maxhgns

The advice is sound: nobody should ever take either an unfunded or a partially-funded offer for grad school in philosophy. No serious PhD program in the US or Canada even makes such offers. But I'd hedge a little on the second claim. Everyone's chances are extremely slim on the job market, even Princeton grads (seriously: I know several with no interviews and no offers). People who take unfunded offers in the US and Canada are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous programs. They're not necessarily bad programs on paper, but they're definitely wronging applicants. Now, none of that actually speaks to an applicant's real quality or capacity to do good philosophy; so many people apply to grad school that it's largely a crapshoot, and most students will grow a lot over the course of their time in a PhD program. But an offer at one of the programs that doesn't fund its students isn't going to do anyone any favours--partly for practical reasons, and partly just because everyone knows which programs do this, and it reflects poorly on them irrespective of the quality of the education they bestow. Frankly, I don't think any of us--certainly not grads and prospective grads, but not profs either--should be actively discouraging anyone from continuing in philosophy. It's not our decision to make. What we should do is provide our students (and each other) with accurate information about what the process is like, what grad school is like, what the costs and prospects are, etc., and leave the rest up to the student and the trials of the PhD process. Tell students that they're competing against two or three hundred other students, all of them also tops of their classes, for five spots in a cohort. Tell them how high attrition rates are. Tell them they're going to be just one of dozens--hundreds!--of very good candidates, and that these bad things happen to people every bit as good as they are. Tell them that once they graduate, they'll be competing against six hundred or more applicants for a single spot at a shitty institution in the middle of nowhere. Tell them that they will have exactly zero control over where they will live (not the city, not the state, not the coast, maybe not even the country). Tell them that the lucky ones scrape by on 20-30k for most of a decade, moving across the country every year, before landing a permanent job that pays 40k in a shitty place. Tell them that once they land a job--if they do--they it'll be even harder to switch to another job somewhere else. Tell them that being an academic--even one of the lucky ones with a job--means facing rejection after rejection (many of them quite nasty and impolitic) with nary an encouraging word. Tell them that you were one of the lucky ones who made it to the end of the race, and that they can have zero expectation of making it to where you are. Warn them that depression and impostor syndrome are rampant, and that they don't go away when you get the PhD, or even when you get a job. Just tell them the truth, unvarnished, and let them decide for themselves. You don't have to be a dick about it, of course. But be honest, and don't take it upon yourself to push them in one direction or another.

And Memphis is 6/11, Oklahoma 11/14, Stony Brook 11/17, Vanderbilt 10/15, Emory 6/17, NSSR 7/11, Fordham 20/29 (1 unknown), Duquesne 6/17... so at just over half of unranked continental boutique-y schools, more than half the faculty come from ranked programs (often pretty fancy ones, too). I mean, it looks like it's true that they do more hiring from outside ranked programs than ranked programs do. But that doesn't amount to all that much, especially considering (1) how few openings there are from these programs each year and (2) how many students graduate from even just these eleven programs each year. And even among their unranked hires, just a few schools show up again and again and again. They may be friendlier to one another, but that doesn't mean they're friendly.

