathering and publishing the sort of detailed placement statistics I enumerated. The obvious place for this information would be on the PGR, although I recognize that Brian can't be expected to compile all that data himself. But it's clear for the reasons cited by Mark Lance that the PGR offers an at best distorted picture of the employment prospects at various departments as it stands, and the addition of detailed placement statistics would significantly cut through the distortion.

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  27. Michael Kremer

    Mark and Brian (Not wanting to derail the thread but in the interest of accuracy): As a little googling will show, in the 1982 NRC ranking, Princeton was 1, Harvard was 2, Pitt Philosophy was 3. I believe Pitt HPS was 5, with Berkeley at 4.

    Pitt made a big deal out of the fact that in the 1995 NRC rankings they moved above Harvard to the #2 spot. Princeton was still #1 at the time. (http://mac10.umc.pitt.edu/u/FMPro?-db=ustory&-lay=a&-format=d.html&storyid=5410&-Find)

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  28. mark lance

    Daniel:
    I didn't exactly say that the PGR offers a distorted picture. I think what Brian says about Placement – http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/jobplace.asp – is quite correct. The problem is rather sociological. There is a tendency, partly because there is little out there beyond the PGR – to take the overall rankings to be much stronger indications of all sorts of things than they claim to be.

    One way to get to better info in the long run is for strong students to do precisely what Brian suggests – refuse to go to schools that won't give out accurate detailed information on placement.

    (On the tedious issue of rankings, I stand corrected. I distinctly remember laughing with lots of folks – including you michael – about some ranking that had pitt phil 1, pitt hps 2, everyone making fun of the way they obvious double counted courtesy joint appointments. But that memory could either be serious senility on my part, or something other than the NRC.)

    The suggested principle that has gotten lost in the debate over my parenthetical qualification is the principle that now MvR and I have endorsed – namely that given the dismal prospects of jobs, and the fact that one can go to grad school without incurring major debt, the rational principle is to do this only if you would consider it worthwhile without any chance of a job. I don't know if that is too strong, but I don't think it is by much.

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  29. Jonathan Birch

    I'm curious as to how the situation differs between the US and UK.

    I did a Masters in 2008-9 with support from a government grant. This is how funding is awarded over here. Yet only 1000 such grants were made available for Masters courses across the entirety of the Arts and Humanities for the whole country.

    The enrolment rate for undergrads is over a million a year, and I would guess that about a third of courses fall under Arts and Humanities. This suggests that fewer than 1 in 300 Arts and Humanities students nationwide are awarded the funding to continue past undergraduate level.

    So life is already quite tough for aspiring graduates. How are things in America?

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  30. Columbia Undergrad

    I think that there are two different issues at work here. One is decreasing the size of graduate programs and the other is the proposal that departments with poor placement records should suspend graduate programs. While I think that there have been a number of good arguments against the former, I'm not sure that there have been any put against the latter. I think that if a school is really this bad (I'm thinking, say, of a school below PGR 75 or something like that so Georgetown is safe! Good will be defined for this discussion as PGR top 75 programs) then 1) the personal fulfillment argument can't possibly be at work since I think it would be hard to say that the quality of education would be anywhere near what a good graduate program gives if the placement rate is so bad. 2) Cutting such programs would mean that there will be more jobs needed at these schools to replace the loss of graduate teaching (and at least a small monetary surplus), which would give more opportunities to those currently on the job market. 3) If most bad programs are out of the picture, you've automatically better informed students without getting schools to self-report, which seems to be game-theoretically unlikely.

    What would the negative effects of losing these graduate programs? Do they outweigh the positive ones above?

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  31. Anon Applicant

    Columbia:

    Jonathan Hunter said this a while earlier, which is relevant to your post:

    "3. Eliminating weaker programs is not generally a good idea. A particular program is considered weak in its current state, but may be able to move up in standing with funding and support from its institution."

    I agree with your (2), but not with your (1); it involves a pretty big assumption about the teaching quality at a large number of schools.

