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A student recently e-mailed me, concerned that the Oxford DPhil was "frowned upon" in the US, which didn't seem to me true. But I invite comment from faculty and students–signed only–about the pros and cons of doing the DPhil at Oxford versus a PhD at a top US department.
Is the question specifically about Oxford, or about UK doctorates in general? Cambridge, for example, awards the PhD degree and not the DPhil, yet there is more in common between Oxford and Cambridge (in terms of educational experience) than their U.S. counterparts. I'm an American doing a PhD at Cambridge and get the sense that, all other things being equal, the "Phd / DPhil" distinction is a non-issue.
BL COMMENT: The question was, I think, specifically about Oxford, but more general discussion about a UK PhD or DPhil vs. an American PhD would no doubt be useful to many students as well.
Some particularly thick-headed administrators or HR people may require a PhD for jobs in the US. Perhaps no one would be denied a position just because she had a DPhil instead of a PhD, but I do know one person who actually had to convince an overzealous dean that his DPhil was, in fact, a legitimate doctorate degree.
That small amount of anecdotal evidence might be worth something.
I'm interested in what others have to say about this topic. I am a UK/US dual citizen about to start an MPhil at Cambridge HPS. I've been told that it is hard to 'move over' to the US with a PhD/DPhil from the United Kingdom, regardless of whether they are from relatively prestigious schools (prestigious in the sense that they are good for the particular area of study, e.g., LSE and Cambridge are good places to study HPS). Is this true?
I can see why a UK doctorate may be regarded differently from a US one, but I can't see any reason why an Oxford D.Phil should be regarded differently from, say, a Cambridge PhD or a Sussex D.Phil.
It may be that some in the US don't know what a D.Phil is, and that could be a minor inconvenience, but that's not particular to the Oxford D.Phil. Once someone knows that D.Phil and PhD are terms for the same thing, the only issue surely is the US/UK one.
Most students who complete an Oxford DPhil in philosophy will have previously completed an Oxford BPhil degree (which is also a graduate degree, despite the name). In my experience, quite a few professional philosophers in the US have misconceptions about the BPhil and DPhil combination, misconceptions that are likely to lead to an Oxford graduate education being devalued. The Oxford philosophy department has a description of the BPhil degree here: http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/bphil_in_philosophy
I'm not a philosopher, but I am a prospective Oxford D.Phil (in ancient history), and I have heard that an Oxford D.Phil (and by extension an English PhD more generally) can be a problematic qualification for Americans planning on an academic career in America (I should emphasize, however, that I have only heard this anecdotally). As I understand it, the worry is that the combination of the very broad American undergraduate degree (when compared with an English BA, or a European degree) and the much more narrow English doctorate does not give candidates the broad mastery of the subject that they would have to achieve to get through the 'generals' of an American PhD. That said, I know Americans with Oxford D.Phils who have done very well on the American job market. I'm not sure how far one can extrapolate from my experience, but there are similarities between Oxford classics and Oxford philosophy, for both are extremely large, diverse, and well-established faculties.
In my experience, candidates with an Oxford DPhil or Cambridge PhD may be at a disadvantage applying to mid-tier schools in the US and Canada because their teaching experience doesn't match that of US or Canadian educated PhDs. The worry would be that giving a few tutorials or supervisions one-to-one in Oxbridge isn't really the right kind of preparation for teaching large classes at a SLAC or a large state/provincial university. I have been on hiring committees where this issue has come up, and since there's such a wealth of candidates to choose from, some schools may be disinclined to interview candidates whose teaching experience doesn't seem to match the kind of teaching they'll be undertaking in their new post.
I don't think this is as much of a problem for applicants to top-tier schools, and anyway it's possible to counter perceptions by explaining e.g. that one has in fact taught Oxbridge students in groups or by spelling out what is involved in giving tutorials/supervisions. The worry may also be somewhat offset if the applicant did her undergraduate degree at a US/Canadian school. All in all, you will probably have to make an extra effort to highlight what your experience really is, but that's something your advisors at Oxbridge will already have explained to you.
I thought the question was one that Daniel Star just answered, namely, whether US hiring departments will devalue a D. Phil. I would have said no, but Daniel probably knows better than I do.
Brian, you are probably in a good position to answer the question I thought was being asked. Aren't there quite a lot of recent (last decade) Oxford D. Phil.s who have got good US jobs, beating out top US PhD competition? (I would list a few, but I'm reluctant to risk insulting someone by leaving them out of a list.)
