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US vs. UK PhD programs in philosophy

Brian Leiter

A reader writes:

As a prospective graduate student weighing offers between schools in the UK and the US, I was wondering if you (or your readers) could answer a question. I have seen read on various blog posts comparing UK and US grad programs that UK programs train their graduates to be much more research-oriented, whereas US programs are more focused on teaching. Does this seem accurate to you? Since publishing is such an important factor in getting a job, it would be an important consideration to make.

It seems right that UK programs are more exclusively research-focused than US programs, but there is considerable variation in US programs, with many wealthy private universities requiring very little teaching over the course of a 5-6 year degree.   But it would be useful to hear from students and faculty about some of the pertinent differences for students thinking about UK vs. US doctoral programs.

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22 responses to “US vs. UK PhD programs in philosophy”

  1. Tim O'Keefe

    One thing to keep in mind is that the US and UK undergrad education systems are very different from one another. And for most jobs in the US, applicants with no teaching experience in a US-style system will be at a significant disadvantage. (Obviously, this disadvantage can be overcome in particular cases.)

    Reply
  2. Tim O'Keefe

    Also, I'd amend the statement that most U.S. systems are "more focused on teaching." It's true that most (not all!) U.S. programs require a fair amount of teaching from their graduate students, and at the end of the day this experience probably ends up being useful on-the-job training. But many programs don't 'focus' on teaching in the sense of providing much training or support for their graduate student teachers. Often, it's some pro forma pedagogy class and a "sink-or-swim" attitude towards their new teachers, with a fair amount of sinking happening at the start.

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  3. Joe Hatfield

    Here's my perspective having done a Ph.D. (Philosophy dissertation but in Politics department) at Cambridge.

    This is less true for philosophy programs, but elsewhere many (perhaps most?) UK Ph.D. students have master's degrees prior to going into the Ph.D. In the Politics department at Cambridge a master's was required. Since such master's degrees often have coursework associated with them, it isn't entirely accurate to infer that UK Ph.D.'s (in general) are more research focused, since much of the US Ph.D. coursework portion of a Ph.D. corresponds to similar coursework for UK students at the master's level.

    As for teaching, as a graduate student at Cambridge (master's and PhD), I was never taught by grad students – although occasionally had a lesson's seminar period run by one whose research was in the same area. So there wasn't a focus on teaching opportunities.

    One consideration that often gets overlooked in such decisions is the tremendous educational opportunity it is simply to live and study in a foreign country. If the offer-holder has lived his/her entire life in the U.S., a UK Ph.D. offers the opportunity to live abroad and learn about the ways of life, politics, advantages (and faults) of people who are unlike themselves. Ceteris paribus (which it never is, of course), that factor should be taken into account – in my opinion. It shouldn't outweigh the career-enhancing objective factors that Leiter rankings take into account, but only those who've never lived abroad dismiss this point.

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  4. Phil Osopher

    There are far greater opportunities for teaching at US institutions. Many US PhD are highly employable, and indeed are employed in the UK, because they had experience of lecturing/instructing/running their own modules. This is practically unheard of at UK institutions, though it happens in places. As a UK PhD student, you will get the opportunity to run tutorials/seminars and, if lucky, to give the odd guest lecture.

    Notice that it doesn't follow from this that UK PhD programs are 'research focussed.' UK PhD programs are focussed, if anything, on getting PhDs to get their dissertations finished. But surely US ones are as well! There is no greater focus on research at a UK institution than a US one. Unless things have changed radically in the past few years (and they may have) it's not true that UK institutions do much, if anything, in terms of research training, if by that you mean seminars or workshops on how to publish. Having spoken to many to students on both side of the pond, my anecdotally-based impression is that UK PhD programs are not as well-organised as US ones. (Of course there are exceptions, and some degree of disorganisation no doubt exists both sides…)

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  5. Sara L. Uckelman

    Which type of programme is best will depend what you want to do afterwards. It is very difficult to get any teaching experience while a PhD students in the UK, so if you're hoping to go straight into a US teaching position, this will put you at a disadvantage.

    Reply
  6. Clayton

    "One thing to keep in mind is that the US and UK undergrad education systems are very different from one another. And for most jobs in the US, applicants with no teaching experience in a US-style system will be at a significant disadvantage."

