alethicethic

LOL, I would have thought that goes without saying. No doubt it varies a bit, but mid-to-late March was the busy season for me, with a few outliers. Good luck!

Actually, most of what I said is indeed correct. Please correct the specifics rather than a generalized attack--that will be more productive. You're missing the place in the dialectic: Ian said Brandeis isn't elitist, because lower-SES students can just borrow heavily to go there. I'm saying that most lower-SES students (rightly) would avoid taking out $120k+ in loans and I provided some considerations in favor of that view. Even if a few of the details were incorrect, the general point stands. You linked to an article about the temporary extension of Pay as You Earn, which I referenced in my post. That 10-year forgiveness program is only for FTE public employees, which excludes many adjuncts. No doubt, your sweeping claim that everything I said was incorrect was targeted at the fact that I left out that there's also the 25 year plan (25 for students who borrow in the $50k+ range, 20 below), which caps it at 10% of discretionary income for those with demonstrated financial hardship. Median salary for an assistant professor is $55k nationally. That's a $319 a month payment under PAYE, as long as you qualify for the program. Yes, that is a lot less than a 30-year fixed repayment at $1100 a month, or a 10-year at $2k a month, but if you get married, your partner's income will also count against you. It's still debt servitude. The points about inequality and intergenerational income mobility stand. Even if you don't intend to pay back the entirety of your student loans, and are only mortgaging your family's future income at 10% for the next 25 years, I still think it's irresponsible and imprudent to take out $120k in loans for a philosophy MA and I am personally unwilling to do so. I imagine that many students feel similarly--hence my point that Tufts and Brandeis are beyond the financial reach of most.

I'm not against discussion of programs in general, program placement or program choice. I'm not against sharing information. Sharing is caring. You have singled out a single post of mine from last season and taken it out of its context, in order to tell me that I should have said something else in order to support my position today? I said what I meant to say then, as regards that particular thread, and I'm saying what I mean to say now. My position is not inconsistent, although I do find it a bit weird that you're combing through my back posts. Ian and I have been arguing about his methodology for awhile, both on and off this forum, so I may understand his position better than you think. This doesn't mean I'm not supportive of Ian's project in general, even if we disagree on some of the particulars. That said, you want to dance, so let's dance. The context of the former post was: hey, you're talking about programs with great placement, but you're missing this relevant data, so you might want to look to that. As far as I know, that didn't happen. I happened to know SFSU's placement because I went there. 2014 is publicly available on the APA guide and is something like: UCLA, Yale, Riverside, Irvine, Washington, Purdue, and Albany. So picture having that information, plus reading that thread--it just seemed obvious that there was something missing. The CSUs (which, FYI, are a state system, not a single program and also include SJSU and CSULA) seemed an obvious oversight to me, since I had firsthand knowledge of students from those schools placing into PGR T10 doctoral programs--no doubt there are other gaps as well. This is entirely compatible with my objections to ranking MA programs. The context of this discussion is: ordinal rankings are not a meaningful way to objectively evaluate placement. Not everyone is as careful as Establishment in reading what the rankings represent. In this case, all the work is being done by information that's not a ranking: that we are talking about some subset of the PGR-listed MA programs and evaluating them by a single criteria, namely the ratio of applicants to placements at PGR T20 PhD programs. It also assumes that the applicants were all aiming for T20 programs, or that they would have chosen a T20 over a mid-ranked program, which may well be false given specialization and program fit. I know of at least two cases where an applicant declined a T20 to go to a midranked program, at least one applicant who declined a T10 to go to a T20, and several applicants who declined a T5 to go to a T10. I even know one who declined a T5 to attend a T20. So maybe what people are after is highest-PGR-ranked acceptance for each applicant? But even if one decides to go forward with this kind of a ranking, representing it as a ratio might also be somewhat misleading, for two reasons. First, the number of applicants is so low overall that a ratio is not the best way to represent information: the difference made by a single applicant is huge (71% acceptance instead of 52%!) Second, a ratio privileges smaller cohorts, even if a larger overall number go on to doctoral programs from the larger cohort. tl;dr Ordinal rankings are unhelpful and easily misused, so let's talk specifics instead. I just realized that we have completely derailed the thread. Reading through, the OP was asking about PhD program placement into TT jobs.

