Will the Financial Crisis Affect PhD Admissions?

A student writes:

I am a Ph.D. student at [an unranked PhD program], currently applying to transfer to a top program (11 of the best ethics programs, according to PGR and my own interests).  I, as well as others on the application front, have started to wonder whether the economy is likely to affect admissions this year.  My own institution is hurting badly enough to start talking about admitting fewer graduate students in some programs (I don’t know if ours is one of them), and this began to make me nervous.  Is it possible that my timing will add yet one more element of luck into the admissions game?  Do you have any sense of whether programs in general, but top programs in particular, have talked about admitting fewer students this year?

I don’t know if this is something faculty are talking/blogging/gossiping about, but if you have any information, I would be very interested to hear it.

It would be useful to hear reports from others on this.  Clearly the financial crisis is affecting hiring, but it seems to me it could go either way with admissions:  programs may cut back either because they get less fellowship/TA money and/or because more of their existing money has to be used to support current students who don't get jobs this year; or programs may keep admissions steady because they will need more 'cheap' graduate labor to do the teaching that needs to be done, and for which departments don't have money to make new full-time hires.  My guess is the first scenario is the more likely one, but the second one may be applicable, especially at state universities which often depend more on graduate student TAs.

Thoughts, predictions, reports from others?

Comments

[Sandy Goldberg]

At Northwestern we actually got good news: the Dean of the Graduate School has increased the number of TA lines in the Philosophy Department this year. Since this increase did not affect our plan to hire three new faculty members this year, I doubt the increase was for want of cheap teaching.

[Jon Lawhead]

I'm a PhD student at a top-10 PGR school. I obviously can't comment on your chances broadly, but I can share what my own institution is doing (or at least what they've told us they're doing). We're planning to attempt to keep admissions relatively constant, but the amount of aid given upon admission will likely be cut back; this will likely come in the form of a reduction in the living stipend rather than a reduction in tuition remission, though, so the slack can definitely be made up through external fellowships. More broadly, we're also cutting back on "extra" funding that's often available to graduate students--e.g. to cover the cost of attending the APA or another conference--but that's unlikely to affect you as a prospective student. As I said, I can't speak for the industry as a whole, but I've gotten the impression here that admissions will not be made particularly more stringent; just be prepared to potentially have even less money than you do now.

[Daniel]

As a first-year PhD student, I have felt lucky to have been admitted prior to the economic crisis, but for a different reason. With the number of people losing their jobs, the prospect of five or more years in a graduate program while the economy sorts itself out might have suddenly become very attractive to a lot of people who were making good money a year ago. So it stands to reason that the applicant pool will be larger and more competitive than normal.

[Anonymous]

I am a student at a top-10 PGR school. In conversations with the chair of our department it has been made clear that the economic situation is impacting both the funding of current graduate students and the plans for admitting students in the incoming class. I have been told that rather than reduce funding for incoming graduate students there will be a drop in the number of students accepted. We usually accept 7-10 with hopes of enrolling 5. It seems likely that this year we will accept fewer and hope to enroll 3.

[Matthew Smith]

It seems irresponsible to continue to admit graduate students at the same rate as prior to the economic crisis. In fact, if the perception that there are always far more job seekers than there are available jobs is correct, then an admission rate - economic crisis or not - that guarantees that this will continue is deeply irresponsible. For one thing, by creating a giant reserve army of PhDs who will take teaching jobs with low pay and even worse benefits simply to stay in the game, we ensure that there will always be some incentive for hiring, to fulfill teaching duties, adjuncts and non-tenure-stream professors. Creating an incentive for an obviously unjust arrangement is pretty objectionable, especially if as a matter of efficiency, there is not much against cutting back on the number of grad admissions and putting those savings towards hiring tenure-stream assistant professors.

For example, suppose that the cost of two graduate students equaled the cost of one assistant professor. Since assistant professors typically teach twice as many classes as graduate students, then it would be worthwhile to cut the number of graduate students admitted by some program by two and then hire one assistant professor. These numbers are, of course, made up and simplified, but I imagine that they reflect something like reality in at least some universities. (Additionally, there is a question of accounting: do we take tuition waivers as a cost to the university in the same category as salary? I think not but I imagine others think so.)