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  32. Columbia Undergrad

    Correction: Let 'good be top 40 or something like that, since I now realize that the PGR only goes to the 40s…

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  33. mark lance

    re Columbia undergrad:
    First, note that your claim is much weaker than the one that started this thread, namely that one has no chance of a tenure track job except at the "very very best" programs. Second, I see no likelihood that any 75th ranked school would give more faculty lines to replace grad teaching. They MIGHT hire adjuncts, but probably would just increase class size. Third, even your principle is too simplistic I fear. While I do think there are probably some programs that should be cut, let's look at the rankings. The PGR only goes to around 50, so we can't look at 75. But Rice is tied for last in the PGR rankings. Meanwhile, it is in the second group in applied ethics. It routinely places students in good jobs in this, as it does in continental. (Maybe in other things too; I just happen to know of candidates in these.) And I certainly don't think you can look at the faculty at Rice and say that you can't get a good philosophical education there. (Note, if jobs are seriously scarce it is completely plausible that there will be lots of places one can learn a great deal of philosophy and have no chance of a career.)

    Again, the sensible advise to those considering grad school is: do your homework. Figure out your goals. What will make this worth doing? How essential is a job (of what sort)? Find out the schools track record in detail. (And for your likely area. This is very important because there are many schools which are top in some area – and widely regarded in that area – while being well down the list in overall ranking. (You might have a much better chance of getting a job in applied ethics coming out of Rice than coming out of MIT, for example.) I don't really think it is hard to get this information, and as Brian advises, be very very suspicious of any school that won't give it.

    If folks do this, then as someone suggested above, we can put our efforts towards increasing the number of positions out there, rather than cutting the number of grad students.

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  34. Anonymous Grad Student

    I'm not in a philosophy department but I would guess that the issue of teaching assistants is not exceptionally different from other liberal arts programs. I just wonder what effect decreasing the number of PhD students would have upon TAships and the corresponding ability to instruct undergraduates. Grad students may have to spend more of their time teaching (lengthening stays), or instruct more students while they are teaching, or more and more classes may have to do without TAs and solely depend upon graders, which still conceivably requires PhD students and their time, it just means remunerating them less…

    If this is a potential problem, then it seems that an issue that would have to be tackled is that need for TAs and need for PhD students are not equivalents, and there's a problem with the TA pool being determined by the PhD student pool. I may be projecting a problem though that isn't as relevant for Philosophy as it is for my rather impacted program (Political Science) in one of the oh so financially troubled UCs.

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  35. G. Owen Schaefer

    It should be noted that one major cost of many departments admitting fewer graduate students would be that fewer undergraduates get exposure to philosophy, and the overall quality of undergraduate education in philosophy will be diminished while raising the costs of that very education.

    In particular, it might be selfish of faculty members to want cheap grad students to teach big intro classes so they can focus on upper-level classes, this also significantly benefits the undergrads – they get more course offerings and opportunities to interact closely with the faculty, more attention to individual papers, etc. In effect, they get a better educational experience.

    Additionally, a surplus of PhDs benefits undergrads by directly enhancing the quality of their teachers. With more hiring options, universities will be more able to weed out poor instructors.

    Furthermore, even if the surplus of PhDs ended up depressing wages (and given economic rules of supply, demand and pricing, I believe it would), these lowered wages would mean the cost of educating a given undergraduate will be lowered, and so there will be undergrad tuition savings. Given the excessive level of student debt in the US, this should not be a minor consideration.

    The above arguments are not conclusive, of course; perhaps the plight of unemployed PhDs in Philosophy is greater than that of the undergrads who would – without the PhD surplus – receive a worse education which costs more. But I think it bears serious consideration, at least.

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  36. Andy Naaktgeboren

    > 4. "Finally, capping the number of philosophy PhDs issued will essentially take philosophy out of the growing joint-degree market" This is just whack reasoning.

    A small point, but I agree. This is a administrative issue, and instantly resolved by a policy like 'we will only take 5 philosophy-only grads a year, but if you're already a grad student in something else (or are accepted in another department), you don't count towards the 5'.