As a grad student, I have no idea about whether hiring committees or anyone else in the U.S 'frowns upon' Oxford D.Phil graduates, but I can say a couple things about the pros and cons of doing an Oxford D.Phil vs. a U.S Ph.D, since I thought about the choice a little over a year ago.
The most obvious difference is that the Oxford D.Phil, by itself, is just a dissertation. There is no coursework, no required teaching, and students are not automatically funded for the degree. U.S programs come with all three of these things. Most Oxford philosophy students do the B.Phil before the D.Phil, which means they do some coursework. And many teach tutorials, which is different from and probably easier than T.A'ing or teaching lecture courses at a U.S university but which nonetheless provides a kind of teaching experience. The B.Phil was just redesigned to be broader than it used to be – students used to study just three areas – but it still doesn't require quite the same breadth as I think most U.S Ph.D programs would. The application process to the D.Phil and other U.K (and continental European) Ph.D programs is different – it's a research proposal, similar to the dissertation prospectus one would write after 2-3 years in a U.S Ph.D program, not an "I'm interested in moral and political philosophy and I want to work with John Rawls" type thing.
I studied in the politics department at Oxford for two years before joining the Ph.D program in philosophy at Stanford, so I don't have too much inside knowledge about the philosophy department there (the politics department has a more active political philosophy scene, which is why I wanted to study there rather than in philosophy). But my feeling was that the graduate programs in Oxford are quite a bit bigger than those in the U.S, and there is less administrative infrastructure set up there to put grad students on the professional academic pathway, so the departments (both politics and philosophy from what I can tell) are thus somewhat less collectively invested in any one student. (Though some supervisors are very attentive to their own supervisees, as mine was.) I don't know if this actually affects job prospects but I can see how it could.
To me the advantage of doing a degree in the U.S is that it's all sort of nicely packaged for you – you get five years of funding (usually), a broad range of classes, some teaching experience, and you don't have to re-apply two years in and hope for more funding, or get separate funding from a governmental entity like the AHRC in the U.K, or apply to be a college tutor to get teaching experience. You don't have to worry about moving somewhere else after your B.Phil or M.Phil; you get to settle down for a while. The application process can be exhausting, so this is a real advantage for those choosing between a U.S Ph.D and the B.Phil/D.Phil combination.
The main advantage of doing graduate work in the U.K seems to be that you can focus more on your specialization. If you already have a dissertation project worked out, then you can get straight to it if you do a Ph.D or D.Phil in the U.K without doing a master's (the B.Phil is a master's) beforehand, or if you've already finished your master's.
The advantage of Oxford in particular is that the university and the town in general is buzzing with philosophy in a way that just isn't replicated at U.S universities (in my experience). Everyone all over the place is talking about philosophy. You can walk into pretty much any cafe and expect to hear someone discussing some philosophical question. Many more of the undergrads are very serious, graduate-level students already than I think you would find at U.S universities (in large part because they have to choose their course of study before they begin university, so they concentrate on philosophy from the beginning, and have to defend themselves in 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 tutorials with professors from day 1). I met a couple undergrads who were probably more well-read in philosophy before beginning their B.A's than I was after finishing my B.A and my M.A; they had all kinds of clever arguments about contemporary topics in political philosophy worked out before they even started their course. So there are many good interlocutors for grad students. Everyone basically lives "on campus," though there is no such thing as a "campus" there, and most people eat "in hall," which means you are forced to defend your philosophical positions over every meal. This can be good for your development – it was for mine. Students might also have an easier time concentrating on philosophy in Oxford because there's basically nothing else to do there but read and talk about books.
It will be useful to remember that not all UK doctorates have the same entry requirements, and therefore not all UK D.Phil or PhD graduates will have the profile Chris Lewis articulates. For example, the department of Politics at Cambridge (where some excellent political philosophy and ethical theory is done) requires PhD applicants to have a Master's degree (with a first class distinction). Also, there is PhD coursework and methods classes that are part of the Politics PhD at Cambridge. So at Cambridge it isn't just a dissertation. I imagine these differences would become important to a hiring committee when comparing US vs. UK grads.
Does Oxford not have a placement record listing the outcomes for all those who earn the D Phil in philosophy?? That is needed. Simply knowing that there are some people with an Oxford DPhil who have good US jobs isn't very much information, absent information about how most graduates fare. My guess is that there are many more Oxford philosophy DPhil students than PhD students in any one US program (there are many more faculty, at least).
