Brian Leiter has a “nice response”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001241.html#001241 to an article in the _Village Voice_ on “the job market in the humanities”:http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0417/kamenetz.php. I mostly agree with Brian’s points, though I have one or two nits to pick.
First though one point Brian is too modest to mention. We know a lot about departments, especially top departments, have done recently on the job market. And in large part this is because of the pressure Brian brought to bear on them to release data on their recent successes (or otherwise) at placing grads in jobs. This is really valuable information for prospective graduate students to have, and Brian deserves thanks I think for getting it out in the open.
OK, onto the criticisms. I’m not sure Brian is right that philosophy is typical. I suspect philosophy graduate students might be better off than English or history grad students when it comes to the job market. At the very least, the anecdotes from other disciplines sound worse than ours. More data from more disciplines on completion rates and placement rates would be good.
I would also heavily qualify Brian’s assertion that “one’s [job] prospects are directly a function of the quality of the graduate program you are enrolled in.” I think that’s somewhat _true_, but misleading, especially when it is taken as a reason to choose one graduate school over another. It’s true that a higher percentage of graduates from better schools end up with jobs, especially good jobs. But there’s some reason to doubt that means it is important for prospective students to go to those departments if they want to be employed.
For one thing, as Richard Heck notes in the comments “here”:http://tar.weatherson.net/archives/000576.html, differences in perceived quality of philosophy programs, at least at the top, don’t make a _huge_ difference to placement rates.
Second, even if grad schools had no effect on how frequently their graduates got jobs, you’d expect a correlation between grad school quality and placement rates. That’s because better schools have a larger choice of incoming graduate students, and the qualities we’re looking for in incoming graduate students are often the same qualities departments are looking for when hiring. In other worse, as far as the data shows, Princeton’s success rates may be largely due to good recruiting not good training. This isn’t to say the data suggests at all this is true, it just suggests that the null hypothesis, that all good departments do equally well in preparing their graduates for the job market, is not refuted by the differential placement rates, because they are a non-random sample.
My gut feeling is that at some stage as you go down the ‘perceived quality rankings’, the quality of the school starts to seriously tell against the graduates looking for work. I don’t know quite when that happens – maybe once you’re outside the top 20, probably once you’re outside the top 30. But to really check we’d need examples of students who could have got into Princeton or Michigan but turned them down to go to a school outside the top 20 or 30, and see how well they did on the job market compared to their couldabeen classmates. I don’t think there’s enough data points to run such a study. There are examples though of philosophers who went to non-top-20 schools doing badly early in their careers and then doing very well later on, and I take those cases to be some evidence that going to a not-top-20 school hurts your initial job market prospects, though we’re really talking about a small sample here.
Having said all that, I agree wholeheartedly with Brian that the profession would be better off with fewer PhD programs and more terminal MA programs of the quality of those offered by Tufts, Arizona State, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and their peers. 110 PhD programs in American does seem too many to me, and I shudder to think what the placement record of some of those schools must be. As Brian says, the trend of dropping good MA programs in favour of yet more PhD programs is really regrettable. It’s hard to see how this benefits students, the profession, or even the schools making the change.
{ 45 comments }
harry 05.17.04 at 10:54 pm
Good schools have tiny, tiny, graduating classes. Are the differences in placement statistically significant? I always suspect that people read much more into such information than is warranted.
harry 05.17.04 at 10:54 pm
Good schools have tiny, tiny, graduating classes. Are the differences in placement statistically significant? I always suspect that people read much more into such information than is warranted.
Jesse R. 05.17.04 at 11:00 pm
As an labor economist–labor market returns to education are a central topic of research in the field, though not of my own research to date–I was very interested to see this post.
You may be pleased to know that with “But to really check we’d need examples of students who could have got into Princeton or Michigan but turned them down to go to a school outside the top 20 or 30, and see how well they did on the job market compared to their couldabeen classmates” you’ve proposed the state-of-the-art approach to estimating the returns to (undergraduate) college quality. If you care, take a look at Krueger and Dale, “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (4), Nov. 2002.
The strategy isn’t entirely perfect–perhaps people who turn down top departments are systematically different than those who enroll–but it is pretty clearly preferable to any alternatives that have been proposed.
chun the unavoidable 05.17.04 at 11:23 pm
Leiter is off about a couple of things here: the public information about IA states that she was trained at a “top ten” department and was a finalist at quite prestigious job early on.
