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Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) writes:
Perhaps, in light of the economic crisis, the bleak job market, the hiring freezes across the country, and the backlog of recent PhD's waiting for tenure-track jobs to open up (and so available for TA-ships and lecturing), Departments across the profession should agree to self-impose a one-year freeze in admissions to PhD programs?
Thoughts from readers? Signed comments strongly preferred.
This proposal strikes me as very heavy-handed and very unrealistic. Some thoughts:
1. Who would these measures actually help? Not those currently on the job market, or about to go on the job market. After all, not admitting PhD students NOW isn't going to help someone five+ years ahead. Indeed, it is not even clear that these proposals would help students ready to go on the job market in (say) three years, since such students would still be two+ years ahead of the class of PhD students that would have started in 2011. The job market will contain the same number of candidates in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years from now even if we don't admit any PhD students now.
2. So it looks like the only beneficiary of the proposed measures will be students going on the job market in 6 or 7 years' time. But who knows what the job market will look like then? Who knows whether students in 6-7 years will *need* the help that the implementation of Dr. Hieronymi's proposals would provide? Perhaps the economy will have improved.
3. I applied to graduate programs this year. I also had offers a couple large law firms that would have paid my way through law school and given me a high-paying job at the end of it. I chose philosophy. But if I had been forced to wait a year and then re-apply, I wold have just become a lawyer. I suspect that many others would do the same: once you've left academia, it is difficult to get motivated enough to jump back in. Do we really want to lose a whole cycle of philosophers? Is that good for the profession at all?
4. Most pressingly, these proposals are completely unrealistic. Imagine that a representative from philosophy department X confronts a university administrator and says: "oh, by the way, we don't intend to teach any new grad students next year." The administrator will not be happy! She will ask: "what are you going to do then? Why have we hired all these philosophy professors, who aren't going to do any graduate teaching next year?" Surely philosophy departments can't just DECIDE to stop admitting grad students. This has to be approved by someone higher up the food chain. But make no mistake, there is no way anyone with the relevant authority will approve such a proposal.
An alternate option (and I'm not endorsing either) would be for departments to cut the usual number of offers by a certain percentage. I think a few departments have been doing this the last two years.
How bad is the economic crisis supposed to be? If we didn't admit any students next year, i.e. starting in 2011, we'd be taking a little pressure off the job markets in 2017. It's possible we'll be in the next recession by then, but if this downturn is still going, we'll have more things to worry about than too many grad students.
Compare what happened after the last serious recession. If we'd put in a freeze on grad admissions when the philosophy job market collapsed in the mid-90s, we'd have been preventing students from graduating into one of the biggest booms we've ever seen in the early 2000s. That would have been a terrible outcome, and I don't see any reason that a freeze now would be any different.
I believe many would think that the proposal is too extreme, but let me just emphasize that it would be a disaster for oversea students. Nowadays it is difficult enough for us, and if everyone needs to wait for another year, then next year there would be even less international students to be admitted (this is especially true for those who come from non-English speaking world). We can have Ph.Ds in the western world and go back to our countries for jobs. Please do not do anything like this to us.
I think that the previous commenters are missing Hieronymi's point. The main aim, as her parenthetical indicates, is not to ease the burden six or seven years from now when newly admitted students would be going on the market, but to ease the burdens on students currently finishing up grad school who would otherwise lose support from their institutions. They would be able to continue to receive support for working as teaching assistants and instructors while some of the backlog clears.
Echoing and expanding on anon's point 4: Given the economic situation, many departments are struggling hard to prove that they 'add value' to the institution and hence should not be cut or downsized. This is hardly a moment when (tenuously) employed philosophers can risk teaching substantially fewer grad students. I suppose the response would be that we should just take one for the team and shoulder that risk, but as anon also points out, it's not at all clear what 'team' that would help, and besides it seems far too much to ask of people. Much better to be excruciatingly clear with admitted grad students that their job and funding prospects may well be very grim.
It is truly amazing how blind you all can be to the fact that our profession turns out more than twice as many Ph.D.s as there are available tenure-track jobs. A one-year moratorium? How about a 10-year. Then we'll talk. Then you can parade around this nonsense about not being in it for the career and about the need to keep good philosophers in the profession.
BL COMMENT: Perhaps there are programs that should institute a 10-year moratorium, but the idea that we are producing twice as many NYU or Princeton or Cornell PhDs as the profession can absorb is obviously nonsense.