This is not to say that currently admitted grad students should be cut from the rolls. The point here is that we should, in the future, strive to adopt a policy of reducing the number of graduate students admitted to philosophy PhD programs (at least until the job-seekers/jobs-offered ratio becomes a little more attractive). Of course, there are some exceptions: for programs like NYU which consistently place all or almost all of their grad students at tenure-track jobs, there may be no reason to cut back on admitted students. But, at programs where PhDs often do not get tenure-track jobs, it is, I think, irresponsible to admit so many grad students. I suspect that this will anger a great many people. I am sorry if it does as it is not my intention to offend (even though I bet I, as usual, will). I am merely reacting to the fact that I know many disappointed PhDs - very smart people who worked very diligently for five or six years with the expectation that they would land a permanent job one day - who were faced, at best, with the unpleasant choice of either completely molding their lives to the exigencies of the job market (a one-year here and then a one-year there, and finally teaching somewhere that is far away from friends and family), or giving up and, embittered, moving on to a new profession.

One might respond here by saying that everyone goes into this with eyes wide open since placement info is usually available. But, first, placement info usually *isn't* available: how many programs list the job-seekers/hired ratio for each year? That would be valuable information. For, the information that each year at some program one person out gets a decent TT job is effectively useless for gauging the success of a grad program if we do not know how many job-seekers from that program did NOT get a decent TT job that year.

Second, it does seem to me that *simply by admitting someone as a PhD student*, we send an optimistic message to that person. Why would we admit someone if we thought that it was unlikely that they were going to get a decent TT job? Admitting someone to a grad program effectively sends a signal to him/her that the faculty believes he/she has a better than bad chance of getting a permanent job once he/she completes a PhD.

But all of this rests on what the ratio is between job-seekers and jobs-offered, i.e., how many graduate students and non-tenure-track PhDs in philosophy are seeking a job each year vs. how many jobs will be offered to these people that year. It may be the case that the perception that this ratio is miserable is a *misperception* and that, all in all, most people who seek TT jobs get them. If so, then I guess everything I've said is bunk. Oh well - that's not the first time that's happened.

Since I am talking about data, here's another question I have: how has the job-seeker/job-offered ratio fluctuated over the past few years? It would be interesting also to determine at what rate people abandon the job search: out of all the job-seekers, what percentage abandon the job search without getting a job after 1 year? After 3 years? After 5 years? Does anyone know if there is data on any of this out there?

[Peter Vallentyne]

At the University of Missouri-Columbia, there is a hiring freeze for faculty and staff, but our TA funding is not affected. We expect to admit the usual number of students with usual funding. There is some chance that we will admit more than usual because of the need to provide teaching on the cheap, given the hiring freeze.

[Jon Cogburn]

Hasn't Mathew Smith's overall point been true for the last twenty-five years? I think that the economic incentives to graduate student labor probably mean the problem is something that will always be with us. This doesn't mean we should perfume our heads (and/or feet, depending on the Gospel) though. And part of the solution is for incoming graduate students to be given the most accurate information available (this is one of the reasons that philosophy is extraordinarily lucky to have PGR). Probably the other solution is for programs with bad placement to be strongly encouraged to be serious about training students to be competitive in alternate career paths, even to the point of policies like Texas A & M forcing all Philosophy PhDs to get MAs in other fields.

In regard to what information that is available, Smith's concluding point is something I want to second and amplify. The best information that prospective graduate students could have would be to know (in addition to the publicly available percentage of applying students get accepted into the program, as well as all of the stuff already in the Leiter Report): (1) what percentage of PhD students in a program actually get their PhDs within six years, and (2) what percentage of a program's PhDs have tenure track jobs within three years of graduating. The first one is absolutely essential, as a non-trivial number of schools have really good placement stats just because they weed out so many students. My subjective impression is that this is more common in mid to lower ranked Leiter schools that need lots of graduate student teaching. But even if there is such a correlation, prospective students deserve to be able to precisely compare the relevant statistics before deciding where to go.

One more point on statistics concerning overall job opportunities is that a lot of branch campus and community college jobs are never advertised in the JFP. If you really wanted stats on candidates versus jobs available you'd need to at the very least also account for the ones advertised in the Chronicle (and probably add some number to account for those advertised in neither). Also, the depressing mismatch between the number of folders in the APA placement room and the number of advertised jobs is a little misleading, because some non-trivial number of those with folders already have jobs and are trying to trade-up.

[Lisa Shapiro]

While I agree with Matthew Smith that we have a responsibility to be honest with our grad students and prospective grad students about their prospects for jobs in philosophy, it seems to me that his argument looks at the academic job market in isolation. Right now, more than in the past 25 yrs, there just are not a lot of jobs out there. Period. And a lot of graduating seniors have student loans. I predict that there will be a surge in applications to graduate schools across the board. If jobs are scarce, many will try to stay in school if they can, biding time, and avoiding paying back student loans. If I am right, admissions stand to get more competitive. Under these conditions, it doesn't seem altogether good policy to be curtailing admissions. Rather, one might see it as an opportunity to ensure that when the economy turns around, those people wanting to get back into the (non-academic) job market have a deeper and better education. There are worse things than bankers with Philosophy PhDs.