The more important question to ask before entering a graduate program is whether most of its graduates end up employed as philosophers *at all*.
Now of course if most Oxford DPhils are employed as philosophers, but in the UK, this could be due to personal preference. But it could also both indicate and cause its being harder to get a job in the US. (The fewer have tried in the US, the less US employers will already know what to make of someone coming out of Oxford.)
Liz, the Oxford philosophy DPhil placement list is here: http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/graduate/placement_record It does not tell you the size of the cohort. My guess is that about 10 philosophy DPhils complete every year.
I'm a current (American) DPhil student in the Oxford Philosophy dept, having completed the BPhil. In response to Liz Harman, I did a quick search of department websites, which revealed the following about the number of current (2012-2013) PhD students at several top schools (note, I attempted to only count PhD students, not Masters students):
Princeton – 59
NYU – 41
Rutgers – 45
Oxford – 47
Oxford also has 7 "probationary research students," who are essentially on a probationary first year of the doctoral program, as they came to Oxford having completed a masters elsewhere rather than the BPhil. But even adding them in, and allowing that any or all of these website lists might include students who have actually recently graduated, it's hardly the case that there are "many more" current DPhil students than there are PhD students at any one US program.
And as for the placement record list that John Gardner linked, while it's helpful, I'm not sure that it's 100% complete and up-to-date. For instance, I know of a recent DPhil student who was appointed to a university lectureship in phil mathematics (i.e. a permanent post) here at Oxford and another who's been hired to a tenure-track job at NYU.
BL COMMENT: I suspect if one added the Oxford BPhils in (who are like first and second-year PhD students at other places), the number would be much higher–though of course not all BPhils will go on to complete the DPhil at Oxford.
Liz and John, the Oxford placement list is organized by year, but that seems to be the year that the person got the job, not necessarily the year the person graduated. Some people are listed in multiple years, since they, e.g., first got a post-doc, then later another position.
So the number of jobs listed per year is not the same as the number of people who both graduated and found employment that year. The former number could be higher than the latter number, if people who graduated in previous years found a new job that year, or if people who have not yet graduated found, e.g., a research fellowship that year. Also, it's possible for the latter number to be higher than the former number, as I see a few omissions on the list, e.g., one who graduated in 2012 and was employed that year in a postdoc, another who graduated in 2012 and was employed that year as an Oxford college lecturer.
Thus, even if we know each year's cohort size, it seems like we need more information than just the placement list to accurately calculate the percentage of graduates each year who found a job.
Agreed. The list is both incomplete and disorganized (or organized, but along mysterious lines).
If you count BPhil students, I think there are about 100 graduates in philosophy in Oxford, the great majority of whom *aspire* to do the DPhil (I don't know what fraction actually do).
In response to Peter Forrest, I would think that even if there are not 'many more' students in the philosophy D.Phil program at any one time, there must still be significantly more students starting and finishing their degrees each year than in a U.S program. Since U.S programs tend to take much longer with all the coursework and teaching involved, there is less turnover – most seem to take 5-7 new students a year or so, and there will be significantly fewer finishing the Ph.D most years because of attrition. Oxford admits about 40 new students every year, and that number does not include D.Phil students continuing on from the B.Phil. I would guess that many or most students take longer than the 3-year D.Phil or 2+2 B.Phil-D.Phil timeframe given by the AHRC and the like, but I'd be very surprised if the average time to finish a D.Phil (whether in combination with the B.Phil or not) isn't at least a couple years shorter than the average time it takes students in most U.S programs to finish a philosophy Ph.D.
In response to Chris Lewis, Brian, and David: that's right, if you count all grad students at Oxford, doctoral and masters students (including the Mst in physics or ancient, though I'm not sure how many of those go on to the DPhil), there are 100 or so at a time. No doubt that is more than many US schools (even noting that many schools also have masters students not in the doctoral program, too).
But one must take into account the number of BPhil students who do not go on to the DPhil, which, in my admittedly limited experience of the last few years, is significant. For instance, of the approx 25 BPhil's in my year, I count only 6 that stayed for the DPhil. Even if that number was unusually low, I'd be surprised if the number that go on to the DPhil from the roughly 20-25 second-year BPhil students each year is much more than half on average. Also, the BPhil+DPhil combination will have taken me 5 years, which, I take it, is about average these days (was shorter in the past, I think), and is not ridiculously shorter than PhD's take in the US.
