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Professors (and graduate students) occasionally get asked, “should I go to graduate school in philosophy?”
In a recent episode of the Overthink Podcast, philosophy professor co-hosts Ellie Anderson (Pomona) and David Peña-Guzmán (San Francisco State) take up this question. Watch below, and feel free to comment with points you think someone asking this question should consider.
Some related posts:
The post “Should I Go To Graduate School in Philosophy?” first appeared on Daily Nous.
A graduate student in philosophy has the responsibility of organizing a graduate student conference hosted by their department, and has some questions, starting with:
1. “Why put on a graduate student conference? What should the purpose of a graduate conference be?“
(modification of a photo by Simon C. May)
They write, “One possible answer is that it provides a low stakes opportunity for grad students to practice presenting and commenting. And the student presenters can get valuable feedback on their work.” But the student hase questions about how to address various issues:
2. “I don’t quite know how I should balance the needs and interests of the two main stakeholders: student presenters from other schools and the grad students at our school.”
3. “Which papers should we accept for the conference? The obvious answer is to accept the best papers. But there are competing goals. For example, I want the presenters to benefit from the conference. Our conference will have a (faculty) keynote speaker. So it seems there’s a reason to prioritize papers by graduate students that suggest they’d benefit the most from the keynote speaker’s presence.”
4. “I want to be inclusive of the diverse interests the audience (i.e. grad students at our department) might have. Not everyone is interested in the main theme of the conference, and I’d feel bad having them sit through the whole conference feeling bored. How many of the accepted papers should be ‘off-theme’?”
5. “Should location be taken in the consideration, by preferring students closer to our department since the travel cost would be lower?”
6. “Which parts of the conference do presenters and keynote speaker find the most value in?”
7. “How should I pick the conference theme? How narrow or broad should it be?”
8. “How can I get the grad students in my own department to be more invested in helping with the conference and making it good?”
They add: “In general, I want to hear from people who have attended and/or organized grad conferences. I want to know what they like and dislike about grad conferences, and how such conferences can be made better.”
Readers?
“[A]s it turns out, the rate of attrition from philosophy doctoral programs often exceeds 30 percent.”
In the following guest post, Martin Willard and Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced) discuss attrition rates at doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, why they are important, and the value of graduate programs disclosing them.
[Richard Tuttle, “IV” from Stacked Color Drawings]
Anyone who has earned a philosophy PhD in the US or Canada knows that not everyone who enters doctoral programs completes them. Even students who receive fellowships to attend highly-ranked programs do not always complete them. No doctoral program is immune to the problem of attrition. Sometimes students leave for reasons having nothing to do with their course of studies: health or other personal reasons; family reasons, including relocating with one’s partner; financial reasons, especially for those who do not receive financial support; and other reasons that can arise regardless of the course of study.
Other students leave their programs for reasons more specific to the programs themselves. They might leave for academic reasons, transfer to another doctoral program, or leave because they no longer want to study philosophy at the doctoral level. Those who leave because they no longer want to pursue a PhD in philosophy have a variety of sometimes overlapping reasons: they are no longer interested in teaching, they have decided to pursue careers outside the academy, they find academic/departmental life too stifling, they want to make more money than academia offers, they believe they will never finish and are concerned they are wasting their time, they believe a master’s degree in philosophy has satisfied their philosophical “itch,” and so on. Students leaving for these kinds of reasons generally end up in careers outside the academy.
Unfortunately, statistics on attrition from doctoral programs in philosophy are not maintained in any reliable or comprehensive way. Various sites track nonacademic careers for philosophy PhDs,[1] but none—at least none of which we are aware—reliably track doctoral program attrition or completion.[2] The lack of reliable attrition data is significant. Although attrition need not reflect the quality of a given program or job prospects for its graduates, it certainly can. When a student leaves one program for another, this can say something about that student’s views of the relative merits of the two programs. And when a student leaves philosophy entirely, this often says something about the student’s perception of academic philosophy as a career. Students considering a program have an interest in knowing whether that program has a relatively high proportion of students who do not pass the comprehensive or qualifying process. Students likewise have an interest in knowing what proportion ultimately stay in academia and what proportion begin careers outside of academia. This requires access to attrition information.