[Carl Seaquist]

I believe that your second alternative, that graduate student admissions will be bolstered by the need for cheap labor, rests on a misconception. As a graduate of two public universities (UWM and Pitt) I have periodically done back-of-the-envelope calculations that lead me to think that it is very hard for a school to make a profit by using graduate students as teachers -- and in any case, adjunct or non-TT labor is always cheaper. Consider, re: Matthew Smith's hypothetical example, the cost of labor at Pitt. Tuition for a grad student is currently $28,000 and the stipend for a teaching fellow (someone who enters with an MA) is $15,000, for a total of $43,000. The average lecturer at Pitt earns $42,000 acc. to the _Chronicle_, and the average assistant prof $68,000. But Pitt has a med school, a law school, and a business school, so figures for philosophers will no doubt be lower, and consequently a full-time hire is necessarily cheaper than relying on grad students, even when we assume the full-timer costs more in benefits. When I was a UWM, grad students needed to teach sections with total caps of 150 students, and UWM might have broken even at this rate on TAs, according to my calculation. At Pitt the number was 100, and at Penn it was 20-40. I'm sure both the latter schools lost money on me.

The only way grad students could save their universities money in the current climate is if fellowships with no service requirement are transformed into TAships. It would be interesting to hear if any schools are taking this approach to budget shortfalls.

[Michael]

Carl Seaquist: surely we can't just count the $28,000 tuition for a grad student as a cost to Pitt? It is not as if they are foregoing a tuition-paying grad student in admitting a non-tuition-paying grad student.

[Martin Lin]

Matthew, one reason to train more graduate students than there are jobs has nothing to do with the desire for cheap graduate student labor: it's impossible to tell which undergraduate seniors have the talents to be successful teachers and researchers. It's not even possible to tell which new PhD's have what it takes to be successful teachers and researchers. In order to produce one successful teacher and researcher, it is necessary to train several graduate students. It can be a cruel system, but no one participates in it against her will. There is a good story in this week's New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell that makes essentially the same point but with respect to NFL quarterbacks and primary school teachers.

[Matthew Smith]

Martin Lin makes an interesting line of argument. But, I am not sure that I can buy it. For, if we buy Martin's line of argument, then it should be a mystery why the most well-respected philosophers have generally come from and continue to come from certain departments (Princeton, NYU, Rutgers, Harvard, MIT, etc. - there are plenty of exceptions, I know, but not enough to render warrantless my generalization).

Have these departments that have produced the vast majority of 'stars' just been lucky over the years in admitting the best students? Or, can we actually tell which undergrads will likely be very good philosophers and the best departments use this information to admit and court these undergrads? Or, can we not tell which undergrads will likely be very good philosophers and the best departments are full of awesome teachers who can expertly shape the formless clay of recent college graduates' minds?

My guess is that it's something like this: we usually can tell who has the most potential and faculty at top departments are very good at realizing this potential.

My additional off-the-cuff guess is that almost everyone else (i.e., everyone who hasn't been tagged as a future star) who manages to graduate from a philosophy PhD program has roughly equal teaching and research abilities. As I wrote above, there probably is an elite few who are unusually brilliant researchers and/or teachers and these go to top departments and get many of the job offers. Furthermore, there probably is an elite few who managed to get PhDs while being loathsome teachers and/or researchers. Let's put these extremes aside and focus on this bulgy bell-curve middle (I am pretty sure that I am in this middle). Why do we produce so many people like me?

I think that for Martin's argument to go through, he is going to have to hold that there is *not* this bulgy middle of perfectly capable people. But, on what grounds? Perhaps Rutgers and Toronto, two places at which I believe Martin has taught, aim to hire only future stars. That seems reasonable given the general awesomeness of those programs. But, perhaps having been immersed in that world leads to forming the incorrect belief that not being a star is the same thing as being unable to contribute appropriately to the discipline. But, that seems false. Not being a star is not the same thing as not being able to do good work in philosophy as a researcher and teacher. Lots and lots of PhDs aren't stars and never will be but they still have the ability to contribute meaningfully to the field. Unfortunately, there just aren't the jobs for them (or at least that is what I am assuming and maybe I am wrong - see my first post in this thread).

Also, it seems to me that even granting Martin's argument, we ought to be as up front as possible about how the profession works: Enter graduate school at your own peril, people! I mean, really - most people do not gamble 6 - 10 years of their lives on such bad odds. And, if people are prone to taking such bad risks, let's ignore Malcolm Gladwell and instead listen to Cass Sunstein and nudge these people towards not taking these risks!

