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  1. faculty at lower-ranked but competitive program's avatar

    We haven’t discussed this in our department (lower ranked PGR but tend to get highly competitive/very large applicant pool) but…

  2. Binary choice's avatar

    If you were the head recruiter for a professional basketball team, would you require height and weight measurements for prospective…

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  6. LC's avatar

    I concur to a certain extent. I also scored very low on the writing section. Back then, GRE was required…

  7. Mark's avatar

This has been quite a PhD admissions season…

Brian Leiter

…or at least that has been my impression from students I was writing for or have met/corresponded with during the process.  According to one report from an admitted student at a top 5 program, that program had nearly double the number of applications from the prior year!   How widespread is this phenomenon?  And what would explain an increase in applications?    Curious to hear from those doing admissions as well as those who applied.  And congratulations to those who were admitted in this cycle!

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12 responses to “This has been quite a PhD admissions season…”

  1. A

    I applied for History, not Philosophy, but I think the story there is similar. I applied to six programs and received five rejections and one waitlist (fingers crossed on that one). I was interviewed by two of my rejections so I am not completely discouraged from trying again, but it seems the dramatic increase in applications to top programs is across the board. Perhaps, in part, this could be a delayed aftereffect of so many programs not accepting students at all during the 2020-2021 admissions cycle. Students move on to work and then revisit their academic aspirations a few years later. But that would not explain a doubling in 2023-2024!

    I am interested in hearing about the overall quality of the rejected applicants compared to past years, as well as whether the domestic/international balance in the applicant pool has shifted at all. The increase in applications could also be attributed to advice students are getting in overseas institutions.

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  2. A Philosopher Named Slickback

    Some programs, like Cornell, had a huge spike from 200 applications to 300ish applications for 6 spots (I applied and was rejected twice), and most schools that I inquired about had more applicants than the previous year (as someone pointed out, Yale, for example); the competition is growing fierce (purely anecdotal, I know, but it made the rejections a bit less of a sting). And most schools, I’ve heard, now have sub-5 % acceptance rates, whereas before, most “safety” schools had around a 10% acceptance rate. Most schools now in the T20 PGR are becoming increasingly selective, with the applicants being increasingly highly qualified; I mean applicants having prestigious MA’s from top schools, JD’s, some even Ph.D.’s in other fields, publishing as undergraduates in T25 journals, presenting at conferences, and I have heard, even referring for journals as undergrads! Typical applicants like me have no shot anymore…

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  3. Anon Phil Grad

    A few stats for this year: Yale had 580 applications, NYU had 450, Rutgers had 350, all for 9-10 admits. MIT purportedly had almost 500 applications–while having 300ish in the past–for 8 admits.

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  4. Anon Phil Grad

    Also by "admits" I literally mean the number of people they initially admit, not the number of spots they have, which is typically lower.

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  5. Brian Leiter

    Could you please clarify your source for these numbers?

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  6. Anon Phil Grad

    My cohort and I applied this year and we learned from the DGS and/or the faculty members at the visits.

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  7. Curtis Franks

    Notre Dame’s Philosophy PhD. program received 21.3% more applications this year than last year. Last year saw its own increase of 6.4%. I do not know the reason for the increase in numbers, but it is not due to a flood of weak applications. If anything, the percentage of applicants who seemed very well prepared for advanced study at a program like ours was also higher this year than usual. We just closed our waitlist, losing a chance to work with a large number of applicants with whom it would have been a definite privilege to work.

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  8. John Baker

    It might be due to the economy. The top programs offer at least a tuition waiver or a tuition waiver plus extra funds to cover living costs. I know Johns Hopkins and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are now in that group.
    That fact might direct more students to apply to their programs. Given tuition inflation, my view is that schools that do not offer adequate aid packages, or any aid packages, will be accepting students who are not qualified, lowering standards to keep the classes filled with warm bodies (a very sad trend). I cannot blame those potential students…just read the websites put up by these programs.

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  9. Grad Student

    Got an offer from two top 5 programs (PGR). Beyond what has been mentioned above, I personally see three reasons:
    1. Many top programs got rid of GRE's as a requirement. I didn't do those either, and it was a major reason why I applied to US programs in the first place. I still think it was a mistake to get rid of them. (Yes, this has already been so when Covid was around, but also… Covid was around. So you'd expect much less applications then)
    2. MUCH more anecdotal: My sense lately has been that many people have been expressing a growing appreciation for rigorous philosophy; feminist and trans issues, scepticism against science, conspiracy theories, certain geopolitical happenings; basically the topics people constantly talk about, are highly philosophical, and my personal experience was that from journalists over scientists even to my parents, people have been appreciating philosophy as a field much more. I'm wondering if you had similar experiences.
    3. Perhaps the supreme court decision against certain forms of affirmative action motivated a lot of additional students to take their shot. I don't think this is too plausible, but reality is often counterintuitive. Only the numbers could tell. I can also personally say that two years ago, I was very sceptical to apply because of many DEI related issues. Those worries have reduced massively since. But maybe that's an internal development, not an external one.

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  10. Top 20 PhD Holder

    I feel that I must state a very deep scepticism that anything but an extremely, extremely small number of applicants likely to be admitted to top programs would have achieved a top 25 publication as undergraduates. So small that it’s basically a statistical anomaly for the purposes of admissions, even at top 5 departments. My motivation in pointing this out is quite simply that such kind of hyperbole and mythologizing does absolutely no service to applicants, and in fact works as misinformation (the student making the comment should not feel inadequate, of course; we all work with limited information and sometimes are misled by gossip).

    To take one very representative data point: A survey of the current graduate students at MIT will show that not a single one of them had such a publication before graduate school. I should mention that I consider this to be perfectly adequate. In general, people who have not been through the publication process do not understand how absurdly hard it is to get to that point of scholarship. And one would truly have to be a once-in-cohort prodigy to have something genuinely worthwhile to publish at that stage. Over half of PhDs from top 5 programs will not even achieve a single top 25 publication (again, quite evident from the list of graduates at such departments; this is a purely factual observation!). But who knows. Maybe this year truly is exceptional. I guess we’ll know in one year.

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  11. Junior faculty at T10 program

    While I did not serve on admissions this year, I can say with a high degree of certainty that “ordinary” applicants’ publishing in professional journals is extremely rare. And certainly not something we expect or are looking for. Nor are we expecting or insisting on special qualifications like MAs or JDs. While some of our admits do have MAs from top programs, many don’t. So while the competition is extremely fierce, no one should feel that they are missing some gold star or other that disqualifies them from serious consideration. A killer writing sample, strong letters, and a transcript that shows continued achievement and good preparation are what we care about. And that is already extremely difficult to pull off! An MA program can help a student achieve that, but it is those materials that count, not the fact of the degree.

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  12. Mike Otsuka

    For Rutgers, the figure of 350 is probably a reference to the 353 applications that were completed (with all required elements submitted, including at least 3 letters of reference, etc.). However, 433 started their application, and we reviewed 362, so including a few that weren't completed. It might be useful for people to clarify whether their figures are for number of applications started, completed, or reviewed.

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