If most PhD programs were shut down, there would no longer be as many faculty hires, as teaching loads would increase, and the graduates of the remaining programs would not fare as well on the market.
chun the unavoidable 05.17.04 at 11:26 pm
Furthermore, no one has of yet mentioned the truly unpardonable sin about the article in question: I was interviewed for it and am not quoted at all.
Clearly a journalist thus so lacking in judgment is not going to be able to do justice to the complexity of the subject.
Matt Weiner 05.17.04 at 11:37 pm
If most PhD programs were shut down, there would no longer be as many faculty hires, as teaching loads would increase, and the graduates of the remaining programs would not fare as well on the market.
How, exactly? Is it that deans would increase teaching loads in programs that don’t have PhDs?
Since Leiter is contemplating turning PhD programs into terminal MA programs, one of the interesting questions is how teaching loads at schools with terminal MAs compare to teaching loads at schools with PhDs. Of course, that might not stay the same if a discipline started turning PhD programs into MA programs across the board, but I don’t know what the change might be.
Chris Bertram 05.17.04 at 11:59 pm
If most PhD programs were shut down…
the remaining jobs would not be so attractive for the graduates of the top programs since I assume that those people value teaching in places with an active research culture.
One thing I did notice. Leiter writes
The simple fact is we know nothing about the Invisible Adjunct’s actual job qualifications: where she got her degree, the quality of her scholarly work, who her references are, what they think about her work, etc.
Suppose IA’s scholarly work were of the very highest quality, but, for whatever reason, she scored poorly on the other measures. What would be her chances? Slim, I guess.
Matt Weiner 05.18.04 at 12:13 am
If most PhD programs were shut down…
the remaining jobs would not be so attractive for the graduates of the top programs since I assume that those people value teaching in places with an active research culture.
But the proposal isn’t just fewer PhD programs, it’s fewer PhD programs and more MA programs. I don’t think that switching from a PhD program to a top-flight MA program would wipe out the active research culture. There will still be a chance to teach stuff related to your research, I think.
Dominic Murphy 05.18.04 at 12:32 am
“If most PhD programs were shut down…
the remaining jobs would not be so attractive for the graduates of the top programs since I assume that those people value teaching in places with an active research culture.”
Not only can you have an active research culture without a PhD program (or indeed without any grad students at all), but if people think your PhD program is a poor one, you might become more attractive to jobseekers if you shut it down. There are plenty of people who think that weak grad students contribute very little to the research culture and suck up a lot of time in teaching and placement effort that could be employed more profitably doing something else. (I know people who have left departments and cited the poor quality of the grad students as a reason.) I’m sure there are good grad students everywhere, but some programs are a lot more enticing than others.
a tenured professor 05.18.04 at 1:02 am
When we hire for a tenure track position we usually get over 300 applicants, most with glowing letters of recommendation and, these days, publications and professional activities on their vitae. In such circumstances the job market becomes a crap shoot–we latch onto candidates from name programs or those who have subspecialties that pique our interest.
I wouldn’t advise anyone to go for a PhD in my field. I got the academic plum after years of insecurity, pain and fighting down to the mat and I sure like it. But I think I would be equally happy as a dentist, veternarian or computer technician.
Even apart from humanities PhDs there is a plethora of Smart People Who Can’t Do Math pumped out by undergraduate programs that make a fuss about the value of a liberal education, promote critical thinking and cultural literacy rather than technical skills and disparage “narrowly vocational” interests. Riding the academic gravy train we can afford to engage in liberal pursuits and self-cultivation but pity the poor undergraduate who swallows this pious poop and organizes her academic program accordingly.
Try applying for a job with an undergraduate philosophy major in the Real World where in spite of what WE know about the value of clarity and critical thinking individuals responsible for hiring believe that philosophy is either profound or flakey and in any case useless. In addition putting a lid on the production of humanities PhDs we should be honest with students considering undergraduate humanities majors.
chun the unavoidable 05.18.04 at 1:15 am
A PhD program is the world’s only justification for the 2/2 load. Go to 4/4 or 4/3, and hiring goes down.
The “shut down unsuccessful programs” idea has gotten a lot of attention in English circles, but no one will admit to being in an unsuccessful program (and if someone did, what would be the cutoff–you, University of Caraway Fields, you rank only 76 and must close, whereas I, University of Pinkerton State, hold the statistically meaningless yet precious #75?); and you’ll look pretty hard for a professor at a PhD program who’ll agree to something that will increase his [check] teaching load and decrease his [ditto] professional standing.
