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Hiring of non-US PhDs in US departments

Brian Leiter

A philosopher trained outside the US and UK (who now teaches in the UK) writes:

I appreciate that you recently brought up the Oxford DPhil post. One comment mentioned something about the UK vs US PhD issue. I do not wish to be identified, but if you find the issue worth discussing, I would like to see someone comment on whether non US PhDs have a disadvantage worldwide or specifically on the US job market. My question comes from my past and current institutions. I did my PhD at [a top Australasian program]. I currently teach at [a strong UK program].  Both are decent institutions. However, I looked at the placement records, and neither seem to have a remotely decent history of placing people in US Universities.

Reason I’m asking is because my course work students at [my current UK program] seem to be relatively uninterested in applying for US PhDs, and I’m deeply concerned whether this would limit their options in the future.

A few observations of my own, but I am very interested to hear from readers with relevant experience.   In philosophy, hiring is hugely affected by "familiarity," and that often counts against non-US PhDs, unless they come from one of the handful of overseas universities whose main faculty are well-known here in North America.  One of my kids is pursuing a PhD in a core natural science discipline, and while some of the pattern from philosophy repeats there, it is also striking, to me, how often it does not.  I assume this has something to do with non-subjective evaluations in the assessment of candidates (how often is your research being cited, for example).   One's research can get a lot of citations, even if one's advisor was not friends with the right people.

The less certain question is how much longer US higher education will continue to be an attractive destination for academics outside the US.  This is the "$64,000 question" as the saying goes.   A number of state university systems are becoming hostile to academic freedom and free speech more generally (Florida most infamously, but Texas is close behind).   Donald Trump, the Mafia Don of the Republican Party, may be re-elected in 2024.   Under Trump, the federal government might strip federal aid to universities which did not do an adequate job of suppressing anti-Israel speech.  Of course, the United States is huge, and the "federal" system gives states a fair degree of autonomy.  But graduate applications to the US are declining, and that's not crazy.  Several other non-totalitarian countries have serious university systems that are also accessible to English speakers:   Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Singapore, even Hong Kong (although Hong Kong is under serious threat).

So back to my correspondent's question: do non-US PhDs have a disadvantage worldwide and/or in the U.S. in particular?

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9 responses to “Hiring of non-US PhDs in US departments”

  1. Mohan Matthen

    An observation: a lot of US, Canadian, and Australian PhDs seem to get hired in Britain–of the first ten people listed on Oxford's list of faculty, seven have non-British PhDs–so the familiarity issue must be asymmetrical if it's the one that's operating–i.e., familiarity isn't the same as proximity.

    Some questions: "students at [my current UK program] seem to be relatively uninterested in applying for US PhDs" This is really interesting. I don't think it would have been true a while ago–say ten years ago. Am I wrong? Is this a Trump phenomenon? Are US PhDs losing their lustre? (If so, does this extend to hiring?) Or does this extend to other countries? Are Brits "relatively uninterested" in applying to PhD programs in Canada or Australia or France etc?

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  2. Canadian PhD

    In Canada, about 45% of philosophy faculty hires have US PhDs, 25% are from the University of Toronto (the largest Philosophy Department by faculty in the world), and 25% from other Canadian doctoral programs (with UBC and McGill outpacing other programs). Only about 5% of hires are from outside the US or Canada – mostly the UK.

    Some of this is raw numbers; there are so many Anerican PhDs. I presume European PhDs are less apt to relocate to Canada than Americans, all else equal. The real crisis in Canada is that Canadian PhDs are less likely to be hired in their own country than elsewhere (or not at all) because they are crowded out by American applicants. Once departments have a large contigent of Americans, they become even less likely to hire, say, a PhD from Memorial, than another from an American institution they are familiar with.

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  3. David Wallace

    Some purely practical observations that speak to the success of US PhDs in the UK and vice versa, and to the desirability of the US PhD for UK students:

    (1) A US philosophy PhD is typically 6-7 years. In the UK (at least when I was there!) it's typically 4-5 (in Oxford, for instance, the standard pattern is a 2-year BPhil plus 2 years of the DPhil, or (more rarely) 1 year of an MSt followed by 3 years of the DPhil, though in each case it's common to run into a fifth year). That generally means that US PhD students have more likelihood of multiple publications by the time they reach the job market, and also just more time to develop philosophical skills. Partly for that reason, and partly because UK jobs are de facto straight to tenure, there's more of a tradition in the UK of doing postdocs or similar before getting the equivalent of a TT job.

    (2) As 'Canadian PhD' notes, some of this is just raw numbers: there are way more US PhD students. That only gets exacerbated if you look at reputations: in the PGR top 15, Oxford (at 2=) is the only UK institution (Cambridge is 20th; St. Andrew's and Edinburgh are around 30th). The rest of the top 15 are in North America (Sydney and ANU are in the 21-30 range). Insofar as that PGR ranking is a good predictor of placement success, you would expect both UK and US hirings to be dominated by US students even if there was no US/UK bias operating.

    (3) Reason (1) above is a good reason for UK students to consider the US. A better reason, though, is funding: it remains difficult even for very good UK programs to fund all or even most of their grad students. (Speaking personally, this is one of the most striking differences I notice between being in Oxford and being in a strong US program.)

