ianfaircloud

This is such a difficult question to answer. The truth is that I'm not sure whether we know how much of a boost people receive from attending top PhD programs. It seems like they get a boost. But then again, it seems like the top PhD programs generally admit the very best people. Maybe there's another way to look at this: When you attend a top PhD program, you sometimes learn from the very best. You sometimes work with the very best. Surely that changes things. Of course, a lot of what makes a great philosopher is the work s/he produces. Then again, the work s/he produces is (at least in part!) a product of her training... I, myself, turned down a non-top PhD to attend a T7 master's. After the master's, I was rejected to every PhD program to which I applied. (I was wait-listed at UW Madison.) I've posted elsewhere that I don't regret the decision to turn down the PhD and attend the MA. I wanted the very best philosophical education possible, and I felt that I would recieve it at the T7 MA program. (Indeed I *did* receive a great education from that program.) Also, I wanted to know that I gave applications to PhD programs my very best. I knew that I stood a better chance of being admitted to a top PhD program after attending the MA program. Finally, I felt that attending the non-top PhD program was too risky. Whether I would have done well is an open question. That's the nature of something that's risky. After the MA, I only applied to T20 PhDs (with the exceptions of Madison, Penn, and Duke). For the rest of the analysis on whether to pursue an MA, see my post above.

We should connect. Would you send me a message privately on this site?

Yes, many of them have done so. Much of the time a professor is simply given a list of waitlist and acceptances and told to call or email each person separately on the list. Profs don't much care which order in which they notify. The result is that wait-lists go out with acceptances. But your instinct is roughly correct: Generally, wait-lists follow acceptances. And generally, rejections follow both.

Agreed. Also, I think the most confident people in philosophy classes are typically the least informed. As I've studied philosophy, I have learned more about the world, and, paradoxically, I have learned how little I know about it. Questions that never came to my mind are now always on my mind, and I am less convinced that I have the answers. The true gain is that I've learned more about the questions, and I'm perhaps better equipped to explore those questions. People who talk a lot in class, as Isostheneia points out, often "skipped over important foundational issues." I don't know how to handle people like this. I think back to when I was an overconfident college student, and I pity them. I keep quiet and look forward to when they stop talking. It's sad, really. And too often the professor will say nothing or, worse, encourage the behavior by treating the comment as if it were gold.

https://faircloudblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/february-7-washington-university-in-st-louis/ This is just what WUSTL does, apparently. If you applied and weren't rejected today, that's good news.

