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Leading PhD programs should also produce fewer PhDs

Brian Leiter

A propos the earlier thread, a colleague elsewhere writes:

Here's something that might suggest that 'too many' also includes the supposed 'blue ribboned' programs.  We are currently recruiting for an open junior position. We have received over 470 applications. If you were to eliminate those applicants who have not studied at the usual highly rated places (in the U.S., U.K., Canada) the number would still be at least 300. We do not, of course, eliminate them, but are examining everyone's publications, plans and ideas for what they could do were they part of our department.  What to conclude? The supposed serious places are themselves overdoing it?

I think so.  As before, signed comments preferred, especially if you are going to comment on particular programs.   And if you are going to represent a perspective (as a "department chair" or a "grad student at a top program" or whatever, even if you post anonymously, you must include a valid e-mail address that confirms your status (I will keep that information strictly private).

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21 responses to “Leading PhD programs should also produce fewer PhDs”

  1. Allen Hazen

    As a retiree, I don't have to think about the job market: something I'm grateful about.
    Still. If we are to have an intelligent discussion of whether too many philosophy Ph.D.s are being produced, it might help to start with a bit of clarity about how many SHOULD be produced. A certain number of philosophy Ph.D.s really WANT non-academic careers, but for the purposes of a first, rough, estimate, let's ignore them. So the number we want is the number needed to fill academic positions.
    So: how many philosophy positions open up each year? I would GUESS (assuming roughly about 10,000 people are employed as philosophy teachers in the U.S. and a 40 year teaching career as average) about 250. Or about half as many as the number of Ph.D.s granted in the most recent year (as reported in a recent post). Is this wildly wrong? If not, it's a number to keep in mind in discussing the issue.

    Reply
  2. Carolyn Jennings

    Brian, I noticed that similar arguments have been made in the past few years about law schools (e.g. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2013/04/the_real_problem_with_law_schools_too_many_lawyers.html) and I am wondering if you happen to know what sorts of actions law schools have taken in response. Are you willing to comment on this issue?

    BL COMMENT: Total law school enrollment has dropped about 25% in the last few years, and the best estimates suggest that within the next two-three years, the number of graduates will be matched to the number of new positions based on BLS projections. But hiring of new lawyers is different than the hiring of new philosophy faculty in a lot of ways, including the role that pedigree plays in employment outcomes (much greater in law than in philosophy). We could increase the size of our class, and outcomes would still be excellent (we have not). Readers interested in the topic should consult my law school blog.

    Reply
  3. Derek Bowman

    One thing to keep in mind about the "right" number of PhDs: The number of (tenure-track and other full-time continuing) positions open each year is not independent of the number of academic-job-seeking PhDs. It is only because there is such a glut of PhDs that the vast majority of universities across the country can increasingly fill their teaching needs with adjuncts, 1-year visiting lecturers, etc without suffering a singificant loss in instructor quality. So in order for the courses taught to remain the same, more (TT, etc) positions would need to be opened if there were fewer candidates. Of course in the present political climate, it may be that many universities would just cut their philosophy programs if they could no longer hire qualified instructors at discount rates.

    Reply
  4. Chris Surprenant

    I don't see why the number of academic jobs available in philosophy is at all relevant to the number of PhD programs that should exist or how many students those programs should admit. Certainly there are legitimate reasons for having a PhD program and participating in a PhD program that are not connected to landing an academic job once you get your PhD.

    A better metric for whether or not a program should exist is the quality of the faculty. Is the collection of people associated with that program of the appropriate quality to justify their awarding of a PhD? There is certainly a non-zero number of PhD programs in the US right now that shouldn't be granting PhDs because the collection of faculty at that university doesn't justify it.

    Once you have a collection of faculty that justifies awarding an advanced degree, be it a PhD or an MA, then it seems the number of students you can admit should simply be a function of the number of students you can handle given appropriate advising and teaching loads. Whether or not you can do something like provide full tuition remission and high stipends to every student, which seems to be mentioned frequently when talking about the appropriate number of admits, also strikes me as irrelevant.

    Reply
  5. Jeremy Goodman

    I think any PhD program should aim to enroll at least 6 new student per year, given how crucial one's peer group is for graduate education in philosophy. So that's one constraint to keep in mind when thinking about reducing the number of PhD's produced overall.