Perhaps the more sensible approach would be to lower the average class size from 6-8 to 4-5 going forward. I agree with Brian Weatherson that trying to address an immediate crisis with measures that won't have an impact for 6-8 years seems a bit misguided (although the proposal would do some work to ease the backlog of Ph.D.s that is being created at present and that we do best not to ignore). At the same time, it does seem true that a dearth of jobs is, more or less, a perennial problem, with the degree of severity varying as does the economic climate. In addition, it is hard to see how much of the recession-instigated contraction won't fall into the "restructuring" category in much the same way as the contraction in other economic spheres seems to. In other words, now that departments have been told to "do more with less," it's hard to see what would lead administrators to say "here, have some more" in the future. Given all of this, it only seems sensible to reduce the number of people who will be dependent upon there being jobs available in the area. Or, alternatively, philosophy departments have to start training/marketing their graduates for academic and non-academic jobs alike.
Is the employment situation for individuals with a philosophy Ph.D. currently any worse than for those without it? If not, it seems to me that restricting graduate admissions would only shift the problem to other areas of the economy, making it harder for everyone to get jobs in whatever sectors the would-be-philosophers end up turning to. It hardly seems fair to raise further barriers to entry into our profession simply in order to make it easier for existing Ph.D.'s to find jobs.
By all means, we should be honest with prospective graduate students about the difficulties they'll face in securing the sort of employment they might be after. But let's trust them to decide what to do on the basis of that advice.
Professor Kukla's point is extremely apt. We have witnessed philosophy programs on the chopping block before ~ recall the situation from a couple years back at the University of Florida ~ as an easy answer to (imaginary?) budgetary constraints. I am sure at least one administrative reason for targeting disciplines like philosophy is that there are already so few philosophy students, from undergraduate majors to ABD students, that they do not expect much flack or bad PR.
How's this for a more practical solution: how about making sure that philosophy Ph.D. students that are admitted to Ph.D. programs are *also* capable of finding good jobs outside of philosophy or outside of academe in general. By capable, I mean being knowledgeable about the options, having some sort of professional skill set that could get them into such positions, and having the professional and social demeanor necessary to be able to interview for, obtain, and be successful in such jobs?
This seems like a much more feasible solution, because, so far as I can tell, everyone wins. Students who want to pursue graduate study are able to do so; research faculty can continue to train new scholars; universities administrators get cheap labor; departments continue to be useful and productive, and thus can justify their continued existence in light of budgetary crises; and students have more options to chose from at the end of their graduate career.
This would require forcing certain social and cultural changes within the discipline, and that would not happen without some difficulty. But those changes might be well-motivated for other reasons, aside from just this.
I don't know why Joseph S. thinks we are 'blind' to the fact that we turn out way more PhD's than there are jobs. I think all of us know this very well, especially since we went through the job market ourselves. It seems to me it's just a fact about our profession. Way more people train to be dancers, or opera singers, or professional basketball players, than will actually make a living at it. Some professions are like that, and ours is one of them, though not as extremely so as the examples I just gave. We are in a competitive and *mostly* meritocratic profession, and more people are interested in trying to join it than there are jobs. Why exactly is this a problem? It seems to me that what is needed is just informed consent – people need to understand the risk they are taking by going to grad school in philosophy, especially at a program that is not top-ranked. And people should be seriously discouraged from going anywhere where they are not offered funding, for all the obvious reasons. Here at USF, the students are *very* informed of the realities of the job market. Of course, there is some hopeful delusion among them – most of them work on sustaining the belief that they will be among those who make it. No surprise there – the same goes on when you train to dance, sing, etc. It's part of how people keep hard-to-achieve dreams alive.
I think many, many of the students who are in PhD programs in philosophy should not be, as far as their own interests go. But I am not convinced that this means there is a systematic problem with graduate training or the job market, nor, certainly, that most of us are 'blind' to their realities.
I don't understand why the proposal is for *all* programs to do this. Perhaps it's an idea that some programs facing certain problems would want to adopt.
One really ought not to underestimate the degree to which prospective philosophy graduate students, individuals who have been exceptional relative to their peer group prior to graduate school, are disposed to unwarrantedly predict that they will prove exceptional relative to their graduate school peer group (I would like to see a study on what percentage of incoming graduate students predict that they will prove to be better than average; I would predict over 70%). As such, one makes too easy for oneself in appealing to disclosure as, by itself, an adequate fix to the problem.
