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Placement from MA programs into PhD programs

Brian Leiter

Philosopher Gil Hersch at Virginia Tech has put together a metric for evaluating the quality of placement into PhD programs from MA programs in philosophy.  It covers the period 2019-2023, and the programs with the most success in placing graduates in quality programs tracks pretty exactly the programs listed in the PGR.   Professor Hersch uses the overall PGR rank as the measure of program quality, but of course sometimes a student is much better served by a program that is very strong in a specialty than overall, as Professor Hersch  recognizes.  Virginia Tech's own placement record is very strong, although it's worth noting it placed far fewer students in total than other strong MA programs like Northern Illinois, Georgia State, and Wisconsin/Milwaukee.

Professor Hersh asked that I invite discussion of his effort to quantify placement, so comments are open.  Signed comments will be preferred, but all comments must include a valid email address, which will not appear.

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5 responses to “Placement from MA programs into PhD programs”

  1. Junior faculty

    This is a problem with the available data not with Gil’s work, but none of these rankings will be terribly useful until we get beyond looking just at the success cases (placements) and look at the ratio between placements and degrees awarded.

    Georgia state is an outlier here.

    Most departments should be doing a better job of this, not just the MA programs.

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  2. R. Clarke

    Professor Hersch appears to have omitted data on terminal MA programs in departments that also have PhD programs. Here at Florida State, we have both. Students who complete the terminal MA program may apply for admission to our PhD program; their applications are considered alongside others for that program.

    In the past five years, 15 students who completed our terminal MA program have entered Philosophy PhD programs. Some have entered our own program, others have entered programs at other universities. Our MA placement record can be found on the department's website, https://philosophy.fsu.edu/graduate-study/ma-student-placement-record

    We fully fund all MA students, with three years' funding for the terminal MA program.

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  3. former MA student

    I wonder how much the mean and median placement results have to do not only with how many students are in the program, but also with what areas the program is strong in. Georgia State is strong in 19th century German philosophy, but some of the best PhD programs for that are not in the top 10 or even 20. I wonder if something isn't true with some of these other MA programs.

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  4. Gil Hersch

    I would want to include number of graduates from each program so that then one could also compare rates of successful placement, which seems like an important piece of information. As you state, the data currently publicly available is not uniform across departments and many do not include number of students graduating. The form for DGSs on the webpage asks for this information as well. If there are enough departments that provide me this information, I can add this important information as well.

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  5. Gil Hersch

    Thanks, I originally only intended to include programs that only have a terminal MA program. The reason was that I didn’t want to end up in a situation in which I am comparing apples to oranges in the sense of comparing two different types of programs–one only with terminal MAs and one with both terminal MAs and PhD programs (I now realize things in Canada are also different from the US in this regard). Given what Randy raised, I will go back to look at some departments that offer terminal MAs and PhDs, and figure out whether it makes sense to expand this list.

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