Academic Placement

My god — you have just relieved this aspiring grad student more than you’ll ever know. Thank you!

The APA has some *somewhat* useful info on this on its web site at:

http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/profession/Candidates.pdf

(I think that’s on the part of their web site that’s open to non-subscribers.) For each academic year since ’82-83, this document lists the number of candidates and the “total new jobs” for that year, and then does the math for you, listing the number of candidates per job. Without more info than the APA provides, this doesn’t help much in getting an absolute sense for how good/bad the market is: We’d have to know more about how the two main measures are done. But, on the assumption that they have reasonably decent ways of measuring these, and that they do so consistently from year to year, this does give a good feel for how the market is moving — whether things are getting better or worse. For the years I’m most familiar with (years that I was on the market or was involved in placement as a faculty member), the years this document lists as having relatively low candidate-to-job ratios do match pretty well my sense of which were the relatively good years to be a candidate.

I perhaps should have been a bit more clear about the categories.

‘Good’ was meant to be a non-trivial standard. It didn’t just mean ‘fair’, or ‘not bad’. The category I was using excludes those working in jobs that have 4/4 teaching loads, it excludes those still working on 2-year contracts after a few years out, it excludes those who have gone into non-academic work in universities (and there were surprisingly many of those), it excludes those who’ve gone to law school (lots of those, and they’ll probably all earn more money in a lifetime than me) and it excludes those who’ve gone into other industries, the most prominent of which were banking and computing.

Now there’s a lot of career paths there that a lot of people in this country (not to mention every other country) would happily trade for. So it’s not like the 15-20% left over are unemployed. It’s hard to know how many genuinely voluntarily left academia, but some of them did. Perhaps not many, but some. So overall I think the claim that these are pretty high numbers is OK.

What would be disturbing is to see how quickly those numbers drop off as you leave the top 15, and especially the top 20. If the numbers were available, I expect they’d be less than flattering.

Brian, I’m interested at how you would rate Brown (which, if we go by Leiter’s rankings could have taken the spot of Columbia or NYU). Also, maybe a sampling of a few schools well outside the top 20, but still in the top 50, might be helpful to compare.

Yale does have a complete account of graduates since 1997 on-line at:
http://www.yale.edu/philos/grad/placement.html

Here’s Cornell. They seem comparable with the top 15. I think they were rated in the top 15 for most of this time, too (we’re using Leiter’s rankings right?)

One thing to note is that not all placement sites are comparable. Some (e.g. Pitt) list first job and current job, others (e.g. Cornell) list only one job. If Cornell’s listing the first job, it’s likely that some people went from non-tenure track to tenure track jobs. OTOH, they may have a mix of first job and eventual job.

I’d advise a prospective grad student to ask for a clarification if the placement info isn’t clear.

In private correspondence I encouraged Brian to look into this topic. Having been on the recruiting (of students) and hiring (of faculty) side of the table for about 10 years now, I’ve been forming clearer views about these issues and wanted to get some meaningful data. I was too lazy to gather the data but Brian did so and did so quickly without charging me an outrageous research fee. Thanks Brian (your bar tab at the next conference we both attend can be forwarded to me).

Prospective graduate students should, I agree, be interested both in job placement for those who finish PhDs and in attrition rates. They should be interested both in attrition rates at individual programs and the general attrition rate among the professional wannabes. Prospective students should be reminded that most of those who drop out of PhD programs thought going in that they wouldn’t be among the casualties. That’s an appropriate dose of realism.

But for purposes of evaluating the claim that the *job market* is terrible I don’t see the relevance of those who don’t finish PhDs. Except in the oddest cases, if we focus on Brian’s target of 3/3 load or better, it’s those who finish a PhD who are in the hunt for such jobs. M.A.s need not apply.

I’ve long believed that both of these claims are true:
1. Most people who finish PhDs in Philosophy at top 15 schools and look for academic jobs end up (perhaps after a few years of looking) in at least a 3/3 job.
2. Almost *everyone* who is in the top half of students at a top PhD program, finishes and seeks academic employment ends up in at least a 3/3 job.

If these claims aren’t true then the philosophy job market is terrible. I think both claims are quite likely true. The second is harder to judge. Those of us who teach in PhD programs probably have some idea whether it’s true of our own schools

Prospective graduate students often overestimate their chances of being “among the best” students in their PhD departments and attrition rates are fairly high at many schools (I think). Prospective students also seem to think that if you get into a top school and *do well* you can “probably” get a job in a top40 PhD program. You might. But “probably” is too strong.

The market isn’t paradise and prospective students often think they’ll sail into a top job if only they do well and finish a PhD with a good advisor in 5-7 years. But I think we can honestly tell those considering graduate school that if they get into a strong school and do well at that strong school then, unless the market gets worse, they can reasonably expect to find an ok or better job somewhere in the world. That’s much more optimistic than most people say we should be with prospective graduate students. What’s wrong with it, if anything?

