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

Academic job placement report

Brian Leiter

Here it is.  I've not had a chance to examine it, though the lead author on the report has an uneven track record and I had heard complaints from others that the placement data was incomplete, but it may be that has been rectified in the final version.  In any case, comments are open for those who have had a chance to examine the report to weigh in with the positives and negatives, what's interesting and useful, what's less interesting or dubious, etc.

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8 responses to “Academic job placement report”

  1. Postdoc

    I suspect the APDA database is at least moderately biased in favor of better placement rates.

    1. Programs with bad placement rates are less likely to advertise them. The programs included seem to be many of the big names.

    2. I suspect those still in academia are more likely to respond to surveys about academic placement/be reachable at all. What is the response rate for the survey? How were participants selected? Randomly from the APDA database? I couldn't find this information from looking through the report but maybe its buried there somewhere.

    3. 'Temporary placement' can mean a lot of things. Does the candidate have a 2-3 year postdoc or serious teaching position or is he teaching a few courses for next to nothing in an adjunct capacity? Is this at his PhD granting institution? This kind of 'placement'is really not what we're interesting in. We want to know the % with real prospects, real jobs, decent incomes…

    It's hard to say how much the numbers should be corrected in any kind of scientific way. The best I can do is refer to anecdotal evidence. Based on my experiences and from what others have told me too I'd hazard that 50% of PhD graduates leave academia within 3 years.

    Of course, this is just a guess! But I don't buy that 36% of PhD graduates obtain a permanent job and 40% temporary work (unless by 'temporary'we just mean teaching a class as an adjunct over the summer or something). I think a lot of people are leaving. In my PhD program quite a few graduates realizing the dire situation immediately went back to school after receiving their PhDs or looked for nonacademic employment.

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  2. John

    I don't see any value in having placement records ranked in this way. Given the differing abilities of entering students it’s impossible to draw meaningful conclusions about either the quality of the graduate education OR how well the department does at finding jobs for its students.

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  3. MKM

    3 things that struck me.

    Looking at placement 2012-2016 explains why permanent placements are so low overall. Most grads get post-docs or vaps before getting permanent posts. Would be helpful to see how the results look for just 2012-2014 (maybe that's there and I missed it).

    Would have been nice to make finer distinctions between kinds of job placement. Big difference between where Oregon grads go and Berkeley grads go, even outside the realm of PhD institutions.

    Response rates to the survey of whether grads would recommend their programs were too low to be meaningful let alone rankable.

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  4. Richard

    Related to the recent thread about "the MIT Model," note that MIT comes in 53rd based on its "permanent placement" rate, with just 40% in permanent posts, though one-third of those were at PhD-granting institutions.

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  5. Recent grad

    I was sent the survey but didn't complete it given the near impossibility of remaining anonymous – one's graduating year and areas of scholarship would necessarily remain connected to one's opinions about the quality of the institution. Because of this, I have serious doubts about the value of those recommendations (and the database as a whole).

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  6. Yet Another MIT Student

    I don't think MIT's ranking here means much: no one could use this data to justify big morals about how philosophy PhD programs should work. (Maybe there are other reasons to give up the "MIT model." Set them aside.)

    We're looking at just 18 people, who graduated between 2012 – 2016. (And by my count, 8/18 = 44% got permanent jobs, not 40%.) Those are small numbers. What happens if you make them bigger? Look back two years:

    2011: 7/8 people have TT jobs (Harvard, Leeds, Dartmouth, UMass-Amherst, Cornell, UIC, UM-Kansas City), one lectures at Harvard.
    2010: 4/6 have TT jobs (Mt. Holyoke, Berkeley City College, Cambridge, Groningen), one lectures at Tufts, and one's a post-doc at Sydney.

    Out of 32 total, 19 got permanent jobs. Seems like 2016 may have just been an unlucky year, compared to 2011 and 2010 (or the years before; 2007 – 2009 were also majority TT). I'm not saying that the data here support MIT-ifying everyone. I'm just saying: be careful not to base your views on fluky data slivers. And of course, remember that some facts don't show up in placement data. MIT students go on the job market sooner than people at other programs, so it makes sense that MIT students might need to spend a couple of years as post-docs, teaching and publishing.

    Where I got the MIT placement data: http://web.mit.edu/philosophy/placement.html

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  7. Brian Leiter

    Very interesting points, I hope others will scrutinize the data for other programs, especially in the years just outside the study period.

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  8. djc

    the report is fascinating. thanks for all the hard work! i see that in the current placement success tables, postdocs are treated the same as VAPs, adjunct positions, and failures to achieve any position. but in fact they’re quite different — postdocs are much more attractive. and students who get postdocs are much more likely to get a t-t job eventually. our experience at NYU is that quite a few students go straight into postdocs without even applying for tenure-track jobs. looking at the NYU placement page, 26 out of 29 ph.d’s since 2012 are currently in either t-t positions or postdocs: 15 t-t, 11 postdocs. most of the postdocs are multiple-year research postdocs, which are basically dream jobs. it would be interesting to see an analysis in which postdocs are treated as successes rather than failures.

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