As was mentioned, the situation is much better in philosophy because of Leiter’s rankings. It’s very easy to see the placement records in most programs, and I think that has to be almost entirely attributable to pressure from the Leiter report, as you’ll look a long time for similar information in most other humanities departments.
Most of us from programs in the 30-50 range tend to be resentful of rankings, I think, and at first I thought the Heck arguments made a lot of sense (though would have been more rhetorically effective from a professor at a school not in the top 50, at least to me). I now think that a Leiter report for every discipline in the humanities would be a great thing, though English and history are far too large and diverse for it ever to happen.
Brian Weatherson 05.18.04 at 1:51 am
A PhD program is the world’s only justification for the 2/2 load. Go to 4/4 or 4/3, and hiring goes down.
I’m pretty sure the load at CalTech, Dartmouth and Tufts is 2/2 (or less in some cases) and I’ve always assumed the load was similar at Arizona State, Vermont, Milwaukee and other top schools without PhD programs. As Dominic suggests, those programs also have very active research programs, so it isn’t essential to the research life of a department that there be grad students around to help.
q 05.18.04 at 4:12 am
Programs: On any scale, most people in this world are average or below average. If you don’t like the program you can always get out. Philosophy students are doing the programs out of choice, and possible disappointment is not something that one can remove. International competitions and rankings could be constructed in order to provide a ranking that would make it clear to the students where the groundbreaking stuff was happening.
Tenure: Personally, I would like to see academic tenure abolished, with teaching jobs allocated on 3, 4 or 5-year contracts instead, and research to be considered separately through separate funding.
Publication: There are far too many publications, and each phrase is repeated many times over.
Research ratings need to be changed to emphasis quality and precision over quantity. Academics should be judged on their best work over the previous 25 years. In one discipline, the best academic I know of has done no publicly rated research since before 1991.
Teaching: Some of the most respected philosophers are useless as teachers. These people need to apply for research money only. Teaching posts should require training. As research and teaching do benefit each other then many current academics should apply for both types of contracts.
Chris Bertram 05.18.04 at 8:44 am
On any scale, most people in this world are average or below average.
Not if “average” means mean. As Jo Wolff once pointed out to me, most people (in fact nearly all people) have an above average number of legs. And so for many other attributes ….
jdsm 05.18.04 at 11:55 am
I think it would be very interesting to compare the situation in the US and Britain with that across much of Europe. My feeling is that we have it easier in mainland Europe. Firstly, most programmes are five year undergraduate programmes anyway and include a Masters thesis, so you’re far better prepared to know whether you’ve got what it takes to do a Phd and those hiring also have a better idea. A Masters thesis is a not inconsiderable piece of work and says more about your abilities than any number of letters of recommendation and GMAT scores.
In Finland at least you then have to go on and do a licentiate before they decide whether to let you do a Phd, so the average age of people with a Phd is 135. If you and everyone around you doesn’t know what you’re made of by then you’re in big trouble. After that, of course, it’s easier to find a job in Europe than the US or Britain and you’re not likely to get fired. If you do some good work you’ll end up with offers from the US anyway.
It’s cheap too!
Ted H. 05.18.04 at 1:56 pm
On teaching loads:
The load is 2-2 at most terminal-MA departments (including my own, UW-Milwaukee) and at many liberal arts colleges (e.g. Pomona and Bowdoin). At many other liberal arts colleges the load is a light 3-2 (e.g. Claremont McKenna, Kenyon), where even in your three-course term you teach fewer than fifty students.
Also: many of these liberal arts colleges have an active research culture (as I can testify first-hand). Most terminal-MA departments have a very active research culture.
Chris Bertram 05.18.04 at 3:14 pm
As someone who has never taught in the US, I’m afraid I’m ignorant of what 4-4, 3-2 etc mean. I’m probably not the only one. Can some commenter please post a brief explanation.
aeon skoble 05.18.04 at 3:34 pm
4-4 means 4 courses per semester, 3-2 means three in the fall and 2 in the spring, etc. The small number of high profile programs with 2-2 (or less!) loads create the impression that the job is on the whole cushier than it is. Here in State College Land, it’s usually a 4-4 load.
q 05.18.04 at 3:45 pm
What does the State College Land 4-4 load translate to in practice in terms of number of students/student hours/hours?
aeon skoble 05.18.04 at 3:54 pm
It’s funny, I often find myself disagreeing with the Leiter blog, but leave it to the Village Voice to run something so silly that Leiter’s entirely-justified criticisms of it produce vehement agreement on my part. I am a latecomer to the “Invisible Adjunct” saga, but the Voice article makes her out to be a Tragic Victim on the grounds that she had to adjunct for a whole 2 years. Well, sorry, I guess I’ve seen so many people who stuck it out a bit longer, and then got tenure-track jobs, that I can’t weep too much for IA. Leiter is exactly right in this post. And yes, can we all please stop referring to the “4 months off”? I don’t know a single academic who takes the entire 4 months as pure vacation time.