I've missed this place, so I'm chiming in on a few topics today. Love you people. My thoughts on the MA in philosophy: Full disclosure, I attended a T7 master's program (where T7 is defined here), and I ultimately failed in PhD philosophy admissions. I'm now a JD candidate at Penn, and though I could drop into the PhD program (as other JD candidates have done), it's just not going to be worth it for me. The decision to attend an MA program involves weighing costs and benefits, and the weight assigned to each component of the cost-benefit analysis is determined subjectively by the applicant (because, among free and equal moral persons, there are diverse and inconsistent conceptions of the good!). The challenge is two-fold: what are these components, and what weight ought each component be assigned? Of course, for some people, the weight of one component may be so great that its consideration alone is outcome-determinitive. Ask some questions. How much do you want the PhD? How certain are you about what you want to do with your life? What is the financial cost of attending an MA program, and how much value do you assign that financial cost? (Every MA program comes with a financial cost, because at the very least, the pursuit of the MA puts off your eventual matriculation into the job market and your earning of a professional income.) How will pursuit of the MA affect important people in your life? Is the MA in philosophy valuable "in itself" and not merely as a means to the end of gaining admission to a PhD program? (Relatedly, how will you feel about failing in PhD admissions?) Are you able to gain admission to a PhD program without the MA? If so, will that PhD program do (enough of) what you want the PhD to do for you? How important is it that you feel, after all is said and done, that you did everything you possibly could do to fulfill your dream of becoming a philosopher? Finally: Will an MA in philosophy increase your chances of succeeding in PhD admissions, and if so, how much? I think the last question is the one most people mean to ask when they ask the general question of whether to pursue the MA in philosophy. What people really want to know is, will the MA in philosophy substantially increase my chances, given my situation, of "succeeding" in PhD admissions? The conventional wisdom is that MA programs in philosophy are meant to support applicants who for one reason or another do not shine brightly from their undergraduate experience or other experience in philosophy. Frequently that's due to the applicant's lesser-known undergraduate institution, or undergraduate institution with a weak or unorthodox (out of the mainstream) philosophy department. Also it's due to the applicant's not having sufficient connections to strong letter-writers. Sometimes it's due to the applicant's not having majored in philosophy or having spent intervening time outside of philosophy. Sometimes it's due to the applicant's weak performance as an undergraduate or inability to produce a strong writing sample. MA programs may give a serious boost to applicants in these positions, though they probably give less of a boost to applicants who are already fairly strong or who attended a strong undergraduate institution (or institution with a strong program in philosophy). "Boost" is important here. Someone who attended Harvard for undergrad, didn't major in philosophy, and then attends Tufts for the MA, may do very well in philosophy admissions not mostly because of a boost given by the Tufts program. For this reason (and not to "pick on" Tufts in particular), it's very difficult to say Tufts is the best program, where "best" program is defined as the program that gives the greatest boost to applicants. Perhaps Tufts brings in people who already were going to do the best overall, and Tufts merely allowed those applicants the time and attention to produce a quality paper. In my limited experience, the best thing that an MA program can do for an applicant is to give an applicant connections to strong letter-writers. The second-best thing that an MA program does is it gives applicants a great environment to produce a strong writing sample. Finally, I think MA programs simply pad an applicant's academic pedigree. Hence programs like Tufts and Brandeis are really helpful to people who attended lesser-known undergraduate institutions. I do not regret my decision to spend $50,000 on an MA in philosophy, nor do I regret my decision to spend $7000 on applications to programs, even though I failed to gain admission to a PhD program. Here's why. I wanted to know that I gave it "my all." I knew that the other option was to become a lawyer, and I figured that I could do well enough as a lawyer to pay off the debt. I also believe that studying philosophy is important in itself. I am a better person, or at least a more informed one, for my devotion to academic philosophy. I studied with some amazing people. And now I'm at an Ivy League law school, and I'm doing very well here, in part because I can think very critically about the law. I'm very fortunate to have had these opportunities. Good luck to you.

I think it's a tough call. Departments typically want to admit people who are more likely to accept the offer of admission. Obviously that a person will accept the offer is not a conclusive reason to admit an applicant, but it's often a reason in favor of admitting an applicant. To the extent that your mention of your spouse's presence indicates something to that effect, the mention is likely only to increase your chances of receiving an offer. Having said all that, do realize there is such a diversity of views among people who may read your application, that it's impossible to state an exceptionless rule about how a statement like this one will be treated. My sense is this: I think it's quite human of you to mention that you have a personal connection to a school or department, and my hunch is that it's worth mentioning, provided that you also are a strong fit for the department for professional, philosophical reasons. Finally, I'll say that, given the intense competition among applicants, and given the long list of considerations that are probably far more important than personal ties, it's unlikely that your mention of the personal connection will be the thing that changes the result of your application.

This is a good time (maybe a bit late, actually) to say that I'm now confident that I will be unable to participate to the extent as I did last year in philosophy admissions. Many people relied on my blog as a quick summary of what's happening in the course of the admission season. I won't repeat everything here, but feel free to read my longer statement at the blog (https://faircloudblog.wordpress.com/). Here, I will suggest a few things to the 2015 applicants. First, when you receive funding information from departments, upload that information here. This portion of my site requires little maintenance, so I expect that it will work for users this year as last year. Second, if you're bored, consult the results of last year's Philosophy Admissions Survey, posted here. The survey gives you 90+ examples of actual successful (and actual failed) applicants from the 2014 season. You'll see immediately how difficult it is to predict how a candidate will do in philosophy admissions. Third, I hope someone will take my place this season. Maintaining a site like this requires some basic Internet skills, a lot of time and effort, as well as punctuality and good judgment. It may also be helpful that the site manager has a decent reputation among those who would use such a site. Finally, it's enormously helpful that the site manager has actual connections to strong graduate philosophy applicants, as I did last year, and is herself an applicant. EDIT: Fourth, I recommend that you consult the history of notifications, which I neatly compiled here. I would love to hear from you all this season, even as I busily devote myself to the JD program at the University of Pennsylvania. Please email me at ian dot faircloud at gmail. In the meantime, I truly wish you the very best this admission season.

Thanks, Monadology. Also, there's some info available here: http://faircloudblog.wordpress.com/funding/. But not too many people have submitted info on MA programs.