Hmm, before someone else makes the point against me:
I regret having used pro basketball as an example, as in that case there are really problematic race and economic dynamics at work, which result in some kids pursuing unrealistic dreams at the cost of other possibilities, in a context where such sacrifices are ill-afforded. But that's neither here nor there for my point. Substitute some other sport of your choice. (I know so little about sports that I always say something dumb when I get specific.) If someone has funding, and wants to spend much of her 20s doing this, and understands her chances of success, and will come out the other end with an advanced degree and little or no debt, I don't think it's analogous to the basketball case and I also don't think it's any kind of tragedy if she doesn't get a job in philosophy at the end.
'Anonymous grad student' remarks that "philosophy departments have to start training/marketing their graduates for academic and non-academic jobs alike." I would be very interested to see if there are any philosophers on here who a) think this is a good idea, and b) would actually be willing to do it.
@Rebecca Kukla: Perhaps I am wrong in saying that many people are "blind" to the realities of the profession. But I do think there is a systematic problem with graduate training and the job market. Philosophy departments who lack the prestige of being in the top 10 or even top 30 on the PGR have a clear interest in bringing more students in so that they can teach them and retain their "Ph.D. program" status. Universities at large have a clear interest in maintaining the status quo because grad students (and adjuncts) are cheap labor.
Naturally, I'm thinking here of the people who have spent a lot of time and money getting to the point at which they have an application attractive to PhD programs. Their chances of admission at any given school have already dropped in the past couple years from as high as 15% to something like 5-7%, as application numbers have increased and acceptance numbers have decreased. That's disheartening, but it's the reality of the situation. Instead of having to be a top notch student, one now needs to be a top notch student with a fair bit of luck. A moratorium on new admissions would take those acceptance rates from 5-7% to 0. I know that economic realities can't always be dealt with fairly, but not even giving folks a chance seems a cruel blow to people who have spent as many as 6 years preparing for this opportunity.
Yes, one could apply a year later, but this would require getting a non-academic job and then returning to academia and would also vastly increase application numbers (again), dropping acceptance rates to as low as 25% of where they were a few years ago.
@training for non-academic jobs:
I'm a grad student now, and when I was applying to grad schools, I was warned that I might not have better than a 50/50 chance of getting a job even if I did everything right (though I'd be curious to hear from BL whether he thinks this applies to my program, I'm in a top 15 department). Anyway, as a result I've been mentally preparing to convince non-philosophy employers that they should hire me since before I arrived at Notre Dame. Certainly I would welcome help marking myself that way, and I bet students who haven't thought about the issue would benefit from it even more.
When you talk about training for non-philosophy jobs, though, that sounds like something much more involved than simple self-marketing advice, that would take a lot of time away from philosophy studies (or my already limited social life). That I wouldn't be thrilled about.
It should be kept in mind that some people pursue a PhD in philosophy for the knowledge/training in philosophy first, and the possibility of a job teaching only second. Some of these students have in the past, and plan after their PhD, to be active in the field outside of teaching at an institution. Some of us just want to be part of the conversation (which reminds me of Robert Paul Wolff's recent memoirs).
In any case, departments (especially on the lower end) should take more initiative in making sure incoming students know the difficulty of securing a position, and (what may be much harder), helping their students secure non-academic positions in which work in academic philosophy might still be possible in one's life.
People have spent six years preparing to get into a PhD program?
It seems to me that Pamela's proposal is in some sense too extreme and in another sense it does go far enough. It's clear that the profession is over-producing PhD's with respect to the job market's capacity to absorb them. But this is nothing new, it's been going on for many years now, and a one-year moratorium, while potentially unfair to current applicants, would not address the problem. The over-production of PhD's feeds the administration's hunger for cheap and disposable labor and ultimately undermines the tenure system. There is something to be said for a long-term reduction of PhD admission across the board. By that I mean that the reduction should not just take place at lower-ranked programs (whose PhD's in any case fare better than folklore would have it), but at higher-ranked and lower-ranked programs as well. The economic times might make it a little easier, if anything, to sell such a reduction to the administration. In my department, this year, we were very careful not to overshoot our target enrollment (while in other years we might have been more cavalier about the prospect). It is also high time, as the AAUP has suggested, that we mount an effort for the institution of fair employment conditions for faculty off the tenure track — wages they can actually live on, reasonable benefits, and a modicum of employment security. While other professional associations such as the MLA have at least made some noises in this direction, it seems to me that philosophers have all but ignored the issue.