Prospective doctoral students in philosophy obtain various bits of information about the graduate programs they are considering. They usually know where their undergraduate teachers got their degrees, and those professors might well recommend their alma maters or other doctoral programs with which they are familiar. Students also know where the philosophers whose papers they have read (and whom they are perhaps seeking to emulate) hang their hats. Students have access to several additional sources of information: the website of each department under consideration; the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR); APDA; and the APA’s Guide to Graduate Programs in Philosophy. The departmental website contains such things as the departmental faculty and their areas of specialization, the requirements of the doctoral program, available financial support and, usually, a page entitled “Placement.” The PGR contains an assessment (and ranking) of the quality of the doctoral programs it evaluates, based on external faculty reviews of the faculty in each department. APDA provides evaluations of doctoral programs provided by former students as well as the proportion of past graduates of each PhD program who have obtained employment in academic and nonacademic jobs, among other information. The APA Guide reports information about attrition, time to degree, and placement—though not all departments are equally assiduous about responding to the APA’s requests for this information.
Of course, the job crisis in philosophy and the humanities more generally is well known, and the issue of doctoral program transparency—transparency about departmental attrition, demographics, time to degree, and placement—is beginning to be recognized, too. But the majority of doctoral programs do not disclose attrition information on their departmental websites. This is unfortunate because, as it turns out, the rate of attrition from philosophy doctoral programs often exceeds 30 percent.[3]
Let’s look at some of the numbers. The University of Wisconsin, for example, tracks not only its own doctoral programs’ completion rates but also those of its Association of American Universities “peer” institutions.[4] For approximately 15–20 of the University’s peer doctoral programs in philosophy at public universities (a total of 97 entering students), 56 percent of the students who entered in 2006 completed their respective programs within ten years after entering the program, 8 percent remained in the program after ten years, and 36 percent were no longer enrolled in the program and did not complete it. Similarly, 55 percent of the students at the peer doctoral programs who entered in 2007 (102 total students) completed their respective programs within nine years after entering the program, 9 percent remained in the program after nine years, and 36 percent were no longer enrolled in the program and did not complete it. For this group of AAU peer universities, then, the philosophy doctoral program attrition rate was 36 percent (PhD Retention/Completion Rates).[5]
Similarly, the University of California system tracks its doctoral program completion rates (UC Doctoral Program Statistics). For philosophy cohorts entering the eight doctoral programs in the UC system from 2006 to 2009—a total of about 185 entering students during that four-year period—49 percent completed the programs in eight years and 62 percent completed the programs in ten years. While UC does not provide attrition rates, the reported ten-year completion rate suggests an attrition rate in the neighborhood of 30 percent.[6] The overall admission rate for these eight doctoral programs is just 10 percent, indicating that it is not a lack of selectivity that causes this level of attrition.[7] The three most selective programs in the UC system had ten-year completion rates of 62 percent (UC Berkeley), 77 percent (UCLA) and 66 percent (UC San Diego) for their 2006-2009 entering cohorts.
Attrition rates are available for other well-known doctoral programs, although this information is usually provided at the institutional level, not the departmental level. For cohorts of students entering the University of Pittsburgh’s doctoral program during the ten-year period from 2006 to 2015, the average annual rate of attrition was 31 percent (Doctoral Program Statistics).[8] For cohorts of students entering Princeton University’s philosophy doctoral program between 2000 and 2009 (total=94), 74 percent had completed the doctoral program and 23 percent had left as of June 2022 (PhD Completion and Cohort Analysis).[9] For cohorts entering NYU’s doctoral program during the ten-year period from 2005 to 2014 (total=65), the attrition rate was 20 percent.[10] At Yale University 17 percent of philosophy doctoral students entering during the eight-year period from 2009 to 2016—8 of 46 doctoral students—had left the program as of October 2021 (Graduate School Statistics). At MIT, the attrition rate for entering cohorts of doctoral students in linguistics and philosophy from 2006 through 2014 was 16 percent (Graduate Education Statistics).[11] At the University of Michigan, 7 of 61 of doctoral students entering from 2006 to 2015—11 percent—left the program without completing it as of September 2022 (Program Statistics).