While I was previwing, I see someone has asked me to clarify something from my earlier post:
“What does the State College Land 4-4 load translate to in practice in terms of number of students/student hours/hours?”
I’m sure this varies a bit from school to school, but I suspect my own experience is essentially typical: we do three intro-level courses and one upper-level elective per semester. The intros are capped at 40 (they might reduced next year, but at previous jobs, these do tend to be 30 or so), and the elective can have anything from 10 to 25. So, well over a hundred students per semester, no TAs.
harry 05.18.04 at 4:38 pm
To add to that: each course meets for 2 1/2-3 hours a week, typically with a mix of lecture and discussion. No TAs means that the prof does all the grading him/her self. Prof typically has much more control over the content of the course than you do over yours Chris. I’d say, to be honest, that the typical academic in a good UK university teaches the equivalent of a 3 or possibly 4 course load; though your terms are shorter (3 10 week terms rather than 2 16 week semesters) and your vacation schedule is less absurd (though, I know, you don’t actually get any real vacation, but at least its time off teaching).
Joshua W. Burton 05.18.04 at 4:42 pm
Brian writes:
_For what this statement, indeed the whole article, indeed almost all discussions of these topics omit is that one’s prospects are directly a function of the quality of the graduate program you are enrolled in._
Here’s some interesting (if rather anecdotal) data from a highly competitive field outside the humanities.
http://physics.wm.edu/~calvin/whereRthey.html
“Who hires theoretical physicists? Theoretical employers!”
As the last of eight Berkeley particle physics PhD’s my year to leave academia (three postdocs, one lecturership, seven years), I honestly have no complaints. Brainwork of research caliber is a live-neuron sport anyway; the real challenge is getting students to the research frontier in time to enjoy a few intellectually productive years before age 30. Tenure, at least in physics, is a benefice (in the traditional sense: a “living” and a pulpit) conferred in retrospective appreciation.
To put it another way, grad school and postdoctoral work is the football career. Most NFL players, even most Superbowl quarterbacks, don’t become network sports announcers in later life; they go into politics, or open steak restaurants. And so what? They still got to spend the most exciting years of their lives doing the most exciting thing they could imagine. And they can still wangle sideline seats through old friends now and then, and keep up with the journals.
h. e. baber 05.18.04 at 8:37 pm
With no graduate program, we have a de jure 4-3 load, soon 3-3, and de facto already 3-3 since almost everyone gets release time on some pretext or other. However what is important is that because we do lots of multi-section courses we can get by with only 1 or 2 preps for the entire year and, arguably, the number of preps are more significant than the number of classes . We’re also expected to do research, get publications and be professionally active–and we get very good travel money.
We’ve considered starting an MA program on and off but my cynical view is why bother?
aeon skoble 05.18.04 at 9:26 pm
“we can get by with only 1 or 2 preps for the entire year and, arguably, the number of preps are more significant than the number of classes”
I beg to differ. The significance of “number of preps” dwindles as one gets more experienced – but the time it takes to grade papers remains constant. If I have 120 students, and assign even 2 three-page papers, well, you do the math. I wouldn’t object to having all 4 classes be different preps in exchange for them being capped at 15 students per. It’s number of students that determines total workload, to a much more significant extent than preps (although I grant that that isn’t entirely meaningless).
aeon skoble 05.18.04 at 9:31 pm
The anonymous q says “Personally, I would like to see academic tenure abolished.” See the thread on tenure and academic freedom on Critical Mass here:
http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/000926.html
Read Erin’s original blog and then the lengthy discussion in comments.
h. e. baber 05.18.04 at 9:51 pm
If I teach 6 sections of baby logic a year and don’t assign any papers my teaching load is truly minimal–even if I teach 180 students.
wolfangel 05.18.04 at 10:12 pm
I think the Village Voice article is incorrect in the number of years IA has been adjuncting. IA got her PhD in 1999 — and the Boston Globe article said she’d been adjuncting for 5 years, which seems likely.