I think I agree with the sentiment here, but I'll add this: Certainly some admission decisions do come down to GRE scores. Absolutely some departments use cut-offs. But I hear Gnothi_Seauton's sentiment as, "Look, when your scores are even decent, it's very unlikely that your application will be set aside because of your scores." Of course not everyone will apply with decent scores. If I earned a 145 on quant and believed that I could score much better with practice, then I would absolutely retake the GRE. Philosophy students score very high on the GRE, so a 145 is a black eye on an applicant. Fortunately, many departments are thoughtful enough to read deeply into an applicant's file, as was the case for this success story, above. As Gnothi_Seauton points out, this success story comes from someone who attended NYU.

Has anyone analyzed the data concerning correlation of attending a Top-20 National University or Top-20 Liberal Arts college and being admitted or wait-listed to a T20 PGR department? I'm very curious to see whether applicants who attended stronger undergraduate institutions are far more likely to be admitted to a T20 PGR. I'm also interested in speculating about whether attending a top college *alone* makes a difference in success -- that is, if two qualitatively otherwise-identical files that differ in this way will be generally be treated much differently by admissions committees. Conventional wisdom is that two such files ought not to be treated differently but that those files would be treated differently (perhaps much so). To the first question: My quick look through the data suggests that there is a correlation. The people who attended these elite colleges were admitted or wait-listed to something like 29% of the T20 PGR departments to which they applied. The people who did not attend these elite colleges were admitted or wait-listed to something like 18%. But I'm not particularly well-qualified to read (or interpret) this data.

We have data on this. Last season, three applicants reported on the comprensive survey that they have undergraduate GPAs below 3.00. Of these three, two of them reported that they were wait-listed or admitted to T20 PGR programs. The other reported that s/he was shut-out. Notice that BOTH OF THESE successful applicants were attending top-20 liberal arts colleges or national universities. Conventional wisdom is that applicants should draw attention to this kind of flaw and offer a reasonable explanation for it. My take: I would do this, but I would check with letter-writers to see whether they could go to some special lengths to make sure that the departments don't toss your application. I could see a professor placing a phone call or sending an email, in addition to touching on this in the recommendation letter. Ordinarily this sort of thing may not be welcomed by admissions committees, but yours is an extraordinary case. If one of your recommenders has a personal connection, this makes sense to me. Also this: Obviously, obviously, something in your file must blow them away. But that's true for everybody

Every month or so, there's a post on this forum about GRE scores, whether to retake, how important they are, and other things. These are great chances to discuss particular scores and to get some personal encouragement or feedback. In the meantime, do check the other posts on the forum related to this. Last season, we had fruitful discussions on the importance of GRE scores. As someone who scored very well and who teaches GRE for a national test-prep company, I maintain this position: most departments, whether they acknowledge it, do roughly use score cutoffs; but once an applicant survives this cut, the scores become almost irrelevant. These cutoffs aren't particularly high for most departments, from what we can see. We have a lot of data on this. Check out the results of the comprehensive survey, and do a quick glance through the history on the grad cafe results search. We learned last season that people are fairly honest about these things on grad cafe. (For brevity's sake, I won't elaborate here.) Here are a few qualifications of the above. I know from personal experience (first-hand knowledge of an actual department's process) that departments are not as predictable as we would like them to be. Sometimes an applicant's file falls into the hands of one or two professors who have very unusual criteria by which they evaluate the file. Some professors, in complete seriousness, do not know how to read GRE results. For instance, professors add the verbal and quantitative scores together to form some kind of super-score. This is a horribly flawed way of evaluating an applicant's GRE scores, and in fact, ETS has warned about this before. Still other professors attach no weight to GRE scores or, perhaps worse, weigh the scores heavily. I know this from personal contact with people on admissions committees. But it's also evidenced in the way that some departments boast about their students' GRE scores. Another caveat: Master's programs may treat the scores differently, on account of their belief that scores make a difference in PhD admissions. Again, from personal contact, a professor once told me that, for this very reason, she thinks it's a bad idea for a master's program to ignore GRE scores. If there's a cutoff, what's the cutoff? Roughly, I think scores in the 160s look good on paper. I think a very high score on one test area (e.g. a 168-170) can distract from a modest score of upper-150s on the other area. If you've tried very hard and are sitting roughly in the low 160s, I probably wouldn't retake, unless you feel like you have extra time on your hands. As I write this, I assume that many of you could devote your time to improving a writing sample or impressing a letter-writer, which could be time-better-spent.

