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Advice to prospective PhD students in light of…well, everything!

Brian Leiter

Philosophy PhD student Charles Bakker writes:

I have always appreciated your efforts to help prospective graduate students make informed decisions as they consider which philosophy programs to apply to. In light of where things are at currently in our field – the shuttering of philosophy departments around the world, the attacks on academia by the U.S. government, the general lack of funding for graduate students [BL:  in some departments, in some the funding is very good], and the already hyper-competitive job market for recent PhD graduates – I would be curious to know what your guidance would now be to a prospective philosophy graduate student. Would you recommend that they think twice about entering a program? Would you advise them not to expect to get a job for X number of years on average after graduating? Bear in mind that as departments close, as more and more courses get offloaded to cheaper contract instructors, and as tenure gets stripped away in places controlled by right wing ideologues, the number of experienced academics entering the job market also increases, making it even less likely that junior academics will find a place in academia. 

The first five weeks of Trump II–which have been a disaster, worse than even I expected (and my expectations were low)–adds to all these concerns, since Trump II promises to be very bad for higher education in the U.S.  (I'll write more about that soon.)   Still my advice now would simply be a variation on the advice I've given individual students for the last 15 years or so (on the assumption that someone is getting a PhD with an eye to earning a living as a PhD philosopher):  do not go to a graduate program unless you get funding; and only go to a top PhD program, if not overall, then at least in your field.  What is a "top PhD program"?  Top 20ish in the U.S. is a reasonable cut-off, with any other Anglophone program ranked equivalent being comparable.  Examples of "top" in a specialty would be UC Irvine's program in "Logic and Philosophy of Science."   These are good rules of thumb.  If you are considering schools not in these categories, scrutinize the placement data carefully.   There are far too many schools offering a PhD in philosophy, as we have noted before, and if these PhD programs are adequately funding their students, then that is something.   But I do think now is an especially important moment for PhD programs in the U.S. to think about whether they ought to exist.  Terminal M.A. programs (which I started emphasizing in the PGR a quarter-century ago) have played a very important role in helping develop students for success in PhD programs and also helping students figure out whether an academic career is for them.  The profession, especially given what's coming, could benefit from more good terminal MA programs and fewer PhD programs.

I would invite perspectives from readers but you must include a full name if you are a faculty member and, regardless, a valid email address (which will not appear).

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15 responses to “Advice to prospective PhD students in light of…well, everything!”

  1. John Schwenkler

    I know this is partly self-serving but I want to say something about my experience placing students from a department that is not "top 20ish". I taught for 10 years at Florida State, then as now top 40-ish department (as is my current department at the University of Illinois), and in that time supervised three Ph.D. students all of whom got attractive tenure-track offers right out of the gate, plus worked closely with another who's just been offered a 2-3 year postdoc at an Ivy League school. Beyond their natural talents, what I believe distinguished these students was not the placement record of our program as a whole (it was and is acceptable, but not extraordinary), but the way that (1) they worked *very* hard throughout their time in the program and (2) they made wise decisions about how to develop their portfolios in ways that would make them attractive job candidates. Of course, being accepted to a "top 20ish" program can be a good sign of one's philosophical abilities, and some such programs will do a lot of things to help their students develop professionally — including being in an environment full of smart, hard-working, and professionally driven peers. But hiring departments will not make their decisions just on the basis of ranking or institutional prestige; there is a lot that the candidate has to do on his or her own to distinguish himself or herself from the lot. So I would say this, not as a correction to Brian's advice but more as a supplement: wherever you enroll for a Ph.D., be prepared to work extremely hard and to think carefully and seek advice from peers, advisors, and other faculty about how to develop yourself as a professional (which in my view is *not* a matter just of publishing as much as you possibly can). To this I would add further: always keep other career paths actively in mind, and not just as "back-ups" should your academic dreams fall through; and understand that the cost of graduate school is partly in the years of lost earnings, so that you may find yourself well into your 30s or 40s before you have the financial stability that your parents enjoyed much earlier in life. (It may help make a difference to that if, unlike me, you don't bring seven children into the world during your 20s and 30s! But that part was well worth it.)

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  2. Brian Leiter

    I think this is all sensible advice, and worth taking very seriously. I do fear that the job market is going to get much worse in the coming years, however.

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  3. John Schwenkler

    Yes, I agree with that last point: higher education as a sector of the economy has been riding a bubble for a long time and there is every reason to fear an impending collapse of many colleges and universities due to demographic shifts and changes in the economy, not to mention changes to the federal funding structure and the possibility of taxing endowments, etc. But this is a good reason for *anyone* to think hard about whether they want to seek a career in higher ed: outside of a small number of institutions (and even there we have room for concern), it just doesn't promise the career security that it did a generation ago.