Oh, and speaking of Malcolm Gladwell's work, I think it borders on trash. But, with regard to his article in the NYer: He makes two points. First, college football is sufficiently different from pro football that experts consistently misidentify who will be star *quarterbacks*. But, Gladwell notes that scouts have no problem identifying both star and capable defensive and offensive linemen. I bet this generalizes to defensive backs, offensive backs, wide receivers, kickers, etc. So, Gladwell's point is just that it's hard to use information from college performance to identify quarterback capability in the NFL. Second, Gladwell actually argues that we do have good metrics for picking out good teachers, but we just don't use those metrics. What these two points have to do with each other is beyond me. What these points have to do with philosophy graduate programs is also not clear to me.

[Carl Seaquist]

Michael: Sure tuition remission isn't a direct cost in the sense that a college writes itself a check, as it writes grad students checks for stipends. But there is a real cost to offering graduate education. In addition to benefits (health, etc., for which real checks are written) and the staff in the grad office, the main cost is in faculty labor. In order to teach a graduate course, a faculty member has to be taken out of the undergraduate classroom but still paid a salary. Presumably the price of graduate tuition reflects these costs, even at schools where students rarely if ever pay tuition out-of-pocket.

Of course measuring that cost is difficult. I don't believe there are good methods of cost accounting for professional labor, and universities don't seem too interested in developing appropriate measures. Number of course sections (e.g., 3-2) is clearly a poor method, yet it's the one most often used. Number of preparations would make slightly more sense, FTEs served probably the most; but other than freshman comp and foreign language courses, where the need for a cap is essential, most courses at large universities can always fit more warm bodies if space is available, so it's always possible to increase the FTEs/faculty without adding costs. (Quality of education might suffer, but that's not really a cost problem.)

So it's not clear that using a grad student as TA in a big lecture class really saves ANY money at all. Let's say we have 100 undergrads being taught MW by a standing faculty member, and Friday by a TA in four lecture sections -- the model at Pitt when I was there. The alternative would be to have the faculty member teach MWF -- then the school would save the cost of one grad student, whatever that turns out to be in dollar terms. You can generalize from this example in most cases.

[Jon Cogburn]

Though I have utmost respect for Martin Lin's important work on Spinoza, I find his point above to be risible.

If it were correct, then a majority of the early baby boomer professors would be unacceptably bad professors. After all, that generation did not benefit from our current enviable disparity between graduate students and positions. But does anyone seriously think that the current crop of gen-X (myself included here) and Y philosophers is in any significant way better than the set of baby boomer philosophers, as Lin's argument commits us?

One could actually make a Nietzschean argument (and by this I mean his views on nature) that it works the other way around; in a more forgiving job market there is more necessary tolerance for the kind of weirdness that sometimes unexpectedly creates greatness. I would not be surprised if in the long view (assuming we do not enter another dark ages) the philosophical era where the ideas were driven by Quine's students and their interlocutors comes to be considered a philosophical golden age, in very part because of the spirit of inquiry the good job market helped engender.

I do not think the mermaids will sing quite as much to my generation. The careerism necessitated by the job market makes us hard of hearing. I'm sure we'll eat plenty of peaches though, and for us the tattoos and body piercings will only add to the the all important decision of where to part one's hair. That is some consolation maybe?

[Gualtiero Piccinini]

I find the points made by Smith and Cogburn against Lin (mostly) unconvincing. Lin might have overstated his case slightly: it is surely possible to make reasonable guesses as to the relative talent and promise of students--we all do it when we write letter of recommendation.

But the fact remains that of the many students admitted to a Ph.D. program, only some end up graduating, and those who quit often do so for reasons that were entirely unpredictable at the time they were admitted. This is true at the best programs too. And of those who graduate--including those who graduate from top programs--there are plenty of people who don't succeed. There is no reson to believe this is simply due to the difficulties of the current job market.

Since there is a large element of unpredictability here, decreasing admission rates significantly would deny a career in philosophy to perfectly capable people.

Of course, there may well be more philosophy Ph.D.'s produced than needed. Whether this is true is independent of the point Lin was making.

[anon applicant]

I find the direction this thread has taken interesting (interesting in the pejorative sense). Certainly the discussion is important, but only to those on the other side. Now, I personally have decided to take a stoic view of the process. Economy or not, there's nothing more to be done. But there are many nervous applicants for whom this thread could provide info on whether budget shortfalls will dampen admission chances? So far we've heard that Northwestern is up, one is stable, one is down: any other info?