I think it's important to note that it is not enough that potential graduate students be informed of the difficulties of the philosophical job market. They also need an honest assessment from their departments, and especially their advisers, about their own skills and chances at getting a tenure-track job. A student whose abilities are seriously deficient should be told this, gently but honestly. I get the feeling that not enough faculty are willing to have these tough conversations with students and that, as a result, the market is full of candidates who have very little chance at finding work.
Mark's right about the point, which is to relieve pressure on students who have already invested 6-8 years in this process, and face a lousy market. A larger than usual number are going to have to admit defeat in the next year or two, and having a way of providing them with minimum wage employment while they wait for opportunities makes sense. Joseph S is also right that there is a systematic problem, though I agree that his solution goes overboard. Cutting admission considerably would help, and doing so permanently for many programs would be a sensible thing to do.
The rest of the Humanities face exactly the same short-term and long-term issues, and are equally unwilling to face up to them as far as I can tell.
RK "If someone has funding, and wants to spend much of her 20s doing this, and understands her chances of success, and will come out the other end with an advanced degree and little or no debt…"
Well, the question is whether people in their early twenties really have the relevant understanding of the chances of success. I'm skeptical. I sure didn't. Does your program include a warning on the application form, or in its offer letters, explaining the chances of success frankly? Does it give frequent and frank feedback on the students' progress?
Anonymous grad student is right, too. Compare with the percentage of people who believe they are above-average drivers.
Yes, some of us did not go into it for the career. I was warned about the job market back in the mid-80s and stayed in graduate school anyway, my objective being to study philosophy under the great teachers there. So here I am 25 years later teaching 8-10 community college courses per term (Goddamn capitalism to the fire of hell) and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Freezing PhD admissions for even one year may exacerbate rather than mitigate the problem of over-supply of philosophy PhDs.
1) Faculty teach in PhD programs and those faculty will have under-enrolled graduate classes. Administrators notice such things and raise questions about adding new positions to the department and perhaps question renewing positions for those without tenure.
2) Administrators who note that a graduate department can continue even with a one-year hiatus of new admissions may, in the future, use that discovered reality as a basis for cutting philosophy program admissions even when economic times are better.
Perhaps, one practical solution to the problem is to encourage mid-career and senior philosophers, if they exhibit the personal proclivities and abilities, to seek and accept university administrative positions. The positives in this move are several:
1) Faculty spaces are vacated creating openings for new faculty.
2) Philosophers (my opinion) tend to be bright and talented academic administrators.
3) Philosophers as administrators are more keenly aware of the value of philosophy programs beyond any simplistic accounting procedures that may be used for administrative decision making.
If the goal really is departmental support and not clearing the job-market backlog, then I don't see why this needs to be a unified national move on the part of philosophy departments–let those who need to do it do it, and those who don't need to do it not do it. Didn't that already happen this year–don't I recall a few highly-ranked programs not taking any new students this year? Economic woes have not hit every school uniformly, and some are much more hard-up than others. I think it might be a good idea for those schools who are really having a hard time finding the money to fund existing students, but it seems silly to mandate it across the board.
Regardless of the merits of Prof. Hieronymi's specific proposal, it seems true that behaving more like a medieval guild of sorts (i.e. regulating the number of apprenticeships to optimise competition) would have some benefits for the profession: the damage from a bad job market does trickle-up, as it were (e.g. Prof. Antonelli rightly notes above that the casualisation of academic work "undermines the tenure system").
But maybe this is just a wider issue, mostly to do with the (lack of?) compatibility between advanced capitalism and the very idea of the university, which after all is historically closely related to that of the guild, which in turn is fully viable only within a pre-capitalist economic system. On the other hand, a guild-like closed system would probably stifle intellectual innovation (the usual story about the links between the Enlightenment and the rise of classical economic thought comes to mind). A difficult trade-off, but one worth thinking about.
I generally agree that a one-year moritorium hurts more than it helps.
I also think that folks applying to graduate programs need to know the truth about job prospects after graduation. That bit of hard truth needs to start when a bright undergraduate comes for a recommendation. I've found it helpful to let them know aproximately how many people applied for my job and how many applicants we've had for recent positions.
If programs want to make sure their new Ph.D.s are able to make a living in philosophy, they have a duty to insure those new Ph.D.s are prepared to teach at all levels. The job market is horrible overall, but it's even worse if a candidate isn't prepared to teach students who aren't ready for college, attending community colleges etc.