Anyway, not sure how much this little debate relates to the original question, and as John Gardner already stated above, it's probably approx 10 DPhil students who finish each year. As others have noted, the real question is how many of those get hired, and whether or not it's especially difficult for them to get jobs in the US.
I seems to me that there are several distinct questions here:
1) Are there some people so silly and ignorant as not to realize that an Oxford DPhil is academically equivalent to a top-ranked American PhD? (Answer from the discussion so far: Yes, but not many, so it is not a major problem.)
2) Do *informed* people believe that an Oxford DPhil gives you as good an education as an American PhD from a top-ranked program? Thus if there wasn’t much to choose between a candidate with an Oxford DPhil and a candidate with a Princeton PhD, would search committees be likely to favor the PhD over the DPhil or vice versa?
3) Does an Oxford DPhil *in fact* give you an education that is as good, better or worse than a PhD from a top-ranked American program? (Chris Lewis suggests ‘better’.)
4) Do the answers to 2) and 3) depend on whether the DPhil was preceded by a BPhil? The reason this is relevant is that a BPhil/DPhil pair gives a candidate something much closer to an American partially-taught PhD than the thesis-only PhDs and DPhils common in the UK and Australasia.
5) Do search committee’s (particularly in the US) favor US-style partially taught PhDs over UK-style thesis-only PhDs (assuming that the degree-granting departments are of roughly equal prestige)?
6) Is it educationally *better* to do a UK-style thesis-only PhD or a US-style partially taught PhD, abstracting from their cachet on the job market? UK-style thesis-only PhDs are obviously less labor-intensive and therefore much cheaper than US-style partially taught PhDs. ( It’s just you and your supervisors meeting at most once a week.) But does the extra effort and expense in involved in US-style PhDs result in significantly better philosophers? [I would say that the answer is ‘no’ but then to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, as a person with a UK-style PhD, I would say that would say that wouldn’t I?]
Oh Lord, I totally stink as both a typist and a proof-reader! Here’s my last post again this time, hopefully, without typos.
It seems to me that there are several distinct questions here:
1) Are there some people so silly and ignorant as not to realize that an Oxford DPhil is academically equivalent to a top-ranked American PhD? (Answer from the discussion so far: Yes, but not many, so it is not a major problem.)
2) Do *informed* people believe that an Oxford DPhil gives you as good an education as an American PhD from a top-ranked program? Thus if there wasn’t much to choose between a candidate with an Oxford DPhil and a candidate with a Princeton PhD, would search committees be likely to favor the PhD over the DPhil or vice versa?
3) Does an Oxford DPhil *in fact* give you an education that is as good, better or worse than a PhD from a top-ranked American program? (Chris Lewis suggests ‘better’.)
4) Do the answers to 2) and 3) depend on whether the DPhil was preceded by a BPhil? The reason that this is relevant is that a BPhil/DPhil combination gives a candidate something much closer to an American partially-taught PhD than the thesis-only PhDs and DPhils common in the UK and Australasia.
5) Do search committees (particularly in the US) favor US-style partially taught PhDs over UK-style thesis-only PhDs (assuming that the degree-granting departments are of roughly equal prestige)?
6) Is it educationally *better* to do a UK-style thesis-only PhD or a US-style partially-taught PhD, abstracting from their cachet on the job market? UK-style thesis-only PhDs are obviously less labor-intensive, and therefore much cheaper, than US-style partially-taught PhDs. (It’s just you and your supervisors meeting at most once a week.) But does the extra effort and expense involved in US-style PhDs result in significantly better philosophers? [I would say that the answer is ‘no’ but then, to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, as a person with a UK-style PhD, I would say that wouldn’t I?]
There are quite a few confusions in the above discussion that I’d like to clear up (Apologies for the long post)
(1) Chris Lewis says that the most obvious difference between an Oxford DPhil and a US PhD is that “the Oxford DPhil, by itself, is just a dissertation”. While technically true, this is misleading because one cannot be admitted to the DPhil program without holding philosophy master’s degree that consists of a substantial taught component (i.e. the B.Phil or an equivalent degree). This means anyone who holds an Oxford DPhil has completed roughly 5-6 years of graduate work, the first two or so being largely taught. There are of course differences between the taught components at different departments, but it doesn’t strike me that a BPhil + DPhil combination provides a vastly different kind of education than a 5 year US PhD program.