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  37. John Protevi

    I suggest reading Marc Bousquet's book and blog, both entitled How the University Works, for a worthwhile change of perspective. We have to stop thinking solely in terms of a "job market" that begins post-PhD. Instead we have to look at the "job system" in its entirety: who gets paid to teach philosophy, and for how much? We can clearly see then that the job system in philosophy, like that in the social sciences and in the humanities in general, does NOT begin post-PhD. It begins post-BA, for graduate student instructors as just that, instructors. From that perspective, we can see the economic incentive for university administrators to continue the current system, in that each incoming class of graduate students refreshes the pool of cheap instructor labor. The analysis of the "job system" needs to be enlarged a bit to consider other forms of continent labor (adjuncts, post-docs, permanent instructors, fixed-term visiting appointments, and so on), but the essential point for this discussion is to shift from thinking of a post-PhD "job market" to a total "job system" that includes post-BA instructors as one of its components.

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  38. a

    "The only legitimate excuse for overproducing PhD's is that many students may want to pursue graduate education for reasons other than furthering their career."

    I'm not sure you consider it legitimate, but one reason for overproducing PhD's is that it employs philosophers with PhD's. Shutting down PhD programs would inevitably decrease the demand for philosophers, which would then, under the OP's proposal, cause even more programs to be shut down.

    The current situation seems to me to maximize the number of people employed as academic philosophers.

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  39. Mark S

    As a way of relieving the job pressure in a way that (I would think) most philosophers would find more agreeable than any of these other suggestions which limit/reduce the number of philosophers/practice of philosophy, why not expand philosophy into secondary schools? As I understand it, Europeans have long had philosophy (in some form) as part of the basic secondary school curriculum. When I lived in Hawaii, I noticed that something similar was being tried out (see link below):

    http://www.hawaii.edu/phil/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=82&Itemid=79

    Not to be jingoistic (or way off-topic), but I've always wondered why our "response" to the events of 9/11 isn't images of teenage Americans studying philosophy, questioning received truths, learning to "think critically", etc. in secondary school juxtaposed with images of Pakistani teens rote memorizing the Koran…at the very least, this strikes me as a really good way to disturb the well-solidified political "right" by creating a rift between the sentiments of nationalism and religiosity which have become so intertwined these last 20 years or so…

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  40. Phil

    If a state school that is dependent on slave graders shuts down its graduate program, it will likely go bankrupt or will lose all its star faculty. The more realistic goal is for such programs to downgrade to terminal MA programs since then they'll still be able to get graders. Of course the only that will happen at some schools is if a dean forces a program to do that.

    Also, what every undergrad who goes to a PhD program has to realize (as well as his/her letter writers) is that s/he is marginally contributing to making a bad situation worse. The higher the demand for phd programs among undergrads, the less incentive there is to improve conditions or information.

    The higher the supply of labor that phd programs spit out onto the labor market, the less incentive there is for employers to do anything. E.g. if I was a department head, why would I make a tenure-track hire over an adjunct or a postdoc? A tenure-track at my department might cost about $50k + benefits for a 2/2 load (or at most a 3/3 load), while a postdoc or an adjunct can be given a 4/4 load for much less money without any benefits and without the drama that goes with not giving someone tenure (and in this financial environment, why would I want to make such promises?) Similarly, a grad student who can teach 3 sections of 30 (or even one course of 50) is much cheaper. And if you want to climb the rankings with a limited budget, then you have an incentive to hire as many adjuncts, postdocs, and graduate TAs and instructors as possible to teach and grade, not spend any money to send them to conferences and not spend any time grooming them, and use the revenue they generate to hire star faculty to teach as little as possible and publish and go to as many conferences as possible. Star faculty = tenured faculty. Tenure-track is the middle ground that's just not very cost-effective, esp. given the incentives that rankings put in place. (And high rankings in turn help you get more and better graduate students, keep them from transferring, help you recruit faculty, and help you look good in front of the dean.)

    I strongly believe, however, that appeals to ethical considerations or rationality can help only so much, especially when there are obviously very different perspectives on this — as this thread shows. The only way to really fix this kind of problem is to decrease the supply of labor and the demand for graduate program. Figure out how to do that and you will have solved the problem. (Ways to do that: get the APA to come to a moral consensus about the problem and a solution to get programs downgrade to MA-only, unionize, improve information *per* program as in "over the past twenty years, what percentage of people who joined this program made it into a tenure-track job within 8 years of starting the program?")