The NFL analogy is interesting, except it pays (far) better than grad school. Yes, graduate school is fun and interesting, and an experience you are unlikely to get anywhere else — but do most students go into it with the idea that it’s like a football career, and at the end of 5 to 7 years they’ll have to find a new career field? Do most faculty advise that this is what it’s like (in fields other than philosophy)?
aeon skoble 05.19.04 at 12:00 pm
“If I teach 6 sections of baby logic a year and don’t assign any papers my teaching load is truly minimal—even if I teach 180 students.”
Sure, that’s true, but it’s _only_ true w.r.t. logic, not to other phil courses. I’m not disputing that some courses don’t require as much grading time as others; my point was that grading time is a more relevant statistic than number of preps when determining workload. OTOH, teaching 6 sections of logic is really only easier than intro if you’re good at it. I know some people for whom 6 sections of logic would be a real headache, never mind the lack of papers.
If IA spent 5 years adjucting not 2, then she does have a more real complaint. But is it the case, as I read on another blog, that she was geographically limited in her job search to NYC? If so, then again, bust out the violins. Lots of us don’t get tenure-track jobs in exactly the place we’d love to live. That someone couldn’t find a job IN NEW YORK after 5 years adjuncting is hardly an indictment of the system.
wolfangel 05.19.04 at 2:47 pm
No, she wasn’t geographically limited. (Well, I don’t think she was going to move for an adjunct position.) Her husband was mobile and willing to move, should she find a permanent position.
aeon skoble 05.19.04 at 3:20 pm
Ok, then maybe she has a case. As I said, I don’t know the specifics of her case. OTOH, since she is anonymous, how are we supposed to judge her merit? That being said, it’s surely true that plenty of good candidates don’t get jobs. As I argued at length on Critical Mass, though, that’s not the fault of the tenure system.
Rana 05.19.04 at 6:28 pm
OTOH, since she is anonymous, how are we supposed to judge her merit?
Exactly. We’re not.
As one of her friends, I have to say I’m getting a bit tired of the attempts to do so.
Chris 05.19.04 at 7:15 pm
I’d like to echo Rana’s remark.
Also as one of IA’s friends, I’d like to point out that what seems to be forgotten is that IA is in fact someone, a person. One common feature shared by the various discussions of her and her blog is that they all have the ring of that de-humanized, bloodless way in which hiring commitees discuss the relative qualities of the various applicants for a given position. ‘She’s this’, ‘she’s not that’, ‘but do we know if she can be this’, ‘she said that’ ‘but what has she published’ etc.
It would be ironic … were it not so F’d up.
Move on people, talk about SOMEONE else.
wolfangel 05.19.04 at 7:49 pm
The problem is that IA has become the face of the job market. If her story is such that it was her fault she didn’t get a job (gave up too early! wasn’t willing to relocate! wasn’t good enough scholarship!) then the problem is after all not in the way academia is working but just one individual who’s bitter, but really just wasn’t up to our standards, you know. And then we can all move on, safe and secure in knowing that it works just like it should, all on merit.
I know *I* feel better now.
Brian Weatherson 05.19.04 at 8:43 pm
I agree the discussion of IA’s particular case has got out of hand. But I would like to put in a plug for dehumanized, bloodless hiring committee decisions.
My impression is that the more the hiring committee sticks to those ‘bloodless’ considerations, the less likely they are to just end up hiring one of their friend’s, or a student of one of their friend’s. After all, you don’t have personal information about every one of the candidates, and most people are nice people, so if you stress niceness you’ll be in effect giveing an advantage to those you have more information about. And if anything’s going to keep the existing networks and hierarchies intact, it’s that kind of advantage to the well connected.
Rana 05.19.04 at 8:58 pm
Brian, that’s a good point. Unfortunately, the “bloodless hiring committee discussion” analogy breaks down here, since this is a public forum (as are the other blog comment threads), and one which IA visits and used to participate in. These comments are not going on behind closed doors nor is the end goal hiring a candidate. Gossiping around a watercooler would be a better analogy.
Chris 05.19.04 at 10:58 pm
Two things: 1. sadly, in my experience, hiring committee decisions often do go public and become a form of watercooler gossip; 2. Brian, in reference to English and Hsitory, I think your belief in the “old boy” networks, and their effectiveness is overstated. In these fields having the “plum” advisor is barely an advantage these days. Philosophy, though, may well be another matter.
dave 05.20.04 at 12:10 am
Chris, this runs directly counter to my own experience in a top history program…Although I bailed out long before I would have gone on the market, during my time there I knew of numerous instances in which behind-the-scenes lobbying by an advisor played a decisive role in securing a position for a candidate. Its funny, many members of my cohort are finishing up this year, and I occasionally google their names to see if and where people get hired. The ones getting the good jobs without exception have advisors who have cozy relationships with the hiring departments.