I don’t know — I’m still suspicious about the supposed comprehensiveness of the lists these schools have posted. Some explicitly state that their lists are complete; some say they draw their data from students who’ve used the department’s job-placement services (which may well not be everyone — and may in particular exclude grads who are several years out, have moved, etc.); some simply don’t make claims (unless I missed them, which is always a possibility).

It’s relatively easy for departments to keep track of their students and grads who get academic placements, at least if these placements occur shortly after graduation. Knowing what’s happened to people who’ve left academia (willingly or unwillingly) is a lot harder. That is, I’m not accusing schools of deliberately padding their data — just pointing out that they aren’t claiming to provide quantitative data, in the sense of percentages, as Brian’s attempted to do. They’re giving us anecdotal evidence about jobs that graduates have taken, and not saying much about what may *not* have happened. Unless you cross-checked with actual graduation lists from the universities, i wouldn’t be too sure about the numbers.

Oh — and one more thing: the websites, even anecdotally, may be wrong. The amount of erroneous and out-of-date info I’ve found on university web sites is astonishing. The “job placement” section of my own alma mater’s site not only had me listed incorrectly for several years (despite my sending in corrections), but also did the same for a few of my friends. And that’s just what I noticed. Again, I’m not claiming deliberate deception — just a lot of disorganization, with no one really ultimately responsible for what gets posted.

For the record, I’m in English — where I believe there have been about 1000-1100 new north American PhDs annually for the past decade or so, and anywhere from 250-550 tenure-track entry-level jobs advertised each year. So we’re looking at 25%-50% TT job placement period, courseload notwithstanding. The MLA is quite good about providing data on all this.

It’s certainly true that if the information the schools have provided is not good, then the percentages won’t be any good either. And I don’t have any good way of double-checking the data. I don’t know of any mistakes through personal knowledge, but I don’t know that many people.

The placement sites are often of recent origin. I don’t know if that makes them more reliable. The unreliability cuts both ways of course – some of the ‘unknown’s will potentially have academic work, even though I counted all of them as not good.

For what it’s worth, the numbers of grads listed per year looked about right given what I know about the size of each of the grad schools. If there were people simply not listed, there weren’t many. This is no help about the _inaccuracy_ of reports of course.

From memory, Michigan was the only school to limit its reports to students who had used the placement service, every other school looked to me to be claiming comprehensiveness, at least implicitly. Harvard, for instance, didn’t say “This is everyone”, but they would from time to time say “One other graduate this year did not find/did not seek academic employment.” If there are others they are just ignoring, this is _very_ misleading, and I was gullible/trusting enough to assume they weren’t doing that.

This practice was quite a contrast to departments like Cornell, and Brown, that list schools their grads have gone to, but do not list how many grads do not have (good) academic jobs. From those lists it is impossible to tell how well the average graduate does.

A x/y teaching load (in my dialect at least, which might not be standard) means teaching x courses one semester and y courses the other. In a university with a quarter system there are complications about just how to work out what is equivalent to what kind of semester-based teaching load, but I think there are some standard translations. The teaching loads faculty members are expected to bear varies _wildly_ across academia, as this discussion has probably borne out.

Just thought I’d note —

I graduated from a fourth or fifth rate philosophy grad program, and ended up with the sort of job one would expect with such a pedigree: a 4/4 load, at a school with no philosophy majors, at an out of the way location somewhere in the Midwest.

And I absolutely love it — probably more than I would enjoy a 2/2 or better load at a much more prestigious school (not that there was ever any danger of that happening), even if I were willing and able to do all the writing that would entail.

Just throwing that into the mix of what counts as a “good” job. I understand the categories here, and agree with them as far as they go. But as everyone here knows, I’m sure, “good” isn’t that simple.

4 courses each semester – or something equivalent to that if you’re at a school with something other than semesters, with rather generous interpretations sometimes about what counts as equivalent.

This is interesting data, though I confess the results for Texas strike me as better than I would have expected! Until very recently, Texas wasn’t even a top 20 department, and our job placement results reflect that. (Conversely, schools like Berkeley have placement results that reflect the fact that, until recently, they were a solidly top 10 department.)

Yes, we’re 4/4 as well, though in some departments like my own we do our best to lessen that through double-counting of courses and buying out classes through grants, etc. I agree with ssuma that there are complementary goods that come with 2/2 schools, and it’d be nice to have them. But the load doesn’t tell the whole story, and any listing of what’s a “good” school and what is not is bound to be arbitrary. All you can really ask is consistency.

I also agree with Brian Weatherson that there’s nothing particularly horrible teaching in a 4/4 school when compared to the non-academic alternatives. I have seen several acquaintances suffer under the publication pressures at the better schools, some going out of academia and others bouncing into jobs none of us would consider “good”; we’ve only had one person break down in my department mentally in my near-20 years of teaching here. I know of a few others in other departments, but frankly some of us want the heavy teaching — less research positions. They’re better than “good” to us. As a department head, I get lots of release time, but the best part of my day is still when I get the hell out of this office and into a classroom.

Oh, and we’re St. Cloud State, forgive my pedantry.