Comments on: Academic Placement

By: mugu

mugu — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 12:10:10 +0000

very good

By: kb

kb — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 22:17:10 +0000

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.

By: Michael Tinkler

Michael Tinkler — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 17:18:33 +0000

I wonder if the self-reporting standards in philosophy departments are slightly higher BECAUSE of the Philosophical Gourmet Report. I have found no similar ranking of any consequence in either history or art history (the two disciplinary groups I’m familiar with). In terms of my scepticism about self-reporting, though, I know that I have never been contacted about my current placement by either my graduate school or my department. I know that there are people who keep up with me – but I also know that they don’t keep up with everyone because they’re always surprised when I mention other folks’ current employment.

By: Brian Leiter

Brian Leiter — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 15:58:57 +0000

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.)

By: Ssuma

Ssuma — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 14:42:16 +0000

4/4 refers to the teaching load. 4 course a semester. It works as shorthand for the goodness of a job not only because 4/4 is a lot of work (I have it now) but also because other things tend to be in line with it. At a 2/2 job you get (usually) more travel/research money, better students, bigger offices, deans who are actual academics, etc. 4/4 means you don’t get all that good stuff and you have to write frequent memos justifying your consumption of office supplies. Like one of the posters above, I am pretty happy here, but there is a reason that 2/2 is considered good and 4/4 is not.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 12:12:36 +0000

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.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 07:46:57 +0000

Could I add my voice to the growing clamour asking what a 4/4 load is?

By: Brandonimac

Brandonimac — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 08:47:41 +0000

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.

By: Ruth Feingold

Ruth Feingold — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 04:21:14 +0000

“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…” (Brian) Yeah—I once interviewed for a job that advertised “4 courses per term”—and only belatedly did I discover that they were on a quarter system, and faculty were expected to teach 12 courses a year… By the by, I’m not trying to discredit Brian’s work on job availability—I’m just very aware of the fact that large numbers of my friends (from an English department generally ranked in the top 5 nationally) didn’t get tenure-track positions, and said department wasn’t very good at acknowledging their existence. English may be very different from Philosophy; my experience may be too particular; I may still be suffering from shell shock. I just went in to grad school basically believing more or less this assertion: “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” (Fritz Warfield), and for me and my cohort (mid-late ‘90s), it absolutely wasn’t true. Please pardon the extradisciplinary tangent…

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 01:07:32 +0000

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.

By: ben wolfson

ben wolfson — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 00:35:16 +0000

Just one question from a possible philosophy grad student—what do the 2/2, 3/3, 4/4 numbers tossed around for course load mean?

By: Ruth Feingold

Ruth Feingold — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 23:54:33 +0000

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.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 22:52:29 +0000

Before the praise starts in earnest a few points should be noted. 1. I was probably frequently wrong about what would have counted as 3/3 or better. For instance, I imagine I would have counted St Clair State as good when I was running through the list, and as kb said it’s 4/4 not 3/3. (I don’t know if it was listed anywhere, but I would have misclassified it had it come up. There’s an obvious conclusion to be drawn here about my ignorance about academic life.) The only places where I was really uncertain about lots of cases were Arizona and (to a lesser extent) Notre Dame. So the numbers listed are probably a better measure of ratio of people that end up in 4/4 or better jobs. Still, I’d be very confident that 3/3 or better still included half the grads at all of these schools save Texas, much as Fritz said. (So in answer to kb’s question, I don’t really know how many schools would have counted as ‘good’ by the classification I (tacitly) used, but it’s at least several hundreds.) Caveat to that caveat: Note that this is another sense in which the classification ‘good’ here is meant to be quite demanding. The alternative to good isn’t taxi driving – it’s still often a job that a lot of people are quite happy with and value quite highly, and that a lot more people would happily trade for. 2. Many of the people that got good jobs, and even several of the people that got great jobs, went through a few rounds of getting short term positions before moving on and up. That need not be a lot of fun, though in my case it was really quite a luxury to have a reason to have a second crack at the job market. But I don’t want to create the impression that average grads from top schools will walk into 2/2 tenure-track jobs straight away. Even superstars can cycle through the job market a few times. 3. I didn’t mean to suggest that outside the top 15 things get awful. The primary reason I stopped is that I ran out of data. But I don’t think we really could get particularly useful data from schools further down the list. The differences within departments between the quality of various supervisors, and of various students, will start to overshadow everything. I suspect that if we had the data we’d see many more results like Yale’s, where some people get great jobs straight away and some people move onto the long-term adjunct track. Still, it would be nice to have the data, and it’s to the credit of the schools that have published it that they’ve done so. I do think it’s “Enter at Own Risk” for any grad program outside the top 20, but that doesn’t mean no one can do well. Where I went to grad school isn’t even a top 30 equivalent, and I did OK out of it. But you need a few things to go right, not all of which are in your control. It would be nice to have the numbers to get a better sense of exactly how much luck is required. 4. I’m still stunned at how good the Harvard numbers are. I thought it would be well behind MIT, Princeton and Michigan, but it’s actually better than all of them. I guess that’s just a reflection of the reputation of the various schools in Australia. I was also impressed by the Rutgers numbers. I thought it had been underperforming in the job market given the quality of its faculty and students, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. 5. My bar bills at conferences can be very high – I wouldn’t go promising to cover one without checking current mortgage rates.

By: Fritz Warfield

Fritz Warfield — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 21:58:23 +0000

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?

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 14:11:18 +0000

Ah, looking again, Cornell (like Brown) doesn’t list people who got no job. That’s something you’ll want to know of course. Oops. Time to press for a full and fair accounting.