    This might be true, but I think it is unfortunate if it is true. The training that we give our postgraduate students to prepare them for teaching is comparable to the training that I received as a graduate student stateside (e.g., we monitor the PGR teaching and meet with students to give feedback, hold workshops on various aspects of teaching every year, make sure that our PGRs teach in a range of subjects, etc.). I don't see a massive difference in the teaching experience that I had in the states and the teaching experience our students have here in the UK (i.e., they mark/grade and offer feedback on drafts, hold office hours, run seminars/discussion sections, and offer lectures).

    It's also true that the undergraduate systems are different, but I don't see why these differences should lead us to believe that postgraduates from the UK would be less able to teach students in the states. (It's true that our undergraduate single honors students are more specialized than the typical students in the states, but that just means that our PGRs often have to teach some students who have specialized earlier than their American counterparts. (Would that put them at a disadvantage when teaching to students in the states? Perhaps, but they also teach joint honors students (e.g., students studying philosophy and physics or philosophy and literature) and students in related programs (e.g., PPE, medical students taking a humanities elective), so they have contact with less specialized students, too.) Could you say more about the differences that you thought mattered? We try to train our students so that they won't be at any disadvantage on the American job market and any suggestions would be very helpful.

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  7. Phil

    I'm not a philosopher, but at both the UK institutions where I've worked it's been absolutely routine for undergraduate classes to be taken by doctoral and even master's students – and training has been available. The downside is that as a postgrad you either aren't paid for teaching at all (if you've got an award including living expenses) or only get paid for the contact hours themselves (if you're self-funded). This being the case, it's not really a matter of shutting postgrads out of opportunities to lecture, lead entire units etc – the opportunities are there if you push hard enough (or if you're in the right place at the right time), but they're opportunities to put in a lot of unpaid work, with no guarantee of gaining any benefit. I used to look round at my salaried colleagues and wonder what it would be like to be an academic but not worry where next month's pay was coming from; I thought it would be wonderful. (Status update: it is pretty good.)

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  8. AC

    I wrote about this regarding PhDs in English back in 2011 – I imagine there's some philosopher-relevant advice in the document despite the different disciplines:

    https://www.martineve.com/2011/07/08/britain-or-america-for-the-phd-in-english/
    https://www.martineve.com/2011/08/02/britain-or-america-for-the-phd-in-english-part-2/

    Hope this is useful for anyone making the choice.

    Reply
  9. Manny

    I started my PhD in the UK before switching to a US programme. In terms of teaching experience provided, the two programmes seem fairly identical (i.e. TA-ing, marking and providing feedback on essays, etc.). If anything, there was more experience in the UK. There it was common for someone to be teaching multiple hours per week, while at my current programme the norm is one hour (of course, whether the excess of teaching experience is a good on the whole is a different question).

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  10. Nick Mann

    In the US at the most fundamental pedagogic level you find a recognition of the need to teach non-philosophy majors at least a modicum of meat-and-potatoes critical thinking. Possibly never more urgent than now. In the UK perhaps not so much although there may be an Oxbridge-redbrick-downmarket divide in this regard.

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  11. GT

    I've seen no evidence that UK PhDs produce more publications than US PhDs do. Or that they produce fewer publications. Either during graduate school or after. Is there any evidence of this? Teaching experience is a big advantage of the US programs. Of course, the main thing to focus on is the ranking (Philosophical Gourmet Report) and the placement rate of the department.

    Reply
  12. Current PhD Student at a University in London

    I cannot speak to the teaching experience in the US, but at my college many research students begin teaching undergraduates while doing their research masters (MPhilStud) and continue into their PhD. The pay is not great but the experience is good. Solid support and monitoring is provided and experienced students can end up teaching three or four classes a term. This is class and tutorial work and essay assessment, not lecturing.

    My own advice for your prospective student however is that it is much more important deciding where you would like to live for the next few years. Pick somewhere you would like to be.

    Reply
  13. Jen

    "We try to train our students so that they won't be at any disadvantage on the American job market."
    With "try" in, this is certainly true.
    In the UK it's very unusual for the offer of a PhD place to be combined with any sort of TA-ship, whereas I think that that's not unusual in USA. And in UK, there's very often an expectation that the PhD should be completed within 4 years MAX (and within only 3 if enrolling following a Masters degree). This ensures that (typically) there's less time to get a thesis together and gain much teaching experience in UK than in USA. And teaching can be poorly paid in UK (at least as compared with the funding of what a U.S. student gets when their PhD place goes hand in hand with TA-ship).