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  4. Kenny Easwaran

    One difficulty is that departments often don't control what sort of graduate programs they offer. At my previous institution, my understanding is that while there had been a long-running MA program, the university made the department start a PhD program several years before I arrived. Then, during my time there, the university cut all support for funded masters programs. As a result, over a decade or so, the department went from having a highly-regarded MA program to having a more marginal PhD program. Presumably this happened because the university gets some prestige from being able to say it offers 94 PhD programs rather than 93, but doesn't think there is any prestige in having a top-ranked MA program that sends people on to top PhD programs in the field, and instead treats masters programs as cash cows.

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  5. Anonymous

    Apologies, I am only willing to post this anonymously. I graduated from a program that was at the time Leiter-ranked #1 in my specialization (which I won't name). Since completing my PhD, I have struggled to find any employment beyond a one-year contract, resulting in constant instability and anxiety. I am rather productive research-wise and have ample teaching experience. Despite that, during the previous year's academic job cycle I received no first round interviews at all. I currently have a position as an adjunct lecturer, but the pay is terrible. I would be in debt or homeless if I weren't staying with family. For the past year, I have been looking for a way to leave academia behind. This has proven much more difficult than I anticipated. After a year of applying for private sector jobs, I have had a few early stage interviews, but have never been a finalist. My accomplishments as a scholar simply don't mean much outside of academia (or in it, for that matter). My scholarly training may prove very useful once I have a position. But for getting my foot in the door–not much help.

    Graduate school was probably the most fun I will ever have in my life. But had I known what my life post-PhD would be like, I don't think I would have done a PhD. I feel like I've squandered my talent in a field that has no place for me. My experience looking for a tenure track job over several years has been heartbreaking. Moreover, I believe my experience is relatively common among people who graduated around the time of the pandemic, even from elite programs. With the Trump cuts and the demographic cliff, I would think market conditions will only worsen, and that an experience like mine will become more of the norm (if it isn't already).

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  6. Charles Bakker

    I am so sorry to hear this. Thank you, though, for being willing to share your story. You are right that this type of experience is now common. This is why I am concerned about the various efforts being made to attract more philosophy students for the sake of saving programs and jobs. All else being equal, learning philosophy is good. However, IF those students being attracted to these programs are not being made aware of what things are actually like for even those graduating from top programs, then the efforts being made to attract them may be unethical.

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  7. Tim Maudlin

    I understand this is cold comfort (if even that), but my standard practice for my entire career teaching undergraduates has been, without exception, not to positively encourage anyone to pursue a PhD in philosophy—and for those who still love the field so much that they want to—to tell them 1) not to go into debt and 2) to try to get into a frame of mind that they so much love having the time and freedom to just study philosophy (while living on a pretty marginal income) that they would not regret the decision to spend some years at it even if nothing professional were to come of it in the end and they had to pretty much start a career from scratch.

    I think it is good advice. It is actually a little milder than the advice I got from Robert Fogelin in 1980, due to the job prospects then. He said—and I quote verbatim because one does not forget something like this—"Not even if you were Immanuel Kant would I suggest going to graduate school in philosophy". (I did go on because of a more encouraging second opinion from Ruth Barcan Marcus.) Fogelin suggested law school instead.

    Maybe one has to be as harsh as Fogelin. Maybe the psychological state I recommend cannot really be achieved. But that's where I have come out in all this.

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  8. Simon Goldstein

    I think there's a significant chance (>10%) that in the next 5-15 years there is a permanent end to most tenure track hiring because of AI automation. If AIs can write human-level philosophy papers, universities will no longer hire new people to write these papers, and the journal system will also collapse. AIs will also quickly (or have already) become better than existing professors at instructing students. I use ChatGPT as a tutor in econ / game theory and find it to be much more helpful than most professors I've had as a teacher. In this scenario, I expect tenure track hiring to end, and tenure faculty to gradually be eliminated over a slightly longer timeframe.

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  9. Brian Leiter

    AI poses problems for higher education (mostly for teachers and how they assess students), but it's not going to replace teachers or produce credible philosophy in our lifetimes, if ever. I'm not a gambler, but I'd bet money on that!

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  10. Adam Rigoni

    I give the same advice as Tim, fwiw. I went out on the market with a JD, so I could bail out if needed (and very nearly did). I would never have done it without that safety net. I don’t think AI will end tenure, but I could see some state legislatures ending it, making the remaining spots even more competitive.

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  11. Noah Gordon

    Let me echo some of what Anonymous said above (and do so non-anonymously). I finished my PhD from a PGR top-10 in 2023. My experience is a bit different from anon's in that I never attempted, nor desired to, go on the academic job market but instead went directly non-ac. I felt I was reasonably well-placed to find a decent non-ac job: I had internships every summer as an undergraduate, had done some contract work during my PhD, had an undergraduate major in IT, and had all stellar academic credentials. What I didn't realize was that a collapse of the white-collar job market in America, especially in the tech sector, was already occurring and is only intensifying. I anticipate that most professional philosophers have no sense of this happening, so that even their limited experiences with previous students who went non-ac just a few years ago might be completely out of date. The main factors behind this collapse, as I understand it, are that the rise of remote work is allowing for outsourcing of most white collar work to cheaper labor markets, and the (justified or unjustified) anticipation that AI is going to be able to significantly automate away many of these positions.