I agree that the job prospects in philosophy even in the best of markets are pretty grim. However, things seem so grim right now, that they're not comparable to the normal situation (as evidenced by anyone who's looked at a few of the most recent Jobs for Philosophers). My experience is that graduate departments (I've been in two) do a good job at making the grim job prospects of the status quo pretty clear. And most of us had read the bit on the Gourmet report citing some of the relevant stats. We all know that stuff coming in, but once you've committed to the program, 2-3 years down the road, you don't want simply to give up and waste whatever time/effort you put in, so you stick it out know matter how grim the job prospects. I guess I don't see what making the grimness of one's job prospects any clearer will actually do to ameliorate the current situation.
It also seems clear to me just what team would benefit from the moratorium. As stated above, it would give current grads about to go on the market another year or two of funding through TA-ships or internal postdocs or whatever. That seems to me a good way not to force promising young grads out of philosophy before they even get a chance. I'm skeptical about just how philosophy departments would usefully provide formal non-academic training as an alternative for students, but providing those about to go on the market with additional TA-ships/internal postdocs seems a at least a step in that direction. Also I wonder about just how much having graduate seminars to teach really matters to the University Administration. It might matter a lot. I'm just not in a position to know. Perhaps it depends on the school?
Some on this thread have denied that the disparity between PhDs and available jobs in our discipline is a significant problem. They point to other professions that face similar disparities and note that our discipline is unexceptional.
While I'm somewhat sympathetic to the response that many prospective students are unaware of their relative chances of success in the profession, many departments post explicit and detailed placement information on their websites. Students may *not* make reasonable judgments about their futures, but it is not always for lack of relevant evidence.
One important factor that has largely gone undiscussed here is that our profession has a significant interest in training more people than there are available jobs: graduate students work for very little money relative to faculty members. Something similar, I take it, is going on in other professions to which ours has been compared: we have more basketball players in training than there are positions for professionals because lots of people want to watch amateur basketball players. And so on.
Noting that our profession is similar to others in terms of its job market woes alone hardly justifies the practice of training more candidates than there are jobs. Whether or not such an admissions practice is in fact justified depends, I think, on whether the employment practices served by this admissions practice are justified.
As I see it, the only hope for significantly reducing the ratio of candidates to jobs is to curtail graduate student and adjunct teaching. Whether or not we ought to do this is an interesting and complicated question. If indeed we ought, one significant hurdle is that significant change would likely require concerted and unified effort at the level of the profession as a whole, since individual universities and departments have substantial interest in cheap labor.
The discussion so far has obscured the role of this question in the debate. We should be talking about it here.
It strikes me that the real question being obscured in many of these comments is whether a graduate education really is primarily about "training", or whether many (hopefully most) students are in it for something more than that. The upshot of having graduate students work for low wages is not just that cheap labor is available to hold discussion sections and grade undergraduate papers, but also that a great number of people think really hard, learn a lot of things, and have a lot of exciting conversations, about things they wouldn't otherwise have been able to consider. If someone who pursues an advanced degree in philosophy of all things feels that he or she has wasted his or her time in graduate school just because it didn't lead to a fancy research position, it's hardly the system that's to blame.
Jon, notice that the poster you're responding to is in an MA program. Four years of college plus two for a terminal MA. A lot of us did it.
Joseph S., grad students aren't cheap labor. They teach one or two courses a semester and get not only a stipend that, nominally, is a living wage, plus they get free tuition that's generally worth a lot more than the stipend, plus health insurance. Adjuncts, in contrast, are virtually free labor at most schools (except at the few schools where unions have negotiated equal pay for equal work, in which case benefits costs can make them more expensive than full-time faculty because they're spread over fewer revenue-bearing courses).
As for whether departments should reduce admissions in order to keep more support funds to unemployed grads remaining at ABD status (the original proposal, I take it), it all depends on how the institution awards funding. TAships are generally a function of undergraduate enrollments, and fellowships at some schools are awarded competitively across disciplines, whereas at others departments get so many per year. In any case, most schools distinguish between funding for incoming students and those who are past their expiration date (usually 4-6 years). So it would probably require negotiations with the dean for this proposal to have its intended effect rather than, say, shifting money to grad students in English or Economics. And then if the dean leaves before you want to go back to the old system (which he probably will), you'll have to hope that your pact gets communicated to the new dean and that the latter continues to honor it.