    Reply
  14. Clayton

    Hi Jen,
    Fair points. The assumptions that we can make about the typical graduate from the UK and US will have to differ because the typical graduate from the states would have had a TA-ship and we cannot assume that that's so with a graduate from the UK. (And it's also true that the postgrads aren't paid what they should be.) Having said that, I don't think we have good reason to assume that students from the UK that have had experience teaching would, ceteris paribus, be less able than their counterparts from the states. I've only had limited experience here, but I haven't seen any difference in the teaching abilities of the other junior people in our department from the states or the UK in terms of their abilities to teach our students. I haven't yet seen any specific reason for thinking that the skills needed to do well in the states differ all that much from the skills needed to teach in the UK. (It's still unclear what differences Tim had in mind at the start of the thread. I've taught in both places and none of the salient differences between the experiences teaching in the two countries suggested that a graduate with teaching experience from the UK would struggle in ways that a graduate with teaching experience from the states would not. I only jumped in because I worry that such remarks can put qualified students from the UK at an unfair disadvantage on the job market.)

    Reply
  15. UK Grad student

    Clayton, one thing I've heard people say is that students in the US get to design their own courses, whereas in the UK that's not possible. They also get to grade papers, whereas so far as I understand in the UK universities ensure that only people with PhDs can grade papers.

    I have no experience of the US, so it may be untrue that US grad. students get to do these things, but if they do then that looks like a substantive difference, no?

    Reply
  16. Daniel Kaufman

    A lot of people seem to depend on TA-ships to get teaching experience. When I was in graduate school, I got all of my teaching gigs myself — adjunct teaching positions, where the courses were fully my own — at local 2 year and 4 year colleges. By the time I went on the job market, I had been teaching my own courses for a good 4 or 5 years.

    We just made a hire for a junior, tenure-track position. Those who had not already taught their own courses did not make it through the first cut. We are about to go back into the market to hire for two full-time Instructors and I guarantee you, the same thing will be true in both cases.

    Reply
  17. Clayton

    Hi UK Grad Student,

    On the issue of marking/grading, I think that this varies considerably. Some students in the UK do mark/grade and all the GTAs I know have to give feedback on work. This seems like a wash to me.

    It's true that some students in the US get to design and teach their own course (well, teach a course that's already on the books, pick the readings, etc.). I was thinking about just this issue the other day because it is a difference. (Although, since people seem interested in generalizations, remember all the caveats. It might be that no UK students run their own courses/modules and some students in the states do. I think that the opportunity to do this can vary from program to program and I don't think every student in programs that do this give each student the same opportunities.) The interesting question to my mind is how much this should matter. When I was in grad school, I had the chance to teach a baby logic course over the summer. At that point, I had never been a TA for a logic course. I had taken a logic course as an undergrad at a liberal arts school that was nothing like the logic course I thought I should teach, so I had to wing it (i.e., I had to imagine what a good logic course would be like, try to create it from scratch, and impose this on some students who needed credit hours to graduate). It wasn't a great course. Meanwhile, some friends of mine had been GTAs in a very well run logic course so they got to see from the inside what a good logic course is like. Suppose your department had to hire someone to teach logic. My CV would say that I've taught logic and my friend's CV would say that he was a GTA. I know that the first logic course that he taught was better than my first (and probably better than the subsequent logic courses I taught as an adjunct). Is it possible that people put too much weight on the experience of teaching a course as opposed to merely being a GTA? It's possible. (Of course, if you know that this is how people act, it's rational to take account of that. My concern is that my own experience is, again, that I don't see any discernible difference in the teaching abilities of students from the states and the UK but I've had experience with both. I don't know if there are studies to consider here (I sort of doubt it) but maybe others have had their own experiences that they'd like to share.)

    Obviously, shouldering the responsibility of designing and teaching your own course is a valuable experience. So is working as a GTA in a well run course. (Or a poorly run course, for that matter.) I worry that people who think that UK students are as a group less able than students from the states to teach might place too much weight on the first point. If working as a GTA as opposed to teaching your own course really was a massive advantage when it comes to preparing graduate students to teach, I'd think that we'd see a resultant difference in the pedagogical abilities of students from the UK and the states that I haven't myself seen.

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  18. Daniel Kaufman

    Is it possible that people put too much weight on the experience of teaching a course as opposed to merely being a GTA? It's possible.