[Jon Cogburn]

Or maybe many of us teach at schools where the grad students do the grunt teaching and also via their presence make it possible for us to teach seminars relevant to our research. And maybe if even half of them graduated our placement record would be abysmally low. In addition, a very good student is obviously much easier to see through to PhD than one that needs a lot more work.

This places extremely strong institutional pressure to wash one's hands of the problem by believing Lin and Piccinni's points (which I have heard asserted over and over and over and over again as excuses not to improve programs in ways that would, while requiring more work from faculty, help graduate students). Again, does Piccinni honestly believe that philosophy was worse off in the early baby boomer years when the number of jobs and applicants was not so out of whack? If not, how can he accept Lin's ex post facto justifications of the injustice in which we find ourselves?

Again, as with Lin, no disrespect to Piccinni; his first rate work on all things computable and so much else remains an inspiration. I'm bummed to disagree with him here.

[Derek Bowman]

What seems to be left out of Matthew Smith's analysis (and the subsequent debate) is the intrinsic value of studying philosophy. I certainly hope for an academic career, and I think I've got a good chance at realizing that hope, but I recognize that the prospects are uncertain. While it would be an understatement to say that I'd be disappointed if I wasn't able to make a living doing philosophy, I would not thereby regret the years I've spent in graduate school. In fact, if I had to return to the kind of office work I have done in the past, I would look back all the more fondly on those wonderful years when I was actually paid to learn and to think about the things that interest me and to converse with others who shared those interests.

[Martin Lin]

Matthew, although top programs do generally have good placement records, they also train a significant number of students who fail to succeed as professional philosophers. And some of the most distinguished philosophers in the profession today were denied admission to the top programs. I don't wish to deny that skill at writing undergraduate term papers gives us some indication of talents relevant to teaching and research. But then again, so does the ability to run the spread offense give some indication of the ability to run an NFL offense. After all, NFL teams rarely draft baseball players or debate team members. But still, being a good teacher and researcher is quite different from being good at writing term papers.

My main fear is that limiting the number of students that the profession trains to the number of jobs that we expect to fill will deprive the profession of talented people and reinforce elitist trends. We will wind up with a bunch of people who were star undergrads (probably at elite colleges) graduating from top ten programs and that's it. But star undergrads from elite colleges don't always make the best philosophers.

I agree with Matthew that it is our responsibility to inform prospective graduate students of the riskiness of a career in philosophy. I warn the undergrads that I advise about graduate school in the strongest possible terms.

Jon, there are, no doubt, other motives for having a large number of PhD granting programs and students enrolled in such programs. My point is just that even if we eliminated all of the reasons such as the desire for others to do grunt teaching and to take our seminars, there are additional reasons for training more students than will find employment that a reasonable person might find acceptable.

I would also like to agree with Derek: philosophy is an intrinsically valuable thing to study and that even if a student fails to find a job, their time was not necessarily wasted. Perhaps this was part of Lisa’s point too.

[Matthew Smith]

Hi Derek, Martin, and everyone else still reading this thread -

I definitely think that there is intrinsic value in doing philosophy! In fact, the reason I applied to grad school was that one of my undergrad teachers said to me, "Matt, two years in grad school focusing on philosophy can only be a wonderful thing for you." He appended that with, "And after that, well, that's a different matter - after that you're pursuing a career and other questions become pertinent."

Also, maybe like Derek, I am constitutionally unable to do office work -- I've either quit or been fired from all my office jobs! (I am sure Derek has a better record than me.)

But, there are real costs to pursuing a graduate degree - both financial and opportunity - and my point all this time has been that we do a disservice to grad school applicants when we recruit *far* more of them to graduate school than could ever get jobs after graduate school. Or maybe I should take on board Lisa's suggestion and say that we do them a disservice... without making the costs and risks abundantly clear.

Finally, we should distinguish two lines of argument:

1. Most people who don't belong in the discipline drop out of grad school before they go on the job market so what's the big deal?

2. Without a glut of PhDs, we cannot get the best work done.

Line of argument #1 depends upon the statistics I asked about in my first post and since I am ignorant about this - I only know the perception - then I cannot comment.

If #2 is true, it reminds me of fed monetary policy and federal gov't policies that aim to maintain a certain level of unemployment in order to hold down inflation, among other things. Now, it may be true that this practice is justifiable on some sort of efficiency grounds or, i dunno, some weird principle of justice or something. Lin and Piccinni suggest that this may be appropriate for an academic discipline - we should adopt policies that maintain a certain level of unemployment amongst philosophy PhDs so that we can get better philosophy done. I can only offer in response an argumentum ad McEnroum: Seriously? You can't be serious!