    Reply
  6. AnonAdjunct

    Further, the PhD students are used to reduce the number of full time faculty needed at their institutions. Even those who plan to leave academia or never finish their degree have this effect. I remember vividly a full time lecturer at my graduate institution who was not renewed because the influx of grad student teachers left him without any classes. He was very committed to teaching at the college level, while a lot those students left academia before finishing or shortly thereafter. I'd be interested in the actual numbers, because I suspect that the pool of current grad students (read, potential grad instructors) is even larger than the pool of willing adjuncts. It's a huge pool of cheap labor that universities have very strong incentives to maintain.

    Reply
  7. Anon Phil Instructor

    "Certainly there are legitimate reasons for having a PhD program and participating in a PhD program that are not connected to landing an academic job once you get your PhD."

    As for legitimate reasons for participating as a student in a PhD program, not connected to landing an academic job, seeing that there are so few other jobs that require a PhD in philosophy, the only other legitimate reasons for enrolling in a PhD program are purely intellectual/personal, as opposed to professional. If someone wishes to enroll for purely intellectual/personal reasons, and has the resources to do so, excellent. But the vast majority are looking toward acquiring an academic job when they graduate.

    At the least, PhD programs (particularly those under-performing in job placement) should be up front about the dismal prospects of landing a sufficient academic job upon graduation with every enrollee as soon as they are admitted.

    Otherwise, PhD programs are just praying on the hopes of motivated novice philosophers, which is kinda sickening.

    Reply
  8. David Wallace

    I think this might need to be answered at a finer-grained level. If your program is reliably placing all or virtually all its students – as, I gather, is the case for the very strongest (US) programs – then I can't see a case for contracting. But if your weaker students aren't getting jobs, that seems a pretty good reason to shrink, and that might very well be true at many "usual highly rated places" that are not quite top-rated.

    Reply
  9. anonymous grad student

    Just wanted to second Jeremy's consideration. My program is very highly ranked and has a very good placement record. I think all the considerations raised here are important, but some of them seem to me to be missing things that matter to how *all* the students do–for example, the unity and quality of the grad student community as a whole. There has been a clear recent trend in my department of larger cohorts doing better overall on the market (or, more often, just doing better at getting to the finish line relatively quickly, and almost everyone who does so and is generally present in the department gets a job). Smaller entering classes have fallen apart more quickly, especially when there have been two or three in a row (so that there simply aren't a lot of students still at the coursework/pre-dissertation phase). I mention this because I think there are a lot of other factors like this that are hard to see when we're just playing this numbers game. Graduate school is *extremely* stressful, and it may well be that some of the things that help people succeed are the very same things that makes a department's placement record in the end look not-completely-stellar.

    Another example of one of these possible trade offs is something I'm very grateful to my own department for: they've consistently taken at least a few chances in admissions offers each year, admitting someone who might be a little rough around the edges, has a less traditional philosophy background, and who doesn't get into other top schools. I'd hate to see them start playing it completely safe here, even though I do think it's probably the case that a higher percentage of us weirdos don't finish, don't get jobs, or end up leaving philosophy by choice than is the case with your standard, ivy-league-undergrad, perfect GRE-scores, perfectly polished writing sample 22-year-olds (though some of these "weirdos" also end up outshining all of their peers). But my department would be a terrible, boring, uncreative, non-big-picture thinking, out-of-the-box-thinking environment for grad students without those people. And I would worry that if we shrunk entering class size for the reasons at hand there would be much less willingness on the faculty's part to take these chances.

    So even though I agree that we need fewer PhDs, I have no idea what the right method of making that happen is. Maybe it's true that all schools need to admit fewer people. I have no idea. But there are definitely opposing considerations from the perspective of being a grad student at one of these places. I don't at all think they are definitive, but they are there.

    Reply
  10. Smalltime Anon Grad

    I'm wondering about the number of 6 students per incoming class. I'm from a very small department that has some high quality faculty in my AOS (we're in the 40-50 range of the last report). Our classes are usually 2-4 students and I still spend more time talking to other students about my work than I really have time to. True, if you had some fringe interests you wouldn't find many other people to talk to here, but then again you shouldn't go here because there would be no one to work with.