There's been lots of great advice in this thread already (especially from Duns Eith), and I agree with most of it. I'll just chip in with a few remarks. It's probably not literally true, but it's also not as hyperbolic as you might wish. There are around 200-250 or so full-time entry-level jobs in philosophy advertised each year in the Anglophone world. That's TT jobs, postdocs, VAPs,and full-time adjuncting. The top ten programs don't graduate that many students each year, and I doubt they come very close to that number even when you account for the backlog. But only about 80 or so of these jobs are TT, meaning that there are only 80 or so real jobs up for grabs each year. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were at least half that many T10 grads in the market pool. For reference, I applied to 75 jobs this year and around 100 last year, and the average number of applicants seems to be about 650. One job had 1200+ applicants, and some have reported numbers as low as 180. Doubtless some have far, far fewer applicants. But for the most part, everyone is competing against hundreds of other perfectly qualified candidates. It didn't matter very much to me when I started out. Now that I've finished up and hit the market (and that I've invested considerably more time and effort in it), and now that I understand the kinds of doors that prestige can open up for people, it matters a lot more to me (or, rather, it would). It's worth observing, however, that even students at the most prestigious programs struggle on the job market. There are no winners here--at least, not until they get an actual offer. It's also worth observing that program prestige and PGR rank aren't quite the same thing. Finally, my own experiences and my observations of my colleagues on the market lead me to think that although prestige helps, it's not the be-all or end-all of one's job market run. Your advisors and their standing in the profession matter a lot. Your publication history matters a lot (though not as much as we might wish it did). And your professional network matters a lot (e.g. being known in your subfield can open doors for postdocs, invitations to publish in edited volumes, etc.). Yeah... remember that your professors are lottery winners. The job market was better when they were on it, but not so much better that it wasn't still largely a lottery. In this profession, everybody who gets a job--no matter where it is--is a lottery winner. The best and brightest are lucky to get any TT job at all, let alone a job a research institution or SLAC. With apologies for being pedantic, but isn't a tight labour market one in which job seekers face embarrassment of riches (there's a high price for the product or service)? So the academic job market would be actually be extremely loose. Honestly, the "continental schools hire continentalists from continental schools" thing is pretty much a myth (and a self-serving one to boot). They might be more likely to hire someone from one of the more prestigious (but nonetheless unranked) continental programs than ranked schools are, but that's still not saying much. Just count up faculty lists at a few of these schools, and you'll see that the bulk of them still come from ranked programs. Besides which, nobody going on the job market in philosophy should have any expectation of ending up at a school with a graduate program. There are very few of those posts and the competition for them is incredibly fierce, even at unranked schools. Just remember that the pay is generally pretty bad (like, 40-50k starting at most places, without much room for improvement [although it can be double or sometimes triple that at research institutions]), the work is hard, long, and unforgiving (60+ hours a week of your brain in high gear), and even if you win the job lottery you don't get any choice at all in where you live. Not the city or the state, and sometimes not even the country.

No. Certainly not directly. It might do so indirectly if, for example, it brings the student's GPA down significantly and the admissions committee cares about that. But that's highly unlikely (they'll care about the philosophy GPA, and everyone knows languages are hard and bad grades are common). I guess it might also cause some very indirect harm if the grad program in question has a language requirement and doesn't recognize Cantonese/Mandarin, or if the applicant needs to spend time learning other, non-Chinese languages for research purposes (e.g. if he/she is working in ancient or medieval, then they'll need Greek and Latin, and perhaps even Arabic, French, and German). But language requirements are becoming less common, and these days they're usually tied to the student's research. So if the student is interested in Chinese philosophy, then having an undergrad background in the language will be helpful. If the student is interested in other things, then the worst that will happen is that he or she will have to learn whatever the other relevant language is. But they'll hardly be alone in doing that. Lots of people only learn their research-relevant language in grad school.

You might want to have a gander at Thom Brooks's publishing advice for graduate students. It's quite a good resource. Some thoughts drawn from my own experience and mixed success: Strategies A and B are mutually compatible, and collectively, they're the strategy you have to adopt. You need to have several papers in constant rotation, and for each paper you need to be a few moves ahead. Assume rejection, and think a few moves ahead: what journal will you try next? And after that? Rejection rates are high (like, 90%+). A rejection doesn't reflect poorly on you or even on your paper; it's just par for the course. You're aiming for an R&R, not an outright acceptance. Acceptance rates for R&Rs are much, much higher (like, 50%+). And what you need for an R&R is a sympathetic reviewer--in other words, luck. A lot of R&Red papers are not ready for publication in their present form. But if a reviewer believes in your project enough to R&R it, then don't be shy: make major revisions. No matter what, the paper will be a better one. Plus, it'll probably be accepted (or R&Red with much more minor revisions)--all you need is a sympathetic reviewer. Besides, sympathetic reviewers give better comments. Some reviewers will be callous, mean, or stupid (these days, I like to think of them as Kellyanne Conway. Choose your own scarecrow!). Don't let them get to you. Just sit on their comments for a week and then revisit them. Change what you can to pre-empt future misunderstandings, and move on. Familiarize yourself with the main generalist and specialist journals. You need to have a good idea (without having to check) of where your work is welcome, of what kinds of papers are published where, of what the typical paper length is, and of what the turnaround time is like at various journals. And you need to have a rough sense of the journal hierarchy, both generally and in your subfield. Conferencing is good, though maybe not for the reasons you think. IMO, it has two main advantages (with respect to publishing; networking is a different matter): (1) you generate a new paper for the conference, and (2) to present your paper you're forced to think about how to condense its argument. Thinking about your paper that way can really help you to improve its argumentative structure. But don't expect too much from conference feedback. Yeah, it's feedback, but nobody's actually read your paper, so they're totally dependent on your presentation. So the feedback generally isn't great, although it can help you to identify some of the more glaring trouble spots. Don't rely on conferences for feedback. The feedback is often inadequate, and conferences are temporally too far apart. That makes it all too easy to fall into the "I don't think it's good enough yet" trap. Trust me, I spent years making this mistake. Don't worry about rejection, it's inevitable; just send your paper out already! Nothing compares to the feedback you get (when you get it) from reviewers. I start my process by writing conference papers, and then develop them into longer papers for publication. It's easy that way because conference papers are short (like, 3K words), and then you have an idea to work with for the published version. And, in the meantime, you're networking. What I do is I bracket off a week every month (for a few months) and write a new paper in each of those weeks. I send those off to conferences, and then once I've got a few papers in hand I spend some time (a week a month for a few months) trying to buff them up for publication.I generated a lot of dead ends this way, especially early on in my graduate career, but it's a system that works pretty well for me. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it's a place to start. Keep an excel spreadsheet detailing which papers you sent where, when you sent them, when you received your verdict (and what it was), your submission number, and where you want to send it next. Keep a running document of paper ideas, and jot those ideas down as they come. When you're stuck for something to write, just refer back to that list and pick something that sounds promising. Remember that publishing takes time. Years, in fact, if you're counting from when you first started developing your idea to its final appearance in print. Most papers you read began their lives two or more years before their publication date. So don't sweat the small stuff, and just make sure you're plugging away at things steadily rather than haphazardly. The haphazard approach will add months and years to your total. (Actually, that goes for the dissertation too: writing a little every day is a lot better than writing a lot on some days.)