Ad hominem. Your comments about my own background are completely uncalled for and inappropriate. COL in Boston has to be at least $15k a year, right, and is probably quite a bit more? Most students are extremely unwilling to take out $120k+ in loans. Maybe for medical school, or a BA degree, but definitely not for an MA in philosophy. Since the BCA of 2011, federal aid to graduate and professional students may only take the form of *unsubsidized* loans at an interest rate of 6.8%. Since you also probably needed to take out PLUS loans to cover the cost of living, those are even worse, at 7.9%. Since these are all unsubsidized, you will continue to accrue interest payments to the tune of about $8k a year. You can defer payment while you are in school, but the interest will capitalize once you graduate--therefore, assuming that someone goes on to a doctoral program, that adds about $50k to the total, bringing you up to about $170k. The monthly loan payment on a 30-year loan of that size is in excess of $1100. You would need to have a salary of at least $130k a year in order to reasonably afford that--and that exceeds what most tenured full professors make, on average. Moreover, you can forget about ever buying a house or sending your own kids to college. You'll have to live further away from desirable centers of economic activity. This will put you at a disadvantage to most of your peers as you spend more time commuting and less time either working or spending time with your family or on hobbies, making you less likely to advance in your career and leaving you more exhausted and less fulfilled. In effect, it entrenches household inequality and reduces intergenerational income mobility. I know what you're thinking--if you enter public service, you can get income-based partial loan reduction through the federal government. However--most adjuncts don't qualify, because they are not considered regular full-time employees of the university. Given that most PhDs will become adjuncts, and most adjuncts cannot afford to survive at all, much less pay back loans, taking on this kind of burden is irresponsible and imprudent. The bottom 10% of students in terms of wealth at law schools come from the middle income quintile and below, right? You must realize that you are an exception, and absolutely should not encourage low-SES individuals to take out those kinds of loans. Many low-SES students also have familial obligations--they simply cannot saddle themselves with this level of debt. $120k+ for a philosophy MA is not an investment. It is lifelong debt servitude. The discussion on Leiter was about the SES of students at all MA programs, not just the private schools. Students who go to Tufts and Brandeis are either able to pay for school (through money or scholarships) or have the ability (perhaps they don't have familial obligations) and the willingness to shoulder six figures worth of debt. I stand by what I said: that rules out most of us. Those programs are not are not a realistic option for most on SES grounds. The state schools provide excellent MA programs, and students don't have to mortgage their future to attend. I am very glad, for your sake, that you went to law school. At least you'll have a hope of paying back your loans.

No. My point there was that Ian had ranked programs in terms of placement without including all of the data--for example, in the case you quoted, the placement data of the CSUs. I was not endorsing the rankings. In the thread above, he again ranked schools by placement. On his blog and in this forum, he has also ranked schools based on Leiter's opinion, which is explicitly in terms of faculty quality, not placement. I support Ian's effort to collect and publish information--but it's incomplete, and I think we should be more cautious about the claims that we make from it. I think that it can be misleading to say things like, "x number of students got into T20 programs!" and have that be the standard by which MA programs are ranked, even just in terms of placement. That's great if those students are interested in T20 programs, but I can think of certain subfields for which mid-ranked overall schools (Duke, WUSTL, Riverside, Irvine, Ohio State) are the best choice. It's not that such data isn't useful--it's good to see which programs tend to send students off to which schools--but I am skeptical of reducing it down to a numerical ranking. This can be done objectively, as the OP requested, without being quite so reductive.

This. Let's stop arbitrarily numbering the MA programs. I know it's irresistible, but this all stems from parsing Brian Leiter's offhand remarks--it's not even based on a survey. I find the numbering ridiculous, not least because Leiter himself doesn't even rank them. For those considering MAs: the PGR lists some solid programs. Use that as a jumping-off point to look at individual programs: the faculty, the suitability for your interests, the funding, the placement, etc. These are all good programs, and it's not helpful to assign specific numbers to say that Tufts is better than Georgia State or that Brandeis is better than Milwaukee. It's better to go where you think you can do your best work--it's a match between where you are now with your interests, and how you want to develop over the next few years. The usefulness of the PGR is that it is a survey of a large range of programs--it reflects the opinions of a group of faculty in their own areas of expertise, and it is limited to one factor, research quality. Controversies with the PGR aside, this is not even the case with the MA programs. Tufts and Brandeis, clocking in at $33k and $45k per year in tuition alone (not to mention the cost of living in Boston), are simply not "investments" that most of us can afford. It's off-putting and elitist for students from these programs to make up rankings with themselves at the top.