Well, as suggested above, I can certainly accept Lisa Shapiro's point: we should be as clear as possible to people what they are getting in to. And that requires collecting some data and then publishing it. So, in that spirit, here's my suggestion:

Brian, how about, in future PGRs, requesting from departments the following statistics: # of that year's PhD's offered TT jobs / # of that year's PhD's on the market

Or do you already gather that info? Or would this be bad info to gather?

And for what it's worth, I think that this discussion has been interesting in a totally normal sense, which is to say that it's been interesting.

[Matthew Smith]

Oops, Martin - I posted my comment at the exact same time you posted yours!

So, what I write above is not a response to what you wrote. And, I largely agree with everything you say. One thing, though: do most grad students who write really good papers come from fancy schools? Maybe so...

Oh, and I think it's great to have lots of people wandering the streets who have taken lots of philosophy classes! It's just that I don't want them wandering the streets unemployed and unhappy.

[Eric Rowe]

As an applicant to philosophy PhD programs this year I will put this offer on the table: admit me to your program, and I will sign a statement agreeing not to seek employment as a philosopher after graduating. Voila - one less future PhD on the job market for y'all to deal with, and I get myself out of this economy for five or so years doing something that I love.

Any takers?

[Anonymous]

Could the purpose of having a glut of PHD's be low wages for adjunct or temporary faculty? I always wondered how colleges find people with graduate degrees willing to teach for $800 a credit hour.

[doris]

I'm off the OP here, but I find Matthew Smith's confidence in the projective accuracy of professional philosophers quite striking.

I'm unencumbered by evidence, but consider the following exercise: If you've been around awhile, think of the 2 or 3 rookie "stars" from your year(s) on the job market (the ones who got most and best interviews and offers), and then ask if these people are the most influential members of their cohort. I suspect that for many of us, this exercise does not engender strong confidence in the profession's predictive acumen. (Perhaps this is why some major programs avoid hiring junior.)

Given the very limited evidence one has when doing graduate admissions (and what I suspect is the limited time often spent evaluating files), I'm even less sanguine about this part of the process. (Of special interest here is the attrition -- often due extra curricular factors -- at major graduate programs.)

Matthew is of course happy to admit there are exceptions to his generalizations. On my view, there are enough exceptions to undermine confidence in the generalizations. Does anyone have any systematic evidence to help us decide this question? Or suggestions about what good evidence would look like?

--doris

[Matt Weiner]

John (doris), I think the point about professional philosophers' lack of predictive ability cuts as strongly against the point that Martin has been arguing, that decreasing the number of PhD students deprives the profession of talented people. For, as Martin has already acknowledged, there is no guarantee that those new PhDs who get tenure-track jobs actually are the most talented in any given class. This means that the profession is being denied the services of talented people anyway; it's just being denied their services when the talented people are much older and more restricted in their life choices. (It's true that the PhDs who don't get academic jobs are making some contributions to philosophy while they're in graduate school, but I don't think that these services to the profession are worth the costs to them of going through a PhD program and failing to get a job.)

I'm also wary of the way "talent" is being used here. When we talk of trying to tell which undergraduates have the talent to be successful writers and teachers, that makes it seem as though at that stage the level of talent is already determined, and it only remains to discover it. But to what extent is talent fixed at any given stage? Perhaps more to the point, how much of future production is going to be a question of talent and how much a question of the one's situation? I really have no idea how much one's graduate school situation affects one's future productivity, but it seems pretty clear to me that one's post-graduate situation has a big impact. Take two duplicate philosophers, put one in a 2/2 tenure-track job at a research school that supports them generously, put the other in one- and two-year 3/3 or 4/4 visiting positions all around the country so that they're on the market every year and always trying to settle into a new home, and I'll bet that nine out of ten times the twin in the tenure-track job will produce more worthwhile philosophical research after seven years.

This is important because it suggests that the biggest constraint on how much good philosophy gets done might be how many tenure-track jobs there are. In which case it wouldn't matter much for the quantity and quality of our aggregate output of philosophical research if we weeded more people out of the profession at the beginning of graduate school rather than the end. That'd be in line with Jon Cogburn's point that philosophy didn't seem to be any worse back when there were enough jobs to go around.

(No disrespect is intended to people not in tenure-track jobs and the research they've produced! Indeed, I believe that a couple of our finest philosophers did a lot of their early research while in part-time positions. But I think these are definitely exceptions, and I hope people will agree that VAPping and adjuncting aren't as conducive to research as holding a steady tenure-track job.)