Honestly, I doubt there's much to know. Academia in Canada is pretty much the same as in the US, with a few small exceptions (e.g. it's typical to get a Master's degree before the PhD). The job application process is basically the same, too, as are the selection criteria. The main difference is that there are far fewer jobs available in the first place.

Tenure doesn't protect from firing for cause. The kind of behaviour described in Ong's complaint would constitute grounds for dismissal.

Oxford's BPhil actually accepts quite a lot of students, especially international students (note: that's not to say it's less competitive than other programs). They do it for the tuition money, though, and the competition for international funding is impossibly high. It's not worth the debt if you don't get funded. Also note that very, very, very few BPhils make it through to the DPhil after. It's a total bloodbath. You can do you MA anywhere you feel comfortable doing it, just try to learn new things along the way. It's good to go to new departments because their courses are different, but also because working in a new department gives you a better sense of what the profession is like, nets you a broader network, and gives you a taste of the instability and uncertainty that awaits you (after the PhD you will move every year or two for five or more years, depending on your job market stamina). Also: I don't know what it's like at NYU, but TAs don't usually cover Master's-level material.

FWIW, McGill doesn't have an MA program in philosophy. They offer an MA in bioethics, but that's obviously not quite what you want! Given your interests, postmodernturn was right to suggest Concordia. I'm kicking myself for forgetting it. IMO it's a very strong MA program, with a really solid set of faculty members. (Note: Concordia has a PhD in humanities, but not in philosophy.) Re: schopenhauerfanboy: Alberta offers both the MA and the PhD. I don't know about Deleuze, but they do have some heavy-hitters when it comes to Foucault, Nancy, and post-structuralism.

FWIW, funding is almost impossible to get in the UK, especially if you're not an EU national. Have you considered Memphis and Guelph?

FWIW, the tenure clock is usually 7 years, and it's pretty standard for people to spend 2-5 years on the market first. Toronto has a combined JD/PhD, which might work for you. McGill also offers LLMs in bioethics and in environment, in conjunction with the relevant departments. Depending on your interests, those might be relevant. Osgoode Hall at York (Canada) offers a JD/MA (in philosophy). Note that Osgoode is probably the top law school in Canada, and McGill and Toronto round out the top 3.

It never really ends, it just lies low for a while. Applying for jobs is exactly the same way, and the publishing process isn't all that different either.