I flew between multiple cities last year and it was not a problem--they were happy to fly me on to a different city and I was honest with them that I was visiting multiple programs. Moreover, this seemed to be the norm--many of us were visiting many departments around the same time. You can also schedule a special visit not during prospectives weekend if you are visiting two nearby schools that are far from your home and you don't have time to fly to that area twice. I did this last year. Also, many prospective visits conflict, so you might not be there with the rest of the cohort anyway, although it's best to go during that time if you can. Usually, departments are happy to reimburse you for a round-trip flight. Some will prefer to book it for you, although I think it's better to manage this yourself as long as you can put it on a credit card or otherwise front the cash. Many credit cards give you extra points on travel, plus I earned a lot of frequent flyer miles, because I booked nearly all of them on the same airline. Also, you may be booking lots of flights and making last-minute destination changes, which is easier to manage if you do it yourself. Protip: Southwest is perfect, cheap and highly flexible for this kind of thing. They often do not show up in kayak searches, so be sure to check their site directly. I disagree about making sure to divide the cost evenly between departments. It's a nice idea, but it probably won't work well in practice, especially since you are probably going to be booking and re-booking at different times, not to mention flying all over the country. I accepted a round-trip from a private school in which I flew back to a different city in my home state, and then asked the public school in my home state to only cover the leg back to my home city. I didn't think that was unfair, or that I should have had the public school cover even half the cost of flying from the private school (which was a *much* longer and more expensive flight than a short in-state hop.)

Just remember, because I'm seeing in some signatures "presumed rejected" and so on: you cannot infer that from a few acceptance reports. Duke's notifications went out over several days last year. The same was true of several other schools. Sometimes I heard earlier than others, sometimes later. It's going to vary from school to school. Sometimes you get an automated letter from the graduate school before the philosophy department even has a chance to call you. Other times, it's reversed--you get the call first, and then they tell you to expect the formal offer from the graduate school. Many schools also send out rounds of admissions. I know it's a difficult waiting game, but just wait for the school to notify you--don't assume. Good luck!

Great advice, Gnothi Seauton! I endorse pretty much everything he said, and we were admitted to many of the same schools. Don't worry too much if you have a lower GPA--it was definitely the weakest part of my application, but I still managed to get into terrific programs. The rest of my application was (apparently) solid enough to be successful. My undergrad transcript looks pretty bad--I am really embarrassed every time I have to show it to someone--but I was working full time, and had a professor explain this in a letter. There was also a marked improvement in my final years, and then I went to an MA program, where I earned stellar grades. I highly recommend MA programs. You get more of a chance to develop philosophically, which comes out in all sorts of ways in your application. You also get to meet lots of terrific people who are passionate about philosophy and headed for different PhD programs.

I don't know why there is a smiley instead of above. I tried to edit it and it's not working. Very odd.