    And yes, it's true that I took it as a sign of great ability and a sure thing when I was accepted to a (at the time) top-10 ranked program. But turns out only half of those who start my program make it into a TT job within a decade (attrition + placement within the given time frame), whereas I thought that 90% of those who start make it into a TT and do so within 5 to 7 years of starting the program. And I also really trusted Professors, Philosophers, let alone Moral and Political Philosophers, and the information they were giving me (though turned out there were hidden costs, overly optimistic guesstimates instead of statistics, and realities of academia that apparently are obvious to everyone except those who are new to the field — i.e. to prospectives and newbies).

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  41. Aldo Antonelli

    Sorry to come a bit late to the discussion. I have been advocating for a while in favor of reducing the number of philosophy PhD's collectively produced in this country, based on the fact that we have a responsibility towards our students to place them in some meaningful way. I agree with the commenter above who said that the situation is not new, just worse. Having said that, there are a number of *wrong ways* to go about it:

    1. I do *not* think that only the top-ranked departments should have graduate programs.
    2. I do *not* think that the way to achieve a reduction is by throttling admissions.

    For (1), the market is more stratified than one thinks, witness for instance Mark Lance's statistics on placement at Georgetown. Top-ranked departments tend to hire PhD's from top-ranked departments, and mid-ranked departments *do* hire a lot of PhD's from mid-ranked departments. So leaving the training of new philosophers to top-ranked depts only would not be fair or effective.

    For (2), in my experience, admission decisions are usually made on the basis of very poor data. Admissions tend to favor pedigree over other considerations, not to mention how absurdly useless letters of recommendation tend to be (just like in Lake Wobegon, everybody is not just above average but in the top 10% or better). I would rather see depts cast a wide net, and then have an effective selection one or two years down the road, when students have had a chance to prove themselves.

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  42. Will Braynen

    Maybe someone can answer this:

    What is the supply-demand data on the phil labor market?

    There is a lot of wishful thinking going on when undergrads go to get a phd, so accurate, up-to-date, and salient information might be helpful here to making informed decisions, as well as to figuring out how to coordinate anything collectively.

    And to figure out who has a responsibility to do what and how to coordinate any action collectively (e.g. to send someone off to a phd program or not, to get a phd or not), quality information and good information signals are critical — which is how this discussion started.

    I. Demand for labor: what was the total number of TT jobs that actually materialized this year (well, they still saying "pending final approval"), last year, the year before, etc?

    II. Supply of that labor:
    (a) how many PhDs are graduating each year total?
    (b) how many PhDs are already currently floating around without TT jobs? (e.g. adjuncting, postdocing, visiting)

    And (c) perhaps a breakdown by phd programs — how many is each producing?

    p.s. Starting point: what's the total number of PhD programs in the U.S.? If it's 100 and each one produces 5 graduates on average, that's 500 PhD graduates each year! I would suspect the total number TT jobs each year is less than 100, right? That's a 5:1 ratio of supply and demand at a very high level of education. So either there is degree inflation or… there is degree inflation? (Increasing the number of TT job openings would be nice, but seems unrealistic to me unless you guys know someone with a couple of billion dollars to donate to endow positions or if a large number of faculty decide to retire suddenly.)
    _____

    Another way to address the problem: reduce the costs of getting a PhD so it won't be such a big deal for those who graduate and have no job. Currently, the costs are hidden: the degree takes way too long (9 years median in the States), people uproot to move to the highest ranked programs, etc. Opportunity costs and readjustment costs are just too high in the U.S. (though probably better in Europe?) E.g. 3-5 years is enough time to write a good dissertation if you are working with a good advisor, so that's all that a PhD should take. Why isn't undergraduate coursework in the field sufficient training? Is 4 years of our undergraduate training so subpar that it requires another 2-3 years of more courses to compensate? And for many students, it's 2 years for an MA and then 2 more years of coursework in a PhD program — that's 8 years of higher ed coursework in the field! Isn't that a little much? (I had to retrain and didn't major in philosophy as an undergrad, so I just don't know — maybe there are good reasons for this much coursework before someone can start doing original research — i.e. work on their dissertation.) Why don't we transfer all coursework when people transfer? etc.