The sad fact is that the current economic crisis has been used as a reason by administrators to do what they would have liked to do in any event. W. J. Hawk is right that a moratorium on Ph.D. admissions would further invite administrators to adopt behaviors ultimately harming the job market for philosophers (i.e., senior profs would be reallocated to undergrad courses). DCH is right that eliminating grad student teaching would be very helpful (or reducing it to the minimum amount that would help grad students gain classroom experience). Eliminating only some (but not all) Ph.D. programs would have a disastrous impact on whatever diversity of philosophical 'schools' there now is. Additionally, some Ph.D. programs considered 'lower rank' still achieve decent placement for graduates in specific geographical or religious niches.
Perhaps we should work towards opening up the market to more philosophy jobs outside of academia. I seem to remember hearing about ethics advising for medical something or other. But what do I know!
Since I have four years until I'll be applying for graduate school, I'm hopeful that the market will clear up by around then. But even so, the sheer disconnection between inside and outside the profession makes me nervous for its future. What kind of profession is one that makes money essential only on its own trainees and perhaps the rounding out of its employers' validity as academic institutions.
"As I see it, the only hope for significantly reducing the ratio of candidates to jobs is to curtail graduate student and adjunct teaching." DCH
As a long-time adjunct, I am greatly interested in how you would go about combating the (know-nothing) administrators who profit off our cheap labor. I remember an APA session in the late '90s where there was talk of militant action, but obviously nothing came of it. After the Second Coming, philosophers walking a picket line for other philosophers would be the greatest sight these eyes could see.
@ Jon: As an oversea students from the non-English speaking world, I spent more than six years for preparing this. Our BA and MA degrees outside of the western world significantly debase the odds of getting good Ph.D admissions, so we need time to do extraordinary things. Since this is not the main theme of this thread, I will not expatiate on the details here. All I would like to stress is that it is we applicants' responsibility to get clear about the job market, and it is our right to have chances to get in Ph.D, even if the chances are not substantial; we are clear that it's practically impossible for us to get a decent job in the western world, but we can go back to our countries. To close the admission is to force us to have Ph.D trainings in places outside of the U.S., and this would be a big problem, since all students from the U.S. will have to apply to programs in the U.K., Canada, and Australia as well. It will turn out that people from the non-English speaking world will go nowhere.
Many of these comments have revealed one serious structural problem, which is that universities apparently have very little financial or institutional interest in maximizing job placements for their grad students.
So maybe *that's* the problem that needs to be solved. What incentives can you *give* universities to run graduate programs that result in the highest possible placement in tenure-track (or equivalent) jobs for their graduates? My impression is that universities have some incentive to maximize undergraduate job placement, because that's (if I'm not mistaken) correlated with alumni giving; alumni giving is also a factor in undergraduate institutional rankings (US News et al), which are important. But there doesn't seem to be a similar set of terms one can use to persuade administrators on behalf of grad students.
It would of course be a service to grad students to get advice and support in seeking non-academic jobs. Maybe part of that would involve departments doing outreach to potential employers as well as giving pep talks to students — explaining to them why a doctoral candidate in philosophy would be a good hire, soliciting internships, that sort of thing.
Thoughts?
Of course the mere fact that other professions train more people than will be able to find jobs doesn't make it right, but I think there is an important factor that's being overlooked here, that we again have in common with those other professions: We *just don't know* which of the very promising undergrads that apply for graduate school will turn out to be worthy philosophers. We can make some educated guesses, but until people actually go through the training, their records simply underdetermine the question (with some rare exceptions blah blah blah). I don't see how we can avoid training more people than will be worthy of jobs in the end except by randomly not admitting some students who look every bit as good on paper as the ones we do admit, or by focusing on some fake, unreliable measure of potential. You simply can't have worthwhile ballet companies without training more dancers than will make it – you don't know until they train just how good they are. It's not like we have reliable ways of being more selective up front. Same with philosophy. Philosophy is hard, and fourth year undergrads don't yet wear their potential and their limitations on their sleeves.
In my program we take plenty of people who anyone with a brain could see don't have a chance of really making it in the profession, and I have been objecting to this for years. We shouldn't lead people on that way. But leaving those people aside, we just can't know in advance who will have the real stuff and who will not. There are genuinely more people who deserve a space in a grad program, based on what they've done in a few years of undergraduate study, then there are people who deserve a job in philosophy at the end. So I guess I think it's good, within reason, that there are more PhD's than there are jobs. (The current abysmal job market doesn't count as 'within reason'.)