(2) Regarding student numbers: Brian is right that we cannot compare number of DPhil students to number of PhD students in a US program, because the DPhil only consists of the last few years of the program. But nor would it right to count BPhil students. A very large number of BPhil students do not go on to do the DPhil, if only because a very large number of them move to US PhD programs after the BPhil. (David Wallace is thus wrong when he says that the great majority of BPhil students aspire to do the DPhil. Maybe a great majority aspire to do a *doctorate*, but not necessarily the Oxford DPhil).
A much better guesstimate of student numbers is the following. Let’s assume a US PhD program takes on average 5.5 years to complete and an Oxford D.Phil takes on average 3.5 year to complete. Using Peter Forrest’s numbers, this puts the average number of students graduating a year at 10.7 in Princeton, 7.5 in NYU, and 15.4 in Oxford (note that I included the probationary students in this count).
(3) I agree that Oxford’s placement website doesn’t give sufficient information (we really should improve that!), but even if we had complete data I’m not sure it would fully help because as Liz notes, it is extremely common for Oxford graduates not to seek work in the US at all (I suspect this is much more common than it is for graduates from American programs).
(4) Despite the above comment, here’s one interesting measure we can look at. Brian publishes a list of which departments have graduates placed in the top 20 departments in the US:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/graduates-by-school-at-the-top-us-departments-2012-13.html
I never understood why Oxford is not included in this survey, and I also don’t understand why the survey doesn’t look at which departments place students in the top 20 departments *worldwide* – a measure which would include people employed by Oxford). But for current purposes the latter omission will help.
I did a quick survey of Oxford DPhil holders that are employed in the top 20 US departments. (There are some explanations about these numbers below).
On my count there are 31 people all together, 5 of them junior. If you compare this to Brian’s numbers this places Oxford in joint 3ed place with MIT in terms of overall numbers, and in the 5th place in term of junior faculty. At least by this measure, then, having an Oxford DPhil looks pretty good compared to a PhD from a top American school!
Things may look worse for placement in departments further down the list but I’d like to see more data before we jump to this conclusion.
—
Notes on the above data: I counted only Oxford DPhil holders, not BPhil graduates. The only two exceptions are McDowell and Dancy, who do not hold a PhD from any institution but were educated in Oxford (this follows Brian’s method for counting e.g. Kripke); I counted Jane Friedman who has postponed the start of her NYU TT job to this fall; I tried to the best of my knowledge to exclude part time faculty (but info on that isn’t always available); I may well have missed one or two people – again, information isn’t always easily obtainable.
My raw numbers, in case anyone wants to correct them, are: NYU (3 total, 1 junior); Rutgers (2); Princeton (3); Michigan (1, 1 Junior); Pittsburgh (1); MIT (1, 1 Junior); Yale (2, 1 junior); Columbia (1); UCLA (3); USC (2, 1 junior); CUNY (1); Cornell (1); Arizona (1); Berkley (2); Notre Dame (3); Brown (1); UT Austin (3);
BL COMMENT: Thanks for all the useful information. Re: your #4: the "reason" is "it's more work."
Oh, I didn't mean to say one sort of program would give anyone a better education than the other. I just wanted to give what I saw as some of the pros and cons of each, abstracting from the question of whether there would be suitable supervision for one's interests.
Sorry to misread you Chris. At least I said 'suggests' !
While it's true that most people enter the BPhil with the intention of doing a DPhil or PhD somewhere, many are undecided when they begin the BPhil on whether they would (if the choice were to end up being available) prefer to do the DPhil or a US PhD. And my impression is that over the last few years significant numbers have voluntarily left to do US PhDs having been given that choice (I am one of these people) or even entered the BPhil with an existing intention of moving to a US PhD afterwards (I am not one of these people).
In my own case the decision to move to a US program was not that the DPhil itself seemed to lack cachet (from the US philosophers I talked to, it seemed to have plenty of that), nor that I wasn't loving and benefiting from being a grad student at Oxford (I was), but simply a desire for more time to (1) complete the PhD and (2) build up a teaching and research record before hitting the job market. Since US programs last longer than the Oxford DPhil, that made a big difference to me. As others have implicitly suggested, these sorts of factors may make a difference to a DPhil candidate's job prospects without reflecting any lack of cachet that the degree itself has.
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