    I have been doing low-paying and unstable contract work in the tech industry for almost for over a year now. My academic credentials, in my anecdotal opinion, have done nothing but hurt my application prospects. I believe it would be best for me to remove my PhD from my resume, but I have too much pride in it to do so. I see no reason to think that the above market forces will change for the better any time soon, and every reason to believe that things will only get worse in the near to mid-term future due to general corporate deregulation by the Trump administration. So I am now making other plans. My current plan, as absurd as it may sound, is law school. My hope is that it will be more difficult to offshore these positions due to requiring US law licenses, that there will be legal regulations to protect the legal industry from extreme AI automation, that firms will continue to regularly recruit new graduates for good positions (unlike many other industries, who would like to either hire experienced workers on the cheap for entry-level jobs, or to use contracting and gig work to get it done), and that perhaps if there is an orderly transition of power and a change of regime in 2028, that federal agencies like the NLRB and CFPB will be hiring. I see no better alternative for white-collar work for the future for someone with similar skills and experience.

    Hopefully this perspective is useful to those still in the philosophy bubble and those thinking about or trying to leave it.

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  12. Justin Fisher

    FWIW, my advice to students perfectly matches Tim Maudlin's and Adam Rigoni's above.

    I share the concern that advances in AI will threaten our academic jobs during the careers of todays prospective grad students, both directly because AI will be able to do a lot of professors currently do (like offering students individualized feedback, ensuring that students see engaging lectures, and assessing how much they learned from the process) much more cheaply than humans can, and indirectly because AI will threaten a lot of the jobs that professors had been training students for, thereby reducing the demand for professors to train them.

    It's worth noting though that many of these forces will threaten lots of the other "white collar" jobs that prospective grad students might have in mind as alternative options, including IMHO tech jobs and law jobs, so it's not at all clear that these considerations weigh in favor of jumping ship from Philosophy when most of the other ships will be sinking too. I can see a pretty strong case for thinking that, ceteris paribus, it'd be better to end up being a practically-unemployable Philosopher than it would be to be a practically-unemployable person with training in some field that has less intrinsic value…

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  13. Tim Maudlin

    Since I reported Bob Fogelin's advice to me above, and Brian Leiter has now gone on to call his advice "insane", let me explain why I disagree.

    Leiter's comment is this: "What insane advice to give to an undergraduate, at Yale no less, which has sent many dozens of students on to successful academic careers in philosophy since that time. Even now, that advice would be crazy, and the situation is much more grim in the U.S. due to the Republican war on higher education. Despite all that, there will still be jobs teaching philosophy, but fewer than even in the last thirty or forty years."

    But the fact that Yale sent many dozens of students on to successful careers in the decades since is just irrelevant to what motivated Fogelin. What he was seeing, and anticipated more of, was exactly the situation that started this discussion: highly motivated and qualified graduate students at Yale who *were not* getting jobs. Focussing solely on the successes, as Leiter seems to do, just blocks out of sight those not lucky enough to get jobs at all, or forced into adjunct positions or a series of post-docs. I think that was what motivated Fogelin. He could see that *all* of these strong students would have perhaps even a guaranteed secure career with a law degree from a good law school, and that was not at all the case for a philosophy degree. And so he advised the safer course for everyone.

    The lucky few successes do not somehow automatically outweigh those who are not so lucky. As for "the good of the field", I rather doubt that Fogelin considered that of much importance in comparison to the good of the flesh-and-blood human beings he was advising.

    One can dispute the advice, but to call it insane merely because *some* students succeeded is not an argument that stands up to scrutiny.

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  14. Brian Leiter

    75% or more of PhD students at the very top graduate programs secure tenure-track jobs in philosophy, and many Yale undergraduates since 1980 went to those programs. The responsible advice would have been to emphasize the importance of going to a very strong PhD program, in light of the very difficult job market. Fogelin's hyperbole was funny, but wholly irresponsible. Ruth Marcus, someone not afraid of candor, had more realistic advice. My guess is Fogelin was over-reacting to the change from the mid-1960s (when jobs were there for the picking) to the early 1970s, when the new status quo for the philosophy job market began.

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  15. Recent PhD

    I'm not sure that professors should be saying much more to students beyond simply presenting them with the stark facts about current and projected future rates of academic and non-academic employment for graduating philosophy PhDs, telling them a bit about what life as a graduate student is like, and telling them whether you think they're well-suited to doing productive research. Your responsibility here is surely to arm students with this information and then let them make up their own minds.

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