    For example: if you are out of grad school with a PhD in hand by 25 and you are well rooted in your local geographic area, then it would be much less of a big deal to turn in the chips and readjust and think about the purely intrinsic costs of your intellectual development than if you are over 30 or over 35 (degree + postdocing/ adjuncting). As others have pointed out, it is also easier to retrain a 25-year old than a 30 or 35-year old, family concerns are also different, etc.

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  43. Craig

    The least controversial idea it seems to me is the idea which is most likely to prove effective: provide prospective graduate students with real completion and placement data.

    The concerns regarding the departments moral responsibility would be greatly abated if the departments provided applicants with the information they actually need. Moreover, I'm certain that if departments were aware that their success would be a matter of public record, they'd both do a better job of assisting their students with placement and change the way they handle admissions. Unfortunately, as it stands now, it is not possible for potential applicants to fully research the track records of virtually any (all?) programs. Thus, they are almost certainly applying with misconceived notions about the likelihood of their success, and so the demand for enrollment spots is artificially high. This strikes me, of the issues relating to graduate school and initial placement, as one of the most prime areas for redress in the field right now.

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  44. Jonathan Hunter

    I am all for people having jobs–good jobs, no less! What I don't understand is why some here think that getting a PhD in philosophy should come with any sort of guarantee of a decent paying tenure-track job upon graduation. A student entering a PhD program is making an investment, and like any investment, it comes with various risks. One risk is that a student will invest 5-8 years of his or her 20s (and possibly 30s), which may also include presenting at conferences and publishing papers, and wind up jobless.

    Yes, perhaps the APA needs to publish some statistics. Yes, perhaps departments need to do a better job of posting detailed placement information. Yes, the discipline as a whole needs to do a much much much better job of making things fair for women and minorities. Yes, there are major problems with the admission process.

    But, students of philosophy aren't helpless. They should be able to (as I said above) weigh the pros and cons and make decisions accordingly. It's no fun not having a job. Welcome to the American workforce.

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  45. Christopher Morris

    This discussion is a bit baffling. There is a macro problem: too many trained philosophers are produced given the demand. The demand may even be shrinking.

    If we wish, among many other things, collectively to decrease the supply, the first thing to recognize is that is a collective action problem. For those who don't know the technical term, typically in collective action problem there are incentives for individual parties not to perform the actions that will lead to the desired result. Something needs to be said about how the incentives of individual programs will be changed.

    So the labor produced is greater than the supply. One consequence is that wages are low (surprise!). If one takes into account the adjunct market, the wages are remarkably low. What to do? Someone suggests that we "reduce the costs of getting a PhD". I wonder what effect that will have on the market?!? Remember that the production of labor is already subsidized (e.g., stipends, fellowships, tuition grants). This already contributes to over-supply.

    Part of the problem with this, as with many of these discussion, is that the number of goals that seem to be important is large and they conflict: balance supply and demand, "do a much much much better job of making things fair for women and minorities", raise support level for graduate students, and so on. As often happens, we can't have everything.

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  46. Kevin Schutte

    Obviously, people go to graduate school in philosophy because they value both learning philosophy AND the potential career. No one would go to graduate school just for learning philosophy (there are cheaper ways!) and no one would do it just for the career path either (there are better career paths!). A lot of comments here seem to emphasize one or the other of these motives rather than acknowledging that they will both be present.

    Phil might as well have been talking about me when he says, "What we have no is a bait-and-switch — students coming in with one set of expectations and having those expectations severely disappointed but by then, by the time demands have been increased — it is typically too late for them to pull out (identity formation issues, goals, a feeling of having worked hard and spent years in vain, etc)." It's painful to make a hobby out of what you've been training to make a career, especially when you still think you would be very good at that career.

    I think people here are vastly overestimating the ease of getting a job outside of academia for PhDs (to say nothing of MA's) in philosophy. There are no easy alternative career paths for philosophers. They can go to law school. They can get credentialed to teach secondary school. They can get analyst or consultant positions. But none of these paths is strongly supported by the philosophy profession, so actually getting the job is going to take more than a small amount of effort. Philosophers consider them second-class jobs, not worthy of their influence. What they seem not to realize is that one of the best ways to relieve these problems (downward pressure on wages, excess supply of labor, etc.) is to make it easier for philosophers to not be professors.