    What do you think of this proposal instead of a minimum number: It should be the job of the admissions committee to make sure that admitted students have other students to talk to about their interests. I.e., it would be a disservice to admit a student interested in metaphysics and philosophy of language if none of the current or other admitted students have indicated any interest in the subject. Of course you can't predict with certainty which students will accept your offers, especially at lower ranked schools, but for higher ranked schools this might not be as much of an issue. It is of course also not uncommon for students to change their interests, but usually I would think that such an interest switch happens due to engagement with others at the department and not in total isolation.

    Reply
  11. Derek Bowman

    David Wallace: Part of the problem with the present oversaturated job market is that, at least in many programs, there is no obvious criterion of "weaker" and "stronger" that distinguishes those students who get jobs and those who don't in many programs. For one thing, it doesn't matter how strong your students working in, e.g., aesthetics are if no almost no one is hiring for in aesthetics this year. But more deeply the various criterion of "fit" that go into selecting from among dozens of qualified candidates are not regular enough to track any stable definition of "strength".

    AnonAdjunct: You're exactly right. If you're really interested you can probably find some statistics on this from IPEDS ( https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ ) or possibly other resources from the NCES (https://nces.ed.gov/). I didn't find anything right off, but I think I remember filtering out that data when looking up information on part-time vs full-time faculty.

    Reply
  12. David Wallace

    @Derek Bowman: I'm not sure if I agree, but in any case the "weaker/stronger" distinction isn't doing any real work in my argument. Feel free to replace "your weaker students" with "a significant fraction of your students".

    Reply
  13. anon ex-pro philosopher

    "We do not, of course, eliminate them, but are examining everyone's publications, plans and ideas for what they could do were they part of our department."

    Riiight.

    But more to the point, it would not be inappropriate to wonder whether the spillover into Canada (whose philosophy job market I know something about) suggests that the “serious places,” as Brian’s colleague calls them, are overdoing it. With two or three exceptions, Canadian philosophy departments are not considered serious, but even the non-serious departments receive hundreds of applications per job search from graduates from top-ranked U.S. and U.K. programs (a few years ago I was privy to the information from of a search that yielded about 150 applications from all manner of Leiterific programs). Presumably a good number of these are “last resort” applications, so the serious places are, it would seem, pumping out too many graduates. After all, graduates from serious places are supposed to get jobs at serious places, not at the University of Timbuktu in Canada.

    BL COMMENT: I guess I would evaluate the Canadian programs a bit differently (I think more than two or three are "serious"), but more importantly, I would not assume that these are "last resort" jobs at all for American applicants, in many cases, the opposite I would bet.

    Reply
  14. Geoff Pynn

    The academic job market is only one relevant consideration. Getting a PhD can be intrinsically worthwhile, and it can have instrumental value even for those who don't pursue an academic career. It can also be good for faculty in various ways to be at a department with a doctoral program. And I'm still inclined to think, as cynical as I am, that the world's a slightly better place for every competent and original dissertation or article it contains. It's not obvious to me how we could determine how many doctoral programs / students there "should" be, but we'd have to consider all those factors (as well as others).

    It also seems to me that if people are really concerned about the exploitation of low-rung academic workers made possible by the massive oversupply of academic labor, they should be doing all they can to support the adjunct and instructor unionization movement, rather than arguing that the people being exploited shouldn't have been allowed to get PhDs in the first place.

    On the other hand it is clearly true that demand for doctoral programs rests to a significant extent on students' unrealistic ideas about the chances of their landing a cushy TT job at the end. Several years of talking with students applying to doctoral programs has convinced me that these unrealistic ideas are not easily dislodged. Statistics and anecdotes are often insufficient to do the trick. I think you might have to actually suffer through the academic job market & serve on a few search committees yourself before you really understand the situation. To the extent that departments are relying on these unrealistic ideas to fill the seats in their doctoral programs *and* not doing anything to help their students prepare for non-academic careers, I think they're complicit in something pretty nasty.