By contrast, the attrition rate for the196 ABA accredited law schools averages 7 percent (ABA Required Disclosures). And the attrition rate for the more highly ranked (roughly the top 50) law schools is much lower—less than 2 percent.[12]
The point here is not to call attention to the attrition rates of any particular doctoral programs. Rather, it is to suggest that this is the sort of information that should be accessible to prospective graduate students. Moreover, although offices of institutional research at many universities publish attrition or completion rates, very few philosophy departments post this information on their websites.[13] Some might argue that attrition information is misleading unless one knows the reasons for each departure. Both UNC and Wisconsin provide information about whether the student left with or without a master’s degree, and UNC reports whether the student transferred to another program. It also is easy enough to include, along with the attrition statistics, a general statement about the various reasons a student might have for leaving a program.[14] In our view, if a 21-year old prospective student is capable of deciding whether to enroll in a seven-year doctoral program in philosophy, then they likely have the ability to interpret that program’s attrition data as well.
In a recent Blog of the APA post Kevin Zollman argues that the extremely challenging job market for permanent positions in philosophy does not justify downsizing doctoral programs. (See also Justin Weinberg’s post at Daily Nous.) Prospective students should be free to make their own choices about whether to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy.[15] But as Professor Zollman notes, departmental faculty must be honest about the risks inherent in attending a doctoral program. These risks include attrition rates, median time to degree, initial job placement, and long-term placement (five and ten years after degree). To date this kind of transparency is largely lacking, even among selective doctoral programs. We think it’s past time for leading doctoral programs to begin disclosing the risks of enrollment—including the risk that the matriculant will never finish.
To see this, compare the range described above in terms of attrition: 11 to 36 percent. The mean number of 2012-2021 PhD graduates per program covered by APDA is 40. Thus, a low attrition program would have graduated 40 of an original 45 entering PhD students, whereas a high attrition program would have graduated 40 of an original 63 entering PhD students. The mean proportion of graduates from this period now in permanent academic employment is 38 percent (around 15 of the 40 students, on average). If we include attrition information, the proportion of entering PhD students now in permanent academic employment could vary from a high of 34 percent for low attrition programs to 24 percent for high attrition programs. This is a difference of around 1 in 3 to around 1 in 4 of the incoming students eventually getting permanent academic jobs. We take this to be a difference worth communicating to prospective graduate students.
To help visualize this, we created an infographic that highlights in orange those students now in permanent academic positions. Worth noting is how the orange group—that is, the proportion of those who end up in permanent academic jobs relative to all entering PhD students—varies with attrition rate. The first pair of slides use the range of 11 percent (low attrition) to 36 percent (high attrition) with average employment rates, whereas the second pair of slides compare two actual programs for demonstration purposes (Yale and Pittsburgh). The first pair of slides use APDA mean values for all 2012-2021 PhD graduates (38 percent in permanent academic jobs, 38 percent in temporary academic jobs, 15 percent in nonacademic jobs; APDA blog post), whereas the second pair use concrete values from the programs in question (APDA table).
Further, philosophy as an academic discipline has an interest in better understanding the nonacademic careers of its PhD graduates and helping to prepare them for those careers. Without attrition information we have an incomplete grasp of how many PhD students ultimately find themselves in nonacademic careers. If we take the same infographic used above and change the color codes, we can visualize this:
Now, all students who have attrited are coded with the same purple hue (but a different shade) as those now in nonacademic careers (since it is likely that those without a PhD are now in nonacademic careers). As above, it is worth noting the change in the proportion of purple from the first to the second slide, and from the third to the fourth slide. Again, this difference makes it all the more clear that a significant proportion of those who embark on PhD degrees in philosophy are now in nonacademic careers, and so philosophers ought to consider how best to prepare their PhD students for these careers.
Going forward, two questions warrant further consideration. First, what is the best way of collecting and reporting attrition information? And second, what does the information about attrition we already have tell us about philosophy doctoral programs? Regarding the first question, attrition information displayed on departmental websites is much more accessible to prospective students than information only available at the institutional level. The format used by North Carolina and Wisconsin is both easy to maintain and simple to understand. It is more useful than seven-, eight-, or ten-year completion data, which usually omit final attrition data. Likewise, it is better than annual attrition rates which, if raw numbers of attrited students are omitted, do not permit calculation of attrition rates over several years.
Regarding the second question, we believe that high rates of attrition, together with high rates of nonacademic employment for doctoral program graduates, belie any suggestion that the only function of a philosophy doctoral program is to train university faculty. To the contrary, in light of the diverse career paths doctoral program matriculants in fact take, program faculty should support the career paths of all doctoral students, including those who ultimately choose not to pursue university teaching positions.
NOTES
[1] See, for example, the website Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis (APDA).
[2] Similarly, it is difficult to obtain reliable and comprehensive statistics about those philosophy PhDs who teach for a few years and then leave academia.