Chris wrote:
In these fields having the “plum†advisor is barely an advantage these days.
Chris 05.20.04 at 4:40 am
Dave — I’m sure this sort of thing goes on, but at the same time the utter glut of candidates applying for positions may be undermining the ability of advisors to effectively lobby on behalf of students.
Still, I have no data to appeal to, and am only going on things I’ve heard/seen.
JohnWendt 05.20.04 at 5:04 pm
From A Tenured Professor:
“Even apart from humanities PhDs there is a plethora of Smart People Who Can’t Do Math pumped out by undergraduate programs that make a fuss about the value of a liberal education, promote “critical thinking and cultural literacy rather than technical skills and disparage “narrowly vocational†interests. …
“Try applying for a job with an undergraduate philosophy major in the Real World…”
Young woman of my acquaintance graduated with an AB in philosophy a few years ago. At job interviews they asked things like “Do you know Quark?” Since she didn’t even know what it is, she wound up as an advertising coordinator at a small, special-audience magazine.
aeon skoble 05.20.04 at 6:52 pm
“Try applying for a job with an undergraduate philosophy major in the Real World…”
Do I really have to explain how foolish a prejudice that is? Most jobs require skills in critical reasoning, close reading, formulating and responding to arguments, having and giving reasons, rigorous yet creative problem solving – all skills that are required by a major in philosophy (and, to be fair, other liberal arts majors). Survey after survey of Fortune 500 recruiters reveal a marked preference for the liberal arts major. Philosophy majors outperform business majors on the GMAT, and all majors on the LSAT.
DJW 05.20.04 at 8:58 pm
When I teach political theory for political science departments, I attract a few philosophy majors. They are pretty sharp, in general, but where they really outshine the poli sci majors is their reading skills–their ability to do a close, careful, analytical reading is generally well beyond that of other majors. If I were hiring for a job that required a college degree but no particular disciplinary focus, I’d be pretty keen on Philosophy majors.
Chris 05.20.04 at 9:14 pm
It may well be a “foolish prejudice,” in fact it most surely is a foolish prejudice. But at the same time, at least in the U.S., it is a pervasive and virtually insurmountable one. And the wall one has to leap over gets even higher with each passing degree.
My experience is that the Ph.D. is in no way an asset when it comes to non-academic jobs; rather, it is an imepdiment, something each applicant must somehow overcome to even be considered for a non-academic position.
As for a B.A. in philosophy, I’m sure it’s as fine as anyother degree for an entry level job. The irony, though, is that when a Ph.D. goes up against a B.A. for an entry level job, the B.A. will likely win over the Ph.D.
aeon skoble 05.21.04 at 2:29 am
“My experience is that the Ph.D. is in no way an asset when it comes to non-academic jobs; rather, it is an imepdiment, something each applicant must somehow overcome to even be considered for a non-academic position.”
I’m sure that’s true – but for all PhDs, not just in Philosophy.
“As for a B.A. in philosophy, I’m sure it’s as fine as anyother degree for an entry level job. The irony, though, is that when a Ph.D. goes up against a B.A. for an entry level job, the B.A. will likely win over the Ph.D.”
Sure, no argument there – the PhD will have to deal with concerns about being overqualified. My point was only regarding the value of a BA in Philosophy — or any of the traditional liberal arts, including Mathematics – if you were applying for a job at a bank, or on a management team for a national retail chain, or selling ad space, I can’t imagine it would make a bit of difference whether you spent senior year reading Aeschylus, doing topography studies and linear algebra, or studying Kripke.
David Tiley 05.21.04 at 10:46 am
There is an over-arching truth, though, about all of these positions.
If you want to be an accountant (say) or a marketing executive or an engineer, or even a child-care worker or a doctor, then you will get a job and practice your craft for a lifetime, unless something personal gets in the way. So you can stand in any third year class in these mainstream disciplines and know that most people will end up as the aforementioned accountants etc.
If you are a philosopher, a historian or an English academic, you have to be absolutely at the top of what you do to get a job.
And I think that’s really sad.
one 05.24.04 at 12:51 am
“so the average age of people with a Phd is 135”
yikes!!!!
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