    = = =

    I have now chaired three faculty searches and been Department Head over a fourth. We have *never* in that time, hired a person who was a GTA only. Never. And as I mentioned, we are hiring for two full-time instructorships, and I can't imagine that the same won't be true again.

    I think graduate students are paying too much attention to publication and not enough attention to this. Instead of that 8th publication, go down to the local community college and get an adjunct/per course teaching position. It'll help you a lot more on the job market. Or at least, it will in the overwhelming majority of schools where there are jobs, which are un-ranked public state and regional places like mine.

    Reply
  19. anon

    Clayton,
    I think there is a lot of ignorance about the different markets: UK, USA, Canada, and other parts of Europe. I graduated from the 2nd rank program in Canada, known for excellence in a particular specialty. I was interviewed at Colleges in the USA that did not even know about the program (this was around the year 2000). They did not know that it was one of the oldest Universities in the country. The faculty were mostly graduates from a USA University that is not ranked. I was baffled.

    Reply
  20. GT

    A more minor point than my last, in light of subsequent comments here. I see no evidence that those trained in the US end up being better teachers than those trained in the UK. Or that they end up being worse teachers. However, graduate teaching in the US (designing and instructing whole courses) is more significant than graduate teaching in the UK (grading and tutoring small groups once a week each). This also makes for a more impressive teaching portfolio. And *might* give a search committee more confidence that the US candidate can teach well and can teach well off the bat. I see no empirical evidence for this point either, but it does not seem unreasonable to speculate that a search committee might see things this way. In any case, all relatively minor points. The main thing is to follow Leiter’s rankings and to compare the placement records of the schools, that is, if you want any hope of a career teaching philosophy at all.

    Reply
  21. Tim O'Keefe

    Hi Clayton. I don't have in-depth knowledge of US vs UK education, so I was speaking more descriptively (how I think hiring committees would act) rather than saying how they should behave. That said, I had in mind 2 sorts of differences.

    One you mention: that in the UK students come in already having declared their major, and teaching is mainly towards those in the major. In the US, the bread and butter classes for most departments are Introduction to Philosophy, Critical Thinking, and others that students with no previous experience in or knowledge of philosophy take in order to fulfill some sort of GenEd requirement. This, I think, is going to have a pretty big impact on drawing up an appropriate set of readings and other assignments that will engage the students, as well as getting a feel of how to deal with students where they are. I don't think that (e.g.) teaching classes in social and political philosophy to PPE students is the same sort of thing.

    The second is in how students are assessed. UK grades, besides being on a different scale, are primarily determined by end of term exams, which aren't marked by the course instructor. So there is going to be a big adjustment in designing exams, papers, and other assignments over the course of the semester that are more in line with the US system, and then assessing them all yourself.

    These aren't earth-shaking differences, and obviously people successfully make the switch. But if I've got a big stack of applicants for a position in the U.S. where teaching is the main part of the job, having to worry about how well an applicant is able to navigate these sorts of changes, as well as having anticipate that that might well be a bit of a choppy transition period, is going to be a minus. Other applicants have already have syllabi that are good to go as is, and experience teaching just the sort of classes we'll be asking them to teach.

    Reply
  22. Charles Pigden

    Just a remark about Australasia where UK-style, dissertation-only PhDs are the norm. There is probably a good deal of variation, and thirty years ago I did no teaching whatsoever during the course of my PhD. However at Otago our PhD students typically do a fair bit of tutoring and often some lecturing. This year, for instance, PhD students are doing a fair chunk of the lecturing for two of our four big first-year papers, plus two of our second-year courses. Both the Department and the University (which has a Higher Education Development Centre devoted to maintaining and improving teaching standards) have mechanisms in place to support such teaching and to ensure it is done well, something we are incentivized to care about anyway as we are heavily reliant on repeat custom to maintain our student enrollments. We have two reasons for turning over some of our undergraduate lecturing to senior students (apart from the fact that the ones we pick can be relied on to do a good job): 1) at any one time at least one member of the permanent faculty is likely to be on research and study leave and we can’t afford to leave any of our popular courses untaught; and 2) we have been fortunate in winning research grants which typically include some degree of teaching buy-out for the lucky winners. I would expect the pattern to be similar in other research-successful Australasian departments except for those that are very large.

    The upshot is that although Australasian PhDs are probably less experienced as undergraduate teachers than the graduates of some US departments, they are not likely to be totally inexperienced either.

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