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Under what conditions, if any, should a graduate program in philosophy admit PhD students for whom it cannot provide funding?
A professor at a department of philosophy sent in that question for consideration among the readers of Daily Nous. They write:
There is disagreement among the faculty in my department about the issue of whether (and if so when) to admit PhD students without funding. For context, we have a small number of funded lines and we often have more qualified applicants who seem like they would be good fits for our program than we have funded lines. Our placement record is just okay. We have had fairly good success in recent years placing our PhDs in long-term positions (like continuing lecturers or teaching professors), but we rarely place PhDs on the tenure track and it’s not uncommon for our PhDs to either become adjuncts and/or to take alt-ac jobs (which on some occasions is what the graduates themselves want).
Some of us worry that it is exploitative to admit someone to our PhD program when we’re not willing to fund them (unless there are unusual circumstances whereby we know that their PhD will otherwise be funded, say through an employer or the military. In such rare cases, the faculty agrees admitting them is permissible). We worry that for at least some applicants we’ll create misleading evidence about the wisdom of enrolling in our PhD program unfunded if we admit applicants who are unfunded. In addition, at least some of us think that admitting unfunded PhD students goes against an implicit best practice in philosophy as an academic discipline, and we’d rather stick to best practices.
On the other hand, some of my colleagues worry that it is paternalistic to remove from unfunded applicants the power to decide for themselves whether or not to attend our PhD program unfunded, which is what results if we reject such applicants rather than admitting them without funding. Several of those colleagues also worry that we may lose out on students who are in a position to self-fund their PhDs (either through wealth they have or through subsidization by other means) if we’re not made aware that they have such sources of funding and we reject them on the grounds that we don’t have funding to offer them.
I’d be interested in learning what others in philosophy, both faculty and students, have to say about this issue.
Readers, what say you?
[A note to help move the discussion in a useful direction: generally, it is highly inadvisable for a person to attend a PhD program in the humanities without full funding from some source (ideally a tuition waiver and a fellowship stipend from the program, which is a kind of vote of confidence in the student). But it doesn’t follow from that alone that it would be wrong to offer people the choice to do so. It may be wrong to offer such a choice; but more would need to be said as to why.]
Related: “Against Reducing the Number of Philosophy PhDs”
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