[3] The following research on degree completion and attrition was undertaken by Martin Willard.
[4] The university does not identify its AAU peers except to say that they are “comparable programs at other public AAU institutions.”
[5] During the period 2006-2015 the University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral program enrolled 68 doctoral students. Of that number, 20 (29 percent) did not finish and were no longer enrolled as of 2022 (UW-Madison Program Statistics).
[6] This assumes that roughly 8 percent of the students remained enrolled after ten years, a figure consistent with Wisconsin’s AAU peer data.
[7] UC System philosophy doctoral program average admission rate is for the period 2016-21.
[8] Pittsburgh does not identify the number of students in each cohort. As a result, the total attrition rate for the period 2006-2015 could differ from the average annual rate of attrition.
[9] The average annual rate of attrition for Princeton’s entering cohorts from 2006 to 2015 is 17 percent.
[10] NYU’s philosophy department provided this information January 10, 2023.
[11] MIT combines attrition data for its linguistics and philosophy doctoral students.
[12] See TaxProf Blog for an analysis of relationship between law school attrition rates and median LSAT scores.
[13] On the other hand, some programs—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) (UNC Program Statistics) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison Program Statistics), for example—publish on their departmental websites the outcomes of each entering cohort: the number of students entering the program, the number completing it, and the number who left the program without completing it.
[14] UNC puts it this way: “Reasons for leaving the program vary widely. Some students may decide that they no longer wish to pursue philosophy. Some may leave for academic or medical reasons. Some may simply receive opportunities to pursue other activities that they find more attractive. Even students from the same cohort who are currently enrolled in our program may vary widely in their progress: students may be nearly completed with their dissertations or be on extended personal leave. Despite the coarse-grained character of the following information, we hope that you find it useful.”
[15] Justin Weinberg makes a similar point in Against Reducing the Number of Philosophy PhDs.
An undergraduate student in philosophy has been wondering whether their dyslexia gives them a strong reason to avoid pursuing graduate study and a career in academic philosophy.
The student asked their professor to write in to see what the readers of Daily Nous thought. Here’s what the professor said:
My situation is this: I have an extremely bright, creative and highly motivated undergraduate student. The student is also dyslexic, to the extent that reading text is much more difficult for them than it is for the average student. In my view, the student is otherwise clearly capable of succeeding at the graduate level in philosophy, should they be admitted to a good, supportive program. They have a great deal of intrinsic motivation to teach and research, and great ideas. However, they’re wondering whether their dyslexia might be a decisive reason to avoid this career path. I hadn’t encountered this question before, so I was wondering if your readers might have opinions here.
It is likely that especially valuable comments on this topic will come from philosophy graduate students and professors who have dyslexia, dysgraphia, or other conditions which make reading and writing difficult, and I hope they choose to voice their opinions on this matter.
My wonderful colleague here in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, Tyke Nunez, is one such person, and he kindly wrote up his thoughts on the matter, posted below.
If a student is dyslexic and otherwise shows potential in philosophy, is it worth encouraging them to go on to graduate school? I’m a colleague of Justin’s who is severely dyslexic and dysgraphic. (Unaided, I read at roughly a third to a quarter of normal pace and I exhibit three or more standard deviations between my processing speed index and other WAIS-3 scores.) My short answer is ‘Yes.’ But let me elaborate through answering a few questions that you might be wondering about.
Is philosophy a good thing to spend your life doing if you’re dyslexic? Going into academia in the humanities is likely not where a dyslexic will find their competitive advantage, as the economists say, but that’s a strange way to think about one’s life. If you love it, dyslexia should not prevent you from going to graduate school in philosophy. Among humanities disciplines, dyslexics also seem well suited to philosophy, because philosophy requires reading slowly and carefully. When I picked up the Republic in high school, it was the first thing that I’d read that seemed worth the trouble and pain of reading. My dyslexia and dysgraphia mean that the various dimensions of research and teaching preparation that require reading and writing take me significantly longer. As a result, I have always had to spend a much larger amount of my time working than my peers. For me it’s worth it, because there is nothing else that I’d like to spend this amount of my life doing.