Plus all the cynical stuff about keeping our jobs and pleasing our administrators and having TAs and all that is true too, of course. Oh, and to the grad student who just didn't know whether administrations cared that much whether we teach grad students? They do, a lot, trust me.
I wonder how many people are entering philosophy Ph.D programs this year because the bad economy has reduced the number of opportunities in the "real world". For some of these people, spending two years in a graduate program while drawing a meager stipend for TA work and then dropping out (perhaps with a consolation prize Masters degree) may actually be a fine choice, given the lack of other options.
I like the idea of grad school as a cheap place for out-of-work smart people to go during recessions. I don't know if we have lobbyists or anything, but maybe this should've been promoted to the federal government when they were looking for countercyclical stimulus measures.
@Joseph S. | April 27, 2010 at 10:01 AM
re: "training/marketing graduates for academic and non-academic jobs alike. I would be very interested to see if there are any philosophers on here who a) think this is a good idea, and b) would actually be willing to do it."
"Yes" from me concerning both a and b. BTW: We are sometimes even *doing* this … [:-)] … .
"Many of these comments have revealed one serious structural problem, which is that universities apparently have very little financial or institutional interest in maximizing job placements for their grad students."
Philosophy departments have some financial interest and *tremendous* institutional interest in job placement.
Relevant news:
"Late on Monday 26 April 2010, the Dean of the School of Arts and Education at Middlesex University, announced the closure of all its Philosophy programmes, including the largest MA programme in Philosophy in the UK. Philosophy is the highest research-ranked subject in the University, and Middlesex is the highest rated of all the post-92 institutions in the subject."
http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/2010/04/closure-of-philosophy-at-middlesex.html
I take Rebecca Kukla's point that the profession has an interest in admitting more candidates to its training ranks than potential jobs awaiting any particular cohort in any particular year. It certainly seems right to acknowledge that we can't tell clearly enough which 22-year-olds are likely to be successful professionals and so we have a good reason to admit considerably more than there will be jobs.
What I think we don't have good reason to do is *graduate* as many as we do. The problem, I take it, is not with admissions practices so much as it is with the kind of institutional inertia that allows students who do not have a reasonable chance of landing good employment to continue on to the PhD.
So, I think that it is our graduation practices that are problematic, but I recognize that they may not be blameworthy. Lots of parties have an interest in seeing students who are admitted finish their programs. Administrators and departments get their low-cost labor. Advisors get to continue close – and sometimes quite profitable – personal and professional relationships. The students themselves are spared the embarrassing and difficult uprooting that accompanies dismissal from a graduate program. And so on. Furthermore, one part of what makes this issue particularly thorny is that the relevant standard of employability shifts on the basis of a factor wholly outside the control the involved parties: the job market.
Finally, as BL noted above, the problem does not affect all graduate programs equally: NYU PhDs are clearly employable; those from many other programs are not so clearly employable. It's not the case, then, that *all* departments have reason to pass fewer of their admitted students on to the PhD. Does this imply that only some subset of PhD programs bear the burden (by significantly curtailing degrees awarded or perhaps by closing their doors) of addressing our job market disparities? Perhaps it does, but it is difficult to see what a realistic and practically effective proposal about this might look like.
It's difficult, then, to see how exactly we ought to revise our practices in order to address this problem. By my lights, it *is* an intolerable problem, and so is worth trying to figure out if anything might be done about it and what the potential solutions are. Others may not see it as so significant a problem; to them, then, our graduation practices are unlikely to seem so problematic.
Rebecca Kukla's comment (April 28, 2010 at 12:51 AM) raises some important issues, but I strongly disagree with her conclusions about why a surfeit of PhDs is unavoidable.
She makes two main points:
(1) There are almost inevitably going to be many philosophy PhDs who aren't worthy of TT jobs, who don't have "the real stuff" that makes them deserving of a job.
(2) That (1) is the case isn't the fault of philosophy doctoral programs, because prior to a person going through the training needed to get a PhD, doctoral programs cannot determine which applicants will have "the real stuff," although they can often make the determination that applicants don't have it. So even if programs restrict themselves to admitting only those applicants who are quite promising, they will admit some students who later on turn out not to be worthy of a job.
I hope that that's a fair summary. On each point.