You chose to start this argument with me, remember? You replied to my post. You didn't like the way it went, so now you're trying to shut me down by ordering me to stop. Of course, you combined your demand with a fresh argument, so you're not really "leaving it be", are you? I made no such demands on you, so I'm hardly trying to get the last word. I have tried to be as constructive as possible while defending my position and pointing out why your view is wrong. You chose to argue in a public forum. I am responding publicly, and have zero interest in taking this discussion offline. It's not my responsibility to educate you, but I am serious about creating a public culture in which we call out offensive comments. I'm not having a nervous breakdown. Accusing your interlocutor of having a nervous breakdown is offensive in several respects: A) it trivializes actual nervous breakdowns. you shouldn't use that as an insult. C) here, you used it as an ad hominem attack, specifically one used to deny epistemic authority to your opponent D) labels such as "crazy", "emotional", "having a nervous breakdown" and so on, are frequently used to dismiss women in particular. Did that particular phrase just roll naturally off your tongue? As for hijacking the thread--I posted a specific complaint regarding an interpretation of the survey. You chose to pick a fight and make offensive comments. I chose to call you out. If you think it's derailed, look in the mirror. In regards to: 2. I did not take any position in the epistemology of science--because that's completely irrelevant. Wield philosophy like a scalpel, not a bludgeon. The straw man that you argue against appears neither in my comments nor the research. Your refusal to update your beliefs despite the evidence is actually quite common. In short, you're in denial, and most of us fall into that trap at one point or another in our lives. This is related to motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and disconfirmation bias. You might try asking yourself what's at stake for you, psychologically, in being wrong in this case. I will walk you through an example. See here for an abstract of one study where highly qualified applicants with stereotypically Black names were called back less frequently than low skilled applicants with stereotypically white names, for job openings where employers were "actively seeking diversity". The study doesn't run all groups together as you claim--and it definitely does not imply, as you claim, that Black Americans are passive victims that need (white?) saviors. Good grief. Studies can help us measure how and why we are going wrong, and what can be done to change it. It's not that underrepresented groups are incapable of success--after all, 17% of TT philosophers are women, and 16% of philosophers identify as non-white or multiracial. It's rather that the playing field is unfair. Because of systematic bias, members of certain groups face barriers to success. No one said that they can't succeed under such conditions. We're saying that they shouldn't have to. Duh. You claim that members of such groups should climb over the barriers with "iron will and talent". I say, dismantle the barriers. 3. That makes even less sense, because it's completely irrelevant. I never said that underrepresented groups lacked access to Google. WTF are you even talking about? 4. Discrimination against Asians takes many forms, as outlined in a few of the articles I posted. Had you read them, you might realize how your comments contribute to damaging stereotypes. Seriously, your comments are offensive. Stop doubling down on what you said and have the grace to be embarrassed. 5. These are not people that you want to emulate. They managed to alienate nearly the entire 2014 cohort--the Vineyard was so offensive that women applicants created a separate, private forum for a safe space away from him. One of the major problems with the Vineyard was that he didn't realize that he was being offensive--largely because he failed to give epistemic authority to women's perspectives, and lacked the epistemic humility to realize that he has a superficial grasp of women's issues. He didn't recognize that there was a certain context in which he should defer, listen, and learn. Much can be learned from his mistake. Are you going to keep whining about downvotes, or are you going to stop making offensive comments on a public bulletin board? So far, your downvotes have been deserved.

That's not what you said in your last post. You explicitly denied that underrepresented students face tremendous barriers to success and that the problems are, as you put it, "highly exaggerated". 17% of TT phil profs are women, and 84% of the discipline identifies only as "white". Suggesting that these numbers are somehow reflective of the failure of nonwhites and women to have "iron will and talent" is, quite frankly, as offensive as it is ridiculous. I'm beginning to wonder whether you are a troll. I strongly object to your caricature of my position as well-intentioned objectification. My position is based on facts, not on some ignorant stereotype vaguely lumping together all underrepresented groups. You are the one who is conflating race, ethnicity, culture, values, and gender in your remarks. Of course different people have different experiences, and not all members of similar groups will have similar experiences, not least because of intersectionality. Who counts as a visible minority also changes depending on context--women are visible minorities in philosophy, but not in other fields. That doesn't make systematic bias any less real. Failure to recognize the barriers faced by underrepresented groups helps keep those barriers in place. For example, "ignoring race/being race-blind" just has the effect of perpetuating racist social structures. "I don't see race" is itself a privileged position--check out unpacking the knapsack. This problem affects most of us, regardless of identity--there is also intragroup bias, like black cops perpetuating systematic racism against blacks, or female professors calling more frequently on male students. I do not think of policies that are designed to reduce bias in academia as "an extra push", because that's completely backwards. It's the difference between helping someone climb out of a pool vs. stopping holding their head underwater. Recognizing the differences in treatment is a way of rectifying the injustice of the current system. Hence my example of blind grading. After symphony orchestras started blind auditions, the ratio of women symphony musicians rose to match the proportion of women in the supply. Yet before that, conductors would say things like, "women just aren't as good musicians" and other such nonsense. You're not losing points because you challenge the status quo. I downvoted you because: 1) your writing is nearly incoherent 2) you responded to my empirically-supported position with your own musings which belie (most charitably) your own lack of knowledge 3) you insulted me by saying that "anyone with the diligence to look for it" could find research that supports your own view (back it up with links, then) 4) I found your comments about Jews and Asians to be offensive. 5) you dismissively refer to my objections as defending the status quo--presumably, you meant to imply that I and the others who downvoted you suffer from some kind of unreflective status quo bias, and that you are some kind of independent-thinking hero for defending the...status quo. As for that, I invite you to look in the mirror. Try taking the IAT.