Now, Martin is completely correct that it would be unwise to try to admit only as many graduate students as there are jobs. Some people won't finish, or won't want to continue in academia, or will turn out not to be very good philosophers for whatever reason. But no one is suggesting that we cut the admissions-to-jobs ratio to one-to-one or anything near it. Perhaps as Martin suggests there needs to be some cruel system of winnowing out aspiring philosophers, but I suggest that we could make the system much less cruel without appreciably harming the profession.

There's also the point that Derek and Lisa have made, that studying philosophy is intrinsically valuable. This is true, but I think that the opportunities forgone by spending so much time in grad school might outweigh it. I know I found the idea of finding a job outside of philosophy much more daunting at age 33 than at age 24. And for reasons I've given before, even if we do our best to inform people of the risks before they enter grad school it might not be enough. This is one argument for increasing the number of MA students I think, an MA lets you study philosophy seriously but has much lower opportunity costs than a PhD.

All that said, Lisa may well be right that now might not be the right time to cut PhD admissions. Biding one's time in grad school might be a much better idea right now than it would be in a normal economy, even if you don't hope or expect to get an academic job in the end. But even if this is true, it's really only true as long as the non-academic job market is bad; when other jobs are there to be had again, we should really think harder about whether we're luring too many philosophy majors to their doom.

(By the way, in case Brian would like to get the comments back to the original topic, I've put up a a thread about this at my own blog if anyone wants to continue the discussion there.)

[Emanuel]

Echoing the words of Lisa Shapiro, I think, the study of philosophy at the graduate level should not be restricted to those who intend to become professional philosophers. Such restriction would likely be either overly naive or unnecessarily pragmatic--perhaps both. There are certainly worse things than 'business people' with Philosophy PhDs. In fact, if we think about the root of the problem we are facing, many a business person would do well to study, say, ethics. Per the words of the philosophy faculty at Cambridge:

"Like it or not—know it or not—business leaders, senior civil servants and top professionals are today's practical philosophers. They may not wrestle explicitly with philosophical questions, but every strategic decision they make assumes philosophical answers."

Additionally, a cursory glance at Stanford's placement record shows that some of their graduates have gone quite regularly to non-academic professions such as management consulting with firms like McKinsey & Co.

http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/newplacementrec.html

[Gualtiero Piccinini]

A couple of clarifications:

I did not suggest, nor did I intend to suggest, that the following is a reason for admitting people to Ph.D.'s:
"2. Without a glut of PhDs, we cannot get the best work done." My department doesn't even have a Ph.D. program (though it does have an M.A. program and our students do some teaching).

I'm not in a position to answer Cogburn's question whether "philosophy was worse off in the early baby boomer years when the number of jobs and applicants was not so out of whack". I'm not sure what Cogburn is asking: does the average quality of philosophers' work depend on the jobs-to-candidates ratio when they went on the market? That seems an extremely difficult question to answer. My guess is that the jobs-to-candidates ratio is at best a small factor in influencing the quality of philosophers' work, but I have no idea how to test this (or even whether it increases or descreases the quality of work; or maybe it does a bit of both under different conditions!).

I don't think the above question is especially relevant to my point. My point was that only some of those who start a Ph.D. (at all levels) have a successful career, and some of the reasons for this are not related to how many jobs there are. That was probably true for the baby boomers too (this is just a guess; please correct me if I'm wrong).

A relateed point (implicit in what I said and explicit in what Lin said) is that some of those who have successful careers in philosophy were unlikely candidates for success before they started a Ph.D. If you deny them access to graduate school on the grounds that there aren't enough jobs for everyone and they don't look as good as others, you are being unfair to them.

[Matt Weiner]

Hi Gualtiero!

some of those who have successful careers in philosophy were unlikely candidates for success before they started a Ph.D. If you deny them access to graduate school on the grounds that there aren't enough jobs for everyone and they don't look as good as others, you are being unfair to them.

I really don't see how this is unfair to them. It would be unfair if they were denied admission on paltry grounds, grounds that applied especially to them. For instance, it would be unfair if we effectively restricted admission to PhDs to people who went to elite colleges; Martin made a very good point there. (I think the solution is for PhD programs to make an effort to admit people who aren't from elite colleges, and I also think that this is an area where it would help to increase the number of MAs, as PhD programs may be better able to judge graduates of non-elite colleges after they've graduated from an MA program.)

But any admissions process is going to deny some people the opportunity for a career, and some of those people would've gone on to productive careers if they'd been allowed to. How is this unfair to any individual? One argument is that we shouldn't deny any more people than we can help the opportunity for a philosophical career, so we should admit as many PhD students as we can. But this doesn't strike me as very convincing, especially given that many of those PhD students won't be able to have philosophical careers anyway because they won't be able to find jobs. So I don't think fairness precludes trying to decrease PhD admissions to better reflect the job market.