(1) I don't think that there are lots of "undeserving" philosophy PhDs kicking around, or that this pool of people is a major factor contributing to our longstanding job market woes. Sure, there are some. I'll let placement directors weigh in on this, but are there lots of folks on the market who just shouldn't get some sort of TT job somewhere? You don't need to be some sort of philosophical superstar in order to remain engaged in the profession and to make a modest, but worthwhile, contribution to some area within philosophy and to move the conversation in that area forward a bit. And with some training, effort, and experience, I'd hope that most people with the level of understanding of philosophy to get a PhD would be able to do a solid and worthy job as a teacher. Again, there are definitely some philosophy PhDs who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a classroom, but are there a lot of them?
(2) I admit that admitting people to PhD programs is an uncertain business (since I've had some experience admitting folks at the MA level), and that people often turn out to be much worse (or better) than you'd expect from what you see on paper coming from an undergrad institution. And I agree that there is no way to eliminate this uncertainty. So PhD programs will probably admit some people who (it turns out) shouldn't go on to a career teaching philosophy. But it doesn't follow that inevitably there will be a surfeit of "undeserving" philosophy PhDs unless most of these folks go all of the way through the program and get their PhD. PhD programs should be operated in a way such that the people who successfully complete the coursework, pass qualifying exams (if the program has them), and write and defend a dissertation up to departmental standards do at that point have "the real stuff" that makes them deserving of a job.
I can see the occasional odd case where this doesn't happen, but if philosophy doctoral programs do their job they shouldn't be producing lots of people with PhDs who aren't deserving jobs.
I have been an Interim Dean since January and have gotten some new perspectives in this role. (The next points apply to my experience at a large state-supported university in Texas.) University upper administrators are not as in charge of things as faculty seem to imagine they are. They are accountable to people (Regents and legislators) who may not always appreciate the value of a liberal arts education or Ph.D. Every detail of budgets is gone over minutely by our Regents, and the same holds for details sent to the legislature. It is important to have administrators who are articulate and committed to trying to make the case for liberal arts education. But this is challenging for them too. One way this came across to me is that I have recently attended a number of meetings that our President (just into her 3rd year) has been having with individual departments in our college. She spends a lot of time listening to their activities and research interests and needs, and then winds up asking them to help her generate an "elevator speech" about the unique strengths of their department: something she can say to a prospective donor or regent while riding up an elevator in one minute to attend a meeting somewhere. Everyone is stumped at this request. It seems difficult to compress our fields into a sound bite like this. And our President is not anti-intellectual, quite the contrary. This is just apparently the sort of thing you need to be able to do.
Other things that matter to administrators and their higher-ups have to do with meeting benchmarks and showing up well in national rankings. These can involve measurement factors that don't always work very well for departments humanities or liberal arts departments, such as citations, Federal grants, private philanthropic fund-raising, and so on. Doctoral student numbers and placement are also quite important in some rankings systems such as NRC.
Our percentage of state support has decreased now to 29% and even though the Texas economy is stronger than that of some other states, we are still having two years of 5% budget cuts. Many expenses are going up and the cuts just do have to be made. Sometimes they affect staff, and we are all (faculty and staff) having a one-day furlough in May. (Deans too.) Tuition has been increased, but there are some legislatively imposed restrictions on this and some common-sense restrictions related to what the student market can bear.
Because of these factors there is a new emphasis on what our Provost calls revenue-generating programs. These are programs that will attract students who are willing to pay high designated tuition and fees. Examples are a Master's of Public Administration associated with Political Science and a Master's of Applied Economics. Neither program has high priority in its respective department because they aren't deemed of high research value. But the departments are nonetheless moving to implement or support them because they do have a market and will generate money that can be used to support TA's and to hire new faculty members. Without such a program it is difficult to say that other departments can expect to get any of these things. I am racking my brain trying to think of a revenue-generating Philosophy M.A. program but without success. Surely there are some things or sub-fields that would be 'marketable'. Philosophers would probably scorn them though and not implement them. So who, then, is supposed to pay for philosophy to continue to be taught at the graduate level, if foundations, private donors, businessmen, regents, state legislators, and the state's citizens aren't interested? What is the case you can make, in an elevator speech, to convince them? Of course as an academic and a reader, I think a book it would be preferable to have more time, or to ask someone to read a book like Nussbaum's new one, but can you get anyone to do so?
A final thought: many of our M.A. students are now getting jobs immediately at community colleges. In a large urban area like ours there is incredible demand for such teaching. Every semester I am asked to help area community colleges find philosophy lecturers. It is not a lot of money but it seems to be an ever-growing demand.
Sorry for some garbled sentences in the above. It comes of editing, cutting and pasting while answering phone calls and signing paperwork. Most of what you do as a Dean is sign paperwork it seems.
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