    Reply
  15. Chris Surprenant

    Again, I don't quite understand why we are focusing so heavily on the availability of academics jobs. Doing so strikes me as falling into the same type of defective narrative that is being pushed by many politicians when it comes to what undergraduate programs universities should offer. Beyond that, it strikes me as overly paternalistic. No one entering a PhD program now is unaware of the challenges when it comes to the job market. As long as the program is good–where good entails that there is appropriate coverage, faculty do a good job of advising and mentoring, there are the appropriate resources available to support the program, etc.–let these adult students decide whether or not they want to go down that path.

    Reply
  16. Aaron Lercher

    Suppose there are 120,000 full time equivalent jobs teaching humanities in the US.
    Suppose there are 5400 Ph.D. degrees awarded annually in the US.
    Suppose that of the degree recipients, 80% (4320) seek academic jobs annually.
    Suppose that the average age of completion for a humanities Ph.D. is 34.
    Suppose that immigration is negligible among humanities academic job seekers. I am *not* advocating this!!!
    Then there is a full time job for every US humanities Ph.D. recipient if retirement is set at 62 years.
    Data: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsf16300/data-tables.cfm

    One may draw different conclusions from this. But it does not seem to me that Ph.D. overproduction is really the main problem.

    Reply
  17. anon

    "Suppose that the average age of completion for a humanities Ph.D. is 34."

    I understand it to be 32-33, but that right there is your problem… This can't be sustainable. Keeping people in an 'apprentice' role well into their 30s. What other job does that?

    BL COMMENT: Alas, in Germany, faculty are kept in that role until 40 or older.

    Reply
  18. Tom Hurka

    Aaron Lercher is exactly right. The end of mandatory retirement, which happened more recently in Canada than in the US, has meant that fewer people get to occupy the same number of academic jobs, because individual careers last longer. Unlike in the laboratory sciences, where you can't continue research without a university affiliation and a lab, philosophers can continue research post-retirement. How about if the APA encouraged philosophers to retire at 65, in order to open up jobs for new PhDs?

    Reply
  19. Derek Bowman

    Aaron Lercher and Tom Hurka assume both that retiring tenured philosophy faculty will be replaced with new tenure-line faculty AND that those new tenure lines will not be shifted to other departments. This may often enough be true at elite universities, but it cannot at all be taken for granted for universities nationwide. At many colleges and universities the problem is not finding enough teaching to go around – it's getting administrators to fund full-time and/or tenure-track positions to fill those teaching needs. Under those conditions, retirements aren't going to help.

    The retirement solution also seem to assume that those same faculty will have been stable enough in their careers, and sufficiently well paid, to have adequate retirement savings by their early sixties – not a safe assumption for faculty who have had to filter through a series of post-docs, VAPs, and/or adjunct positions before starting whatever tenure-track job they are fortunate enough to get.

    Reply
  20. Aaron Lercher

    @Derek Bowman
    My arithmetic wasn't meant to suggest that mandatory early retirement policies are a good idea. I *definitely* don't think there's any reason to believe that tenured positions will be maintained and not replaced by non-tenured instructors. I think that educational institutions reflect the rest of society. Since US society is increasingly unequal, the hierarchies of all kinds within and among educational institutions are likely to be increasingly tall and narrow, with increasing distinctions in rank, however this rank may be judged or sorted. Maybe the rankings will make sense, or maybe not.

    I am not in a philosophy department so I avoid taking positions on issues for philosophy as a profession. Brian has clear opinions on the quality of philosophy programs and expectations of philosophy students. He believes that many philosophy programs are not very good and that if their students expect to get philosophy jobs they are misled. But I do not feel qualified to have an opinion on those issues.

    My arithmetic only suggests that Ph.D. overproduction, as such, is not the main issue.

    Reply
  21. Brian Leiter

    Aaron Lercher has raised an important issue, but I still think overproduction *is* the main issue. Those currently running PhD programs can actually do something about PhD overproduction. They can not do anything to get people to retire, so that is just wishful thinking, absent a change in the law. There's something to be said for Prof. Surprenant's anti-paternalistic view, above, but I am not confident that all PhD programs are forthcoming about professional prospects. Certainly there is more transparency now, than 20 years ago (for which I'm happy to take some of the credit!). But I fear it is still uneven and that there are grounds for paternalistic concern.

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