Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Fool's avatar
  2. Santa Monica's avatar
  3. Charles Bakker's avatar
  4. Matty Silverstein's avatar
  5. Jason's avatar
  6. Nathan Meyvis's avatar
  7. Stefan Sciaraffa's avatar

    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

APA Guide to Graduate Programs for 2012

MOVING TO FRONT FROM TWO DAYS AGO–SEE THE UPDATES–IT LOOKS LIKE THE APA 'GUIDE' HAS SOME SERIOUS OMISSIONS

It's now on-line.  No qualitative assessments, needless to say, but a lot of useful data and information.  In most cases, there is more job placement data on-line at department websites than is offered here, but it's still a useful resource.

UPDATE:  Donald Hubin, the Chair at Ohio State, writes with an important cautionary note:

In reviewing the APA Guide to Graduate Programs for 2012, the Ohio State Department found significant and puzzling errors.  We are currently working with Andres Colapinto, the APA researcher overseeing the report, to correct the data for our department.  Mr. Colapinto has been extremely responsive and the APA is committed to correcting any errors in the report quickly and reposting corrected PDF on the website.  I believe that this report holds the promise of being a useful tool for prospective graduate students.  However, until departments have had a chance to review this report and correct any errors, prospective graduate students should not rely on the accuracy of the report.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Stephen Menn (McGill/Humboldt) writes:

The APA Guide to Graduate Programs for 2012 says that it's giving "information about Ph.D., M.A., and equivalent degree programs in the United States and Canada." But in fact neither their Doctoral nor their Master's program guides include any information at all about Canadian programs. Both of the guides have notes at the end saying "the following schools did not submit data for this report," and giving a list, and neither of those lists includes any Canadian schools. So it's not that the Canadian schools didn't respond. Rather, it looks as if the APA sent out questionnaires to a list of schools (of which some responded and some not), but that they simply forgot to send the questionnaire to any Canadian schools. The effect of the APA's Guide will be to tell prospective graduate applicants that there are no Canadian graduate programs worth bothering about. Canadian philosophers (unlike Europeans and Mexicans and so on) pay full APA dues, for full membership in APA divisions, and this is not how we want our dues money spent. I don't think the APA can cure this simply by changing their wording and saying "information about Ph.D., M.A., and equivalent degree programs in the United States," and never mind the Canadians. At an absolute minimum they should say, "for information about Canadian graduate programs, see http://www.acpcpa.ca/en/departments.php", which will at least give their readers links to the departmental websites. But it would be better if they took the webpage offline and made a more serious effort next year–or this year if there is still time to do it ahead of the graduate application season, but there won't be much time remaining for everyone to get their information together.

AND STILL MORE:  Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) writes:

The Georgetown entry in the APA guide is also fully of errors and weirdnesses. I have no idea how the information got collected or transmitted or by whom so I am not blaming anyone in particular. But our write-up underreports our minority and female students, and the list of our strengths is very odd. For instance the list does not mention feminist philosophy, ethics, or political philosophy, which I would think are much more clearly strengths of ours than is philosophy of language. Anyways it seems that guide should be taken with a grain of salt.

Given the unfortunate extent of the errors and omissions, I'm opening comments for other examples.  Signed comments only:  full name and valid e-mail address.  Please comment only on your own department's listing (or omission).  As noted last week, comments may take awhile to appear due to other pressing obligations.  Please be patient.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

4 responses to “APA Guide to Graduate Programs for 2012”

  1. HPS at Pittsburgh and LPS at Irvine are not even listed as graduate programs in philosophy, and the placement for Pitt (and I assume for Irvine) does not reflect the placement of Pitt HPS.

  2. The Georgia State information is as we reported, although one row is misleading: we're said to have 50 "fellowships." That isn't quite right. I checked, and the spreadsheet I filled out asked for "# MA fellowships and grants (current year)," which I took to cover people getting things like teaching assistantships with a stipend plus tuition waiver too, not just fellowships narrowly construed. So it'd be nice if that row were relabelled. While the exact mix of support types does matter, the truly crucial piece of information is something like "# of students receiving a stipend and tuition waiver."

  3. Margaret Atherton

    There were indeed errors in the APA Guide with some of the numbers for our program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. HOWEVER, as soon as we called them to the attention of those who are overseeing the guide, they were immediately corrected. There is an address listed on the second page of the guide where corrections should be sent. The information in the guide is supposed to be self-reported from departments. If there are mistakes in your listing, do not just fulminate, report it.

  4. It appears that a communication breakdown between the national office and the grad guide researchers was at the root of the omissions from this year's grad guide. Unfortunately, at least two significant categories of programs that should have been included–Canadian programs and philosophy of science programs–were not represented in the database of contact information originally provided to the researchers. I apologize for the omissions, and for describing the guide inaccurately in its announcement. We have corrected the description of this edition of the guide on our website and will expand our contact list so that these programs can be included in next year's edition of the guide. In the meantime, we have posted a link to the Canadian Philosophical Association's department list on the grad guide page so that prospective students will be able to find information on those programs.

    We will also post new PDFs of the guide on a regular basis over the next few months and will be happy to add or update any data submitted to us. Programs wishing to correct their listings in the guide or submit initial data should email gradguide@apaonline.org. And as this is only the first edition of the newly restarted grad guide publication, we very much welcome suggestions for expansions and improvements to future editions, which should be sent to that same email address.

Designed with WordPress