Will being dyslexic be a hindrance to getting into grad school, succeeding in grad school or getting a job? What is it like to be in the academy as someone with dyslexia? Professionally, my sense is that by disclosing a learning disability one will face some discrimination, and that this is not a kind of diversity that is valued in the academy today. As an undergraduate I had professors who were extremely resistant to accommodating my disability, however, as a graduate student I didn’t. This is likely because in graduate school one tends to know one’s professors well, and I didn’t ask for many accommodations. Looking back over my application materials for graduate school from 2005/6, it looks like I included a statement about my disability for several of my applications. I did not get into any of those schools, but I got into many comparable or better ones for which I did not include such a statement.
When I was applying for jobs at universities and colleges, I deliberated about discussing my learning disability in my diversity statement. I ultimately decided to do it because I think it is important for people with learning disabilities to be visible in the profession. I had one interview with a department that asked for my diversity statement. As a professor, I always talk about my dyslexia with my students at the beginning of every semester. It helps to put us all on an even footing. I’m also an avid whiteboard user that spells at an eighth-grade level, so it’s obvious. Otherwise, my disability is not very apparent from the outside, say, if you are reading my work or on a committee with me.
What accommodations are there that make philosophy doable with dyslexia? Obviously, spell-checker has been essential. I also would not have been able to make it as an undergraduate, let alone through graduate school, without the use of audio-book services like Learning Ally or text-to-speech programs like VoiceDream reader. Even in philosophy, you can’t read everything slowly, and without these aids I would neither be able to skim (listening sped up, no underlining) nor read carefully at a workable speed (listening sped up while following with my eyes, but stopping to highlight and take notes). Likely if a student is thinking about graduate school, they have already cultivated a base competency with these skills. Of course, even with these aids I read much more slowly than someone who does not have dyslexia.
Even more than my dyslexia, dysgraphia—which often accompanies and is conflated with dyslexia—has been a hurdle. Before I reached college, I thought I might want to go in to philosophy professionally, but early on a professor made it clear to me that the coin of the realm was the essay, and that mastering argumentative writing was a requirement on a life in philosophy. In my first two years of college, I had the good fortune of having professors who would closely read and edit draft after draft of my papers, which improved my writing. Twenty years on, writing is still a laborious and painful process. It is orders of magnitude more cognitively demanding than speaking. But it is also a daily practice that I now crave. I imagine that if I had grown up using speech-to-text programs like Dragon Dictate, I might have been able to become a faster, more fluid, more elegant writer than I am. Now, however, I’m accustomed to my writing process, and learning to use such programs feels forced.
There should be more acceptance of learning disabilities in the academy. A requisite step is recognizing and fostering the academic potential of students with such disabilities. Of course, this comes with challenges, but the transition to graduate school is difficult for everyone. Many of my peers struggled to learn to read slowly and carefully. I struggled to learn to read quickly and cursorily. Both are basic skills. As an undergraduate, I did not look like a standard good philosophy student. If you are already seeing the philosophical potential of students despite their differences with this standard, then you are already well down the path to making the profession more accepting.
Note: Some minor clarificatory edits were made to the post since it was first published.
UPDATE: Lex Academic has created a new scholarship for graduate students with dyslexia who are studying philosophy. The scholarship includes £500 and free proofreading of the recipient’s thesis or dissertation. Details here.
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”
There’s what professors expect their students to be doing in order to be successful in graduate school and beyond, and then there’s what successful graduate students are actually doing.
How different are these descriptions? And in what ways are they different?
[“The Dress” by Lou Benesch, detail]
Curious about other ways in which graduate student behaviors depart from what professors might think they are doing or should be doing (not necessarily by failing to meet expectations; there could be instances of going beyond expectations, or behaviors unrelated to typical expectations), they asked:
What belongs on “The Secret Syllabus” of being a philosophy graduate student?
Let’s hear from current and recent philosophy graduate students about this. (Note to the professors out there: what’s being asked for is not a recapitulation of professors’ thoughts about what graduate students should be doing.)
NOTE: I understand that people who normally post under their own names may wish to comment pseudonymously on this post. That’s fine. But please note that the commenting software associates your email with the name first used with it, so if you want to keep your identity hidden, you should either enter a different email address than the one you used when you commented with your real name, or add “DN” to the beginning of your email address when you enter it in the comment form. (Your email address is not made public.)
UPDATE: A reader draws my attention to the book, The Secret Syllabus: A Guide to the Unwritten Rules of College Success, and from the same series, A Field Guide to Graduate School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum.
Related:
“Grad Students: What Do You Wish You Knew?”
“Grad Students: What Do You Wish You Knew? (Volume 2)”
“Grad Traps!”
FreshRSS 