It's true that the unranked SPEP schools seem to be friendlier to graduates of the unranked SPEP departments than the ranked departments are. But it's not quite as true as you might think, or hope. Emory has 6/17 (35%) permanent faculty with PhDs from ranked departments (which would probably get counted as "primarily analytic"), DePaul 4/18 (22%), Memphis 6/11 (55%), Oklahoma 11/14 (79%--and just look at the schools: crazy prestige), Stony Brook 11/17 (65%), Vanderbilt 10/15 (67%). Those aren't all the programs, obviously, but it's a pretty large sample. It just goes to show that your advisor and training count for a lot, as does prestige and what you're actually hired to do. If a school tells you that they do a good job of placing into other "continental" schools, then check their placement data against the number of their graduates. And don't forget that even though the unranked SPEP programs do seem to hire more (on average) from one another, they still don't hire all that often. The bulk of the hiring on the market comes from programs that are UG-only.

But if it's generally known that the scores get swapped, then swapping them yourself beforehand will end up misleading people who read your scores expecting them to have been swapped by the system. Plus, if it ever gets fixed, then they'll be re-swapped.

Bear in mind, also, that not everyone is applying to American programs (or to American programs that require the GRE).

I was admitted to my top choice from the waitlist on April 17. For a little while, the fact of having been a last-minute waitlister made me feel kind of inadequate. FWIW, though, nobody even remembers who was waitlisted or not after the first few weeks, and there was no division between waitlisters and first-rounders. And it's become clear to everyone since then (most importantly, to me) that I'm far from the weakest student in my cohort, let alone my program. So, anyway: don't make an emotional mountain out of that imperceptible little bump.

I don't disagree that prestige matters in philosophy. The further along I get, the clearer it is to me that it matters a lot. What I'm saying is that our usual assessment of what's prestigious isn't tracking the reality of placement especially well. Once you start to count the distribution of PhDs (in ranked programs), you see that it's not actually closely correlated to individual program rank. Oxford matters, in that order. Princeton, Harvard, Toronto, and Pittsburgh also matter, but less (and in that order). MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Stanford, and UCLA matter significantly less (and in that order). Then Yale, Rutgers, Michigan, Chicago, Cornell, Columbia, and Western. NYU, Brown, Arizona, the Sorbonne... And then you get below 1% of placements. Even at the top end, Oxford only nets you 8.4% of placements into ranked programs (+ Canada). Yes, those are (almost) all ranked programs. The point is just that their PGR rank doesn't translate into their placement rank (at best, a high PGR rank correlates to the loose category "1% or more of placements"). And even where their placement rank is concerned, the only programs placing very large numbers of people are the first few. You can see the raw data for yourself (if it's still up) here. The reality, I'm afraid, is that everyone struggles on the job market. Even the "sure" bets aren't that certain. I know plenty of Princeton and Oxford grads who've struggled. And the market is not going to be any better in six or seven years.

I think you misunderstood me. You claimed that 75% of all hires went to the T10 ranked departments. The data you cite indicates that 88% of 2013-4's hires came from Leiter-ranked programs. That's a significant difference. I have no quibble with saying that most of the hiring comes from ranked programs. My problem is with the claim that three quarters of hires come from the PGR T10, which is both false and, as I've explained, misleading. I am not talking about the difference between getting a PhD at a ranked vs. an unranked program. I'm saying that even where ranked programs are concerned, it's only a handful of programs that are killing it in terms of placement (into MA- and PhD-granting programs), and their ordinal rank in the PGR doesn't seem to have a lot to do with it.

I'd be curious to see where you got your information about the correlation and the 75% rate from, because I'm not aware of the existence of any such information. The correlation is often posited, but as far as I'm aware it's never actually been demonstrated. A few years ago I took the time to count the distribution of PhDs in PhD-granting programs. I found that five departments account for 34% of all placements into the international T53 programs. If you include all of Canada's MA- and PhD-granting departments in that calculation, then ten departments account for 43% of all placements. They are not, however, the top ten departments. The IT10 departments make up 36.23% of those placements. While it's possible that the number extends to 75% when CCs and primarily undergraduate institutions are added into the mix, I doubt it. The thing is that things taper off really quickly after those top-placing departments (in fact, they start to taper inside that tranche!). The T10 placers don't follow the PGR's ordinal ranking (I2, I3, I7, I14, I8, I15, I12, I19, I8, I12) and the dropoffs are really steep (there's a huge drop from the #1 spot to the #2, a large drop to #3, a small drop to 4-5, then another large drop, some smaller drops for a few places, then a giant drop again). When I say a huge drop, I really mean it. A few US departments place a lot of former graduate students into the I53+Canada, but the vast majority have placed between 1 and 6. But none of that takes into account the number of graduates per program. Anyway, my point is just that the best placers, as far as placing into graduate programs goes, are not necessarily the departments you might be led to think are the best-placing. The PGR is a reputational survey, not a placement survey. I didn't run any sophisticated analyses, but just eyeballing the top ten placers, it looks like they correlate more strongly to the international prestige of the university in general (the only exception, to my mind, is Pittsburgh) than to the prestige of its philosophy department. As I go down, down, down my list of placers, it looks like that's borne out with only a few outliers. As for your last question... I know that Queen's in Canada has also historically refused to participate in the ranking, and I think a few other Canadian programs have done so as well. I don't know what their reasons are, but their non-participation would make sense to me on the simple grounds that non-American programs get something of a raw deal in the PGR, and I'm not sure how reliable it is as a reputational survey of non-American programs.

