A prominent philosopher writes:
I have come across a number of graduate students -- typically students from overseas -- at [school name omitted] who complain about somewhat appalling conditions there. I may be wrong but here is my perception of what is going on: truckloads of overseas graduate students are being admitted without a proper understanding of what they are letting themselves in for. They are given encouraging signals about various possibilities for funding but the reality is that in most cases they are being used to service the undergraduate teaching in a way that makes it absolutely impossible to make progress in a doctoral degree. In very many cases, these students are given no full fee waiver and teach between 3-3 and 4-4 loads (yes, three to four courses a semester) just to survive. In a number of cases these students had offers from other graduate programs in the USA and would have been infinitely better off to have taken one of those options instead. Now I don't know all the details -- though I have spoken to more than ten graduate students who have told me a similar story. And I make no pretension to have gotten all the facts right. But I think its important that talented overseas students in philosophy coming into this country do not get exploited, and I think you are in a position to make a difference here if what is getting reported to me is correct. Let me emphasise that I do not want my name brought up in this connection, and I have no personal grudges against anyone at [the department in question] (I am writing this simply because I felt genuinely sorry for some of the students that I have spoken to and felt that they could have been so much better off if they had been just a little better informed). I thought that at the very least your site could do something to warn prospective graduate students -- if they indeed need warning -- about the pitfalls of certain underfunded graduate programs.
Here's the key point: there are big differences in the quality of funding between programs, even when the programs have comparable faculties. Students should be particularly alert to this with respect to private versus public schools, even though some public schools (e.g., Michigan) have excellent funding available. But, as the PGR has long noted, public schools tend to provide more of their financial aid via teaching assistantships, but it's crucial to know what the teaching burden really is: both how many contact hours per week and how many students you will be responsible for grading. If you don't get a satisfactory commitment in writing about this, you should think again about that program.
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