I meant what I said. Underrepresented students, including visible minorities from high SES backgrounds, still get lower grades on average, unless blind grading is implemented. This starts as early as primary school and continues through graduate school. Check out this post on New APPS for a quick primer. They are also less likely to be called on in class, less likely to be mentored, etc. Everything that I said is backed up by extensive empirical research. Don't believe me? Maybe you'll believe Rutgers' philosophy department web site. If you're interested in learning more, you can start by checking out some of the literature on implicit bias--perhaps start with Banaji and Greenwald's work. Blindspot is a great introduction. Let's do avoid lumping Asian cultures together. But--to take your caricature at face value--then why aren't there MORE Asians in philosophy? Check out this link.

I am more skeptical about the conclusions we can appropriately draw given such limited information. I started the survey last year, but stopped because I was uncomfortable with some of the questions. I sincerely hope that my answers were not submitted. I also have some concerns with the methodology and presentation. I think that empirical data is helpful, and I do appreciate Ian's efforts in that regard--but we need to be very careful about appropriately qualifying the kinds of claims that we make from it.

I think that you should strike #3. Many people wrongly assume that if you're a member of an underrepresented group, such as a woman or an ethnic minority, you have a higher chance of getting in. But this ignores the many factors that are working against such groups. Such students are also likely to get lower grades, and are not seen by professors as equally competent candidates, which comes out in letters of recommendation. They are less likely to get the mentoring necessary to write a good sample or choose the appropriate programs. The students who are members of underrepresented groups have to overcome tremendous barriers to success. Also, saying that underrepresented groups are more likely to get in leads to the view that the only reason visible minorities have been accepted is because of their underrepresented status. It downplays their accomplishment and marginalizes them. In actuality, they are far less likely to major in philosophy--and of those that do, they are far less likely to apply to graduate school. Of those that do apply, they have to overcome all the barriers listed in the previous paragraph (and many more besides.)

SFSU has at least four faculty with interests in political philosophy (Wilcox, Toh, Tiwald, Azadpur) and regularly offers variable-topic graduate seminars and upper division courses in that area. There are also lots of related courses in moral philosophy and the philosophy of law. SFSU allows you to take lots of courses in your AOI if that's what you want to do, as long as you have completed breadth work elsewhere (in an undergraduate degree, say) and as long as you pass the comprehensive exam on the history of M&E.

I think you are confusing Chicago's MAPH (MA Program in the Humanities) with its Committee on Social Thought, which is a well-regarded interdisciplinary PhD program that fully funds the small cohort of doctoral students it accepts each year.

The CSUs are free for California residents whose income is low (if you are a TA, you qualify.) So if you establish residency (takes a whole year), tuition is free. SFSU in particular also has many scholarships that philosophy students have been very competitive for.

SFSU is also worth checking out. Bas van Fraassen runs a terrific logic workshop each semester with variable topics (for instance, logical puzzles that bear on the philosophy of language, or space and time, etc.) You can also enroll in one course per semester at Berkeley to take courses specifically focused on the philosophy of math. Good luck!

Bas teaches at least one course per semester (usually, a logic workshop with varying topics, which you can repeat for credit.) He has sat on committees and written letters for students. The other faculty are outstanding. As for the # of students: I don't know the official number of active students. It doesn't seem like that many. Students get plenty of time with professors in office hours. As with any program, however, you need to be proactive if you want to go on to a top program. You can't just show up to class and go home. You need to go to office hours with specific topics and questions, etc--get to know the profs so that they will write you strong letters. SFSU's placement is stronger in recent years than CSULA or CSULB.

You're excluding the CSUs. SFSU in particular has had very strong placement in the last few years that compares quite favorably with the programs you're discussing.

You've posted 360 times--you can hardly expect us to have read all of them. There are a lot of threads and posts here. You seemed especially anxious to hear from UCLA, but it was odd given the context of your T-5 offer and your negative attitude toward the department. We asked sensible questions--no reason to get defensive. Your position (now) makes sense--thanks for clarifying. Would you accept at UCLA if you received an offer?

If that's your attitude toward UCLA, why not just accept the other offer?

Why aren't the CSUs on this list? SFSU and Cal State LA? SFSU has phenomenal placement and terrific faculty.

Declined UNC Chapel Hill. Hope that helps some folks! It's a terrific program.