My reading: The total financial package is $21 523, and requires you to discharge duties as a half-time (teaching?) assistant (it's not clear if that's once a year or every semester). Included in that package is a 9-hour tuition waiver and health insurance (coverage; it's not clear to me exactly what this amounts to. e.g. it could just be catastrophic care, or it might even be just partially paid for; as in, you're cleared by default to pay to access the university policy). Students probably still have to pay fees out of that 21k, however, and it's possible that the tuition waiver is actually only partial (e.g. if full-time doctoral students register at twelve credit hours a term instead of nine).

Totally, and that's why places like this get started. It doesn't guarantee a sustainable population, though. Since most posters stop posting once they get in somewhere, there's high turnover and a total reliance on new prospectives. All that seems to weigh against sustainability. Shrug.

I doubt it. Web-based discussion of grad school in philosophy has been slowing down for years now, and several good former sites are now completely dead. My impression is that TGC in general has been getting quieter and quieter. Anecdotally, however, the number of applicants doesn't seem substantially lower. I don't know why that is. There were never really dozens or hundreds of philosophy applicants using these sites, so I'd imagine that they always relied on people stumbling across them in their research into grad schools. Perhaps fewer people stumble onto them now because good information about the process of applying to grad school in philosophy is now more readily available, and applicants have fewer reasons to trawl through pages of Google search results. That, and there doesn't seem to be much word-of-mouth among prospectives in this field (not entirely surprising, since few graduates in any graduating class will go on to the PhD). EDIT: I should add that there's a parallel trend at the other end of the process. There used to be *a lot* of web-based discussion among job applicants, but most of those sites have died and the discussion now proceeds at a snail's pace. There, too, I think that access to more and better information is largely responsible.

Do not single-space it. Double-space it. Once you've done some of your own grading, you'll quickly realize that single-spaced work is a royal pain in the visual ass, especially when (unlike a journal article) it's novice-level work. Single-spacing is an invitation to skim your sample or junk it entirely. Remember, the committee members have hundreds of these to read (or dozens, if they winnow before reading samples). Single-spacing to ensure you fit into the page limit is a recipe for disaster. If I were handed a 20-25 page paper that was single-spaced, I wouldn't bother reading it. I'd just reject the applicant. There are hundreds of other applicants, after all, who were able to follow the guidelines, and who demonstrated at least minimal familiarity with the editorial process by keeping their papers to the limit. (Note: I think it's OK to be a page or two over the limit.) Remember, this is not a fair process. Your goal here is to make it through the first few cuts, so that the adcomm actually looks at your file carefully. For the first few cuts, they're looking for reasons to junk your application. Don't give them reasons to do so. Also, make sure your text is justified and not left-aligned. It looks a lot better (as long as you deal with false returns) and scans more easily.

Who are the people you've read and cited in your own work? Where do they work? You'll have to do some combing through programs and their faculty. What you're looking for is a department that's just got a couple faculty members working in the area, but which is well-rounded overall, especially in areas cognate to mind--phil. of cogsci and neuroscience, metaphysics, phil. of science, etc. My list would include Western (which I think is underrated by the PGR, especially with respect to mind). Connecticut Storrs is another that's underrated (and although she's emerita, Millikan is probably the most important--and underrated--philosopher living today). Maybe also Alberta, Buffalo., and Calgary FWIW, though, "middling" in the PGR are those programs listed with a mean of 3.0. That's a pretty solid list in the mind category.

Thanks! I'm actually not looking to submit to them, since my paper is squarely philosophical. Just to page through a few issues to get a sense of where things lie these days.