And it's certainly true that some of the reasons for not having a successful philosophical career don't have to do with the number of available jobs, but it seems to me that the number of available jobs provides a hard cap on the number of people who will have successful careers.

[Gualtiero Piccinini]

Hi Matt!

I agree with almost everything you say. And if indeed there are way more philosophy Ph.D.'s than the market can absorb, it would be reasonble to decrease the number of admissions somewhat. But not too much.

Maybe "unfair to them" is not the best way to put my point. Maybe it's better to put it in utilitarian terms: other things being equal, it seems to me that everyone is better off if they are allowed to pursue their goals--especially if they have the ability to succeed.

There are also other factors that have not been mentioned:

1. There seems to be an implicit assumption in this discussion that the only worthy goal of a philosophy Ph.D. is to be a philosophical star or at least an accomplished published researcher. Not so. Plenty of people have little or no interest in publishing but are happy to become philosophy teachers. Some people are happier teaching philosophy, even without a tenured job, than doing anything else. And there a quite a few philosophy Ph.D.'s who are happy to go into other fields (such as computer science-related jobs).

2. Decreasing the number of admissions seems to me an entirely impractical proposal: who is going to do it? Who is going to ensure that when some programs decrease admissions, other programs are not going to accept their rejects? If we are going to play this wishful thinking game, we might as well talk about increasing the number of available jobs. In some countries, philosophy is a normal high school subject (at least in some high schools). I think it would be great to offer philosophy courses more widely in American high schools. Presumably high school philosophy teachers need to be trained by people with philosophy Ph.D.'s. I realize that this is another pie in the sky, but if there were demand for philosophy high school teachers, this might also increase the demand for philosophy Ph.D.'s.

3. Ultimately, the process is going to be collectively regulated by the individuals and institutions involved, as it always has. Parents and teachers will warn students not to study philosophy or else they won't find a job (mine did!), some students will diregard such advice, programs will accept students to the extent that they are comfortable doing so, and students who don't get philosophy jobs will find something else to do.

[Laurence McCullough]

Gualtiero Piccinini asks a very good question: "Decreasing the number of admissions seems to me an entirely impractical proposal: who is going to do it?" Answer: Deans willing to gather reliable data on placement and simply discontinue graduate programs that have not placed students (or very many) during a reasonable time period, say the past five years. Even better: Philosophy departments could as a matter of professional integrity look at their own data and recommend to their dean that their gradiate programs be discontinued when the data show no or very few placements. Both methods are practical and call only for reasonable sacrifice of self-interest on the part of the graduate philosophy faculties that would be affected. One happy result: More teaching of undergraduates by fulltime faculty, which out students (and their parents, who are wising up to what is going on) will appreciate and smart administrators can use to market their universities and smart philosophy departments can use to market themselves to the undergraduates in their universities.

BTW: As a fulltime medical educator, I have no dog in this hunt.

[Don Fallis]

Several people have suggested that the philosophy profession has some obligation to make sure that there are not a lot more PhDs than there are jobs. This idea used to seem fairly compelling to me (especially back when I was a job candidate). However, I am no longer convinced.

The philosophy job market just seems to me to be a tournament quite like the tournaments for other highly sought after careers (such as movie actor, professional athlete, or even drug kingpin as is suggested in Freakonomics). The rewards for succeeding in getting such a career are sufficiently great that many more people voluntarily enter these tournaments than can possibly succeed.

Of course, the financial reward for securing a position in philosophy is not as great as it is for some of these other careers. But being able to do what you love to do is often a sufficient motivation for many people to enter such tournaments (especially if simply training for the tournament has value to them). Also, the philosophy job market has one important advantage over other such tournaments. Namely, even if they are bad, the odds of securing a position as a philosopher (even in a serious economic downturn) are presumably much better than the odds of securing a position as a professional athlete, for example.

By the way, it is not clear to me that "most people do not gamble 6 - 10 years of their lives on such bad odds." And, given the potential reward, I am not sure that it is irrational for them to do so.

It is not clear to me that it is unethical to open an acting school or a tennis academy even if you recognize that you are training your students for a career that few of them will succeed in getting. Similarly, it is not clear to me that it is unethical to admit PhD students that may not be able to secure a position in philosophy. In fact, it might be objectionably paternalistic to decrease PhD admissions simply because there is not going to be a job for every PhD (even if, as Matt points out, it would not be unfair to anyone in particular to do so).

That being said, I do agree that the philosophy profession probably does have obligation to make sure that PhD applicants and candidates are well informed about the risks of pursuing a career in philosophy.