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  4. David Wallace

    Just as a follow-up: Brian put data together a year ago on where US top-20 untenured faculty earned their PhDs. (https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2022/04/where-untenured-tenure-track-faculty-at-the-us-top-twenty-earned-their-phd-2022.html) Of the 60 people in total, 2 did their PhD (well, DPhil) in Oxford and 2 did their PhD in Cambridge, i.e. 1 in 15. That's not far off what you'd predict from the fact that 1 in 10 top-20 programs is a UK program, even before allowing for the fact that plenty of UK graduates have personal reasons to want to remain in Europe.

    Of course, Oxford's program is exceptionally large so you might say that you'd expect it to have a better placement record than that. I actually suspect that looking at tenure-track hires understates Oxford's presence in the US because quite a few people get hired a bit later, straight to tenure (me, for instance). I'm not sure how (simply) to measure that, though.

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  5. David Wootton

    I had a quick look at the first dozen permanent staff at the University of York in philosophy (excluding visiting, emeritus etc.) and the result is 2 US PhDs and the rest UK. There are restrictions on hiring non-UK citizens which in practise I think don't apply to Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial who are assumed to need to recruit on an international market. I suspect this is typical of good departments outside the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge.

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  6. UK Faculty

    Could you please clarify what restrictions on hiring non-UK candidates you have in mind? I have been working in the UK for 10 years and I have never heard of any such restrictions (even though, after Brexit, immigration rules have become stricter)

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  7. Mohan Matthen

    Some confirmation checking Cambridge. Of the first dozen, eight are from away.

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  8. Dirk Baltzly

    My two cents worth as a US PhD who has worked for 30 years in Australia.

    The structure of North American style coursework + thesis PhDs that are typically completed over 6-8 years confers certain advantages when it comes to applying for academic positions. For complex reasons related to industrial relations laws, the scholarship plus teaching assistant arrangement so common in the US is generally not an Australian thing. Granted, PhD students may pick up some experience as tutors along the way, but they won't typically have "teaching portfolios" as thick as those of the North Americans who started out TA-ing for Philosophy 101 and were then teaching their own self-designed versions of such intro subjects in the last two years of the thesis.

    Additionally, the relatively minor coursework component in the Aus/NZ PhD *may* mean that graduates lack the apparent breadth of their North American peers. They *need* not. But there is nothing baked into the very structure of the PhD program to make sure that they've gotten their USDA recommeneded intake from all the Philosophy food groups: value theory plus history of philosophy plus M&E plus logic/language/phil-sci. (I gather that the brutal hazing ritual I endured at Ohio State in the late 80s called General Exams has been supplanted by more humane forms of instruction. But anyone who survived that hazing had at least a passing acquaintance with a LOT of areas in philosophy.) The breadth that Australian students used to acquire through the Honours degree has been diminished by "streamlining" of the curriculum and the insertion of more "methods" classes at the insistence of busy-body deans.

    Moreover, there's simply the question of duration. The longer North American PhD programs afford more time for papers to be rejected a couple of times before finally being accepted in a journal. Given reviewing times and the time between acceptance and publication, your CV will generally look better after 7 years in grad school rather than 4.

    Finally, many North American institutions have (or perhaps had?) something like a 'placement officer' whose job it is to ready students going on the market, help fine tune cover letters, dossiers, etc and perhaps even do mock interviews, I think few departments in Australasia have such an officer. Of course, individual supervisors help prepare students who are applying for jobs, but it isn't regularised in the manner characteristic of American departments.

    And then there's the question of academic culture: Some of my Australian graduate students who have had extended visits in various American departments reported to me their surprise at how early their American peers had laser-like focus on academic employment. I would characterise their response to the American ethos as a mixture of admiration and distaste. On the one hand, they were impressed with their budding professionalism. On the other, the jostling for attention and recognition seemed to some of them a bit too ruthless or too self-absorbed. I think such an academic culture is contrary to the laconic and humourously self-deprecating persona that elite Australian sportsmen and women project — and which I think similarly elite students absorb at some level. This cultural difference manifests in letters of reference too. At one point, I sought to play the role of placement officer since I was (as the Americans would say) 'chair of the graduate program'. I had to ask colleagues to re-write what were, in fact, extremely strong letters of reference (relative to an Australian audience) to make them much longer and — dare I say? — more effusively over-the-top for an American audience.

    Obviously none of this means that I think graduates of our programs are generally inferior to graduates of North American programs. But there are structural, as well as cultural, differences. Hiring committees who can't adequately take those differences into account may be missing a good thing in some foreign job applicants.

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  9. Hannah

    "That generally means that US PhD students have more likelihood of multiple publications by the time they reach the job market, and also just more time to develop philosophical skills."

    I'd like to see your source for that claim. I'm sceptical given that publications are far more important than university prestige in the UK hiring process, unlike the US where the name of a university carries considerable weight. I suspect that's also one reason applicants from the UK struggle to get tenure-track positions in the US — there simply aren't enough universities in the UK that have the same prestige as the top 10-20 in the US, so everyone is effectively competing for the extremely limited places at Oxbridge. E.g. the University of Leeds has a top 5 philosophy department in the UK but that's probably equivalent to a top 30-40 in the US, so a Leeds PhD student looking to get a job in the US will be under higher pressure to publish and in all likelihood will still be passed over for a Harvard PhD with no or fewer publications.

    So I agree in theory with your third point that UK students should consider applying to US PhD programmes if they want a job there, but how many 20 year-olds (i.e., second-year BA students) already know that they want to move 5k miles away for a one-in-a-million chance of becoming a philosophy Professor? They haven't even begun their final-year dissertation at that point…

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