    It's not the same for other disciplines. If you get a graduate degree in English, earning that credential to teach English in secondary school isn't that difficult. If you get a graduate degree in psychology, there are counseling positions that welcome you in. If you get a degree in business, economics, or political science, there are (at least here in California) government positions that have been reserved just for those like you. But nowhere (in the U.S.) other than in philosophy departments are there institutionalized career supports for philosophers. So now I ask you philosophers: Why aren't there?

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  47. James

    I think rather than completely closing the bottom programs, some should be turned into terminal MA's. There seems to be an abundance of PhD programs (many with poor placement records) but a real lack of decent MA programs. I assume that even a poor PhD program (in terms of faculty quality and placement record) would make a relatively good MA program.

    1) The MA should be encouraged for students entering other fields. I think a philosophy PhD for anything other than academia amounts to a great deal of time and effort with little payoff, but an MA could be pushed for personal gratification, improved reading and writing skills, increased LSAT score, and so on. Certain MA programs could be tailored for just such a purpose, this way some programs could remain open without flooding the job market. (For what it's worth, I am an undergraduate in this category. Because of the job market, I have decided an MA and then a JD is a better option for me.)

    2) Undergrads lacking the initial pedigree would be able to, instead of entering a poor PhD program, earn an MA and compete for a spot in a mid-ranked program, improving their chances of a tenure-track position. This would make good programs even more competitive, but if the number of PhD programs and spots were to be decreased, I think this option could be a safeguard to the exclusion of those lacking pedigree who would make fine PhD students and eventually professors. A student's record in an MA program would be a more accurate barometer of success as a PhD student, making the process generally more fair.

    3) I am sure that many students would enter an MA program with the hopes of following it with a Phd, only to decide that academia is not for them (especially when they are made fully aware of job prospects). Also, those who decide to continue would be more confident in their decision to do so, presumably increasing the completion rate for PhD's.

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  48. Jacob Metcalf

    I'd like to second Kevin Schutte's comment. As someone who uses philosophy training outside of a philosophy department (but still inside academia), I think the field would benefit intellectually and economically if we could be more creative and proactive about finding jobs for philosophy PhDs outside of TT jobs in philosophy departments. We're too cloistered and defensive in general, and the political and economic climates at many universities are not going to favor that sort of stance.

    Has anyone here ever had a promising PhD advisee pursue a non-academic job as anything other than a consolation prize? Does anyone have experience of putting graduate-level philosophy training to use outside of academia? I can only think of one acquaintance who did so, and she entered environmental policy. I'm curious what that looks like because I find it disappointing that it is uncommon but I think it is a compelling direction for a cultural change in philosophy.

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  49. Saul Smilansky

    I find the idea that people go to graduate school just in order to study and do philosophy, with the thought that they are quite likely not to be able to find a job in academia, impressive and indeed romantic. Even more so if one thinks that, even were one not to find a job, that one would say that it was still worthwhile doing, overall. The idea that talented people who seriously want to do philosophy will not do so because of university limitations or because of their fears about their job prospects is sad. Likewise is the thought that we have missed out on so much good philosophy because talented potential philosophers didn't go to graduate school.

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  50. Jonathan Hunter

    Graduate training in philosophy equips a student with a certain set of skills that is entirely relevant for pursuing employment as a professor of philosophy, but may not be so relevant for pursuing other types of employment. That's not to say that philosophically trained individuals aren't smart enough to do just about anything out there. It's just that each field has its own ideas about what counts as an employable skill set, and that set very well might include some kind of technical certification that can only be had by pursuing a certain educational track.

    I think Kevin Schutte pointed this out nicely above.

    Back to the original question: having caps on admission isn't a good idea and cutting programs isn't a good idea either. Instead of issuing a statement discouraging students from going to graduate school, the APA could publish numbers. Acceptance into a program is not an implicit guarantee that one will get a decent paying TT job. Students should use their smarts to weigh the pros and cons and make their decisions accordingly. It is the students alone who face the consequences of being jobless at 32 (with kids? with lots of debt?) with very few, if any, marketable skills. It sucks. It's probably not fair. But there you have it.

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