I'm excited to hear more from you, Perpetuavix, and others about the survey. I especially appreciate your post (http://perpetuavix.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/some-notes-about-the-data-set/) regarding the limits of the survey. My own take is that the survey results are helpful, though the conclusions we draw from the results have a large margin of error. At the least, I believe the survey results offer us much more about philosophy admissions than the advice and personal experiences reported to us from professors and peers. For example, from professors I hear multiple, conflicting reports about the helpfulness of various pieces of an application file. From peers, I hear a lot of speculation about, e.g., the importance of GRE. We now can look at the profiles of 80+ applicants and see roughly how they fared. No one can rightly deny that this is very helpful and a big step in the direction of cracking philosophy admissions (if the thing can be cracked!). It sounds like you've begun to draw conclusions of some value. Again, I'm so glad to see that someone competent to interpret the data is offering us some (even tentative) conclusions. In the meantime, you rightly suggest that the next person to conduct a survey should try to avoid the problems with my survey. I completely agree. I also think that it would be helpful if the next person is *qualified* to write the survey. I have no relevant formal training; I have just a sense of what we all want to know about philosophy admissions. Perhaps the next survey could be a team effort, with at least one highly qualified person participating in the development of the questions, design, and administration. Let's also start a list of all the drawbacks of my survey and the challenges that we face with future surveys. Here's a start: First, I couldn't get enough participants. If we had another 50 or 100 participants, I assume the results would be way more helpful. Second, I could only reach people through the Gradcafe forum. In my experience, the people on this forum are generally better applicants than those not on the forum. Third, I changed the survey after receiving a lot of responses, on account of the fact that many of the respondents were getting survey fatigue and exiting the survey before entering data on all of the schools to which they applied. I also suspect that some people were worried about privacy and decided not to provide the details concerning programs to which they applied. (To address this, I suggest the next survey exclude the school-specific questions and simply jump to a results page in which respondents are asked to give the number of schools to which they were admitted, wait-listed, and denied in the categories of T20, T35, T50, and unranked.) Fourth, some respondents skipped quite a few questions. I chose to make almost every question optional in order to encourage participation. We need to think about whether this was the best approach. The problem is this: philosophy-types are opinionated, and it's very difficult to write a long survey which contains only questions that every participant is willing and able to answer. More to say . . . !

Hence my forewarning on the page: "No doubt this is not the most organized way to gather and present the data." Yes, it's not great. Please contribute by reorganizing the data for us!

I'm so glad to see the first reaction! Thanks so much for the post. And regarding the suggestion that there may be some difference in performance between continental and analytic applicants: intriguing! Don't be surprised if we don't hear much from people in the coming weeks. It's midsummer, and I would venture a guess that many folks are away from the site.

The results of the comprehensive survey of applicants to philosophy graduate programs have been published at faircloudblog.wordpress.com/philosophy-admissions-survey. Please read the brief notes in bullet points on the survey page before reading the results or offering comments.

When I have time, I'll post an updated MA placement chart (as I did above).

Now that it's May, I'm checking in. We received 101 responses, though some of these responses are incomplete enough to be excluded from the data. In any case, I'll post the raw data soon. I'll give a few thoughts and ask others to give their thoughts, as well.

Just to clarify here: I actually got word of the Stanford offer from Tim O'Keefe, and it is reflected in the chart above (#9). Or do you mean that a second person was admitted to Stanford?

Yeah, I've been operating according to what I called the "T7", the first seven programs that Leiter mentions on his site. Leiter writes: "Among terminal MA programs, the top program in the country (in terms of faculty quality) is Tufts University. After Tufts, several other terminal MA programs have very strong faculties: Arizona State University, Brandeis University (their M.A. program is relatively new, so has a limited placement ecord), Georgia State University, Northern Illinois University, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Virginia Poytechnic Institute & State University. Other terminal M.A. programs with strong faculties include University of Houston; University of Missouri, St. Louis; and San Francisco State University. Other M.A. programs also worth considering for students with the right interests would include California State University, Los Angeles; Colorado State University (esp. for applied ethics); Ohio University; Texas Tech University; and Western Michigan University." I assume -- but maybe incorrectly -- that Leiter means to say that Tufts + these other six are programs with "very strong faculties." The other programs have "strong faculties." Then there are some "worth considering," in his words. I don't mean to endorse Leiter's ranking ("ranking" may not even be the right word for this). It is, however, the ranking that I think most people have viewed. I think it's the most influential of them. I completely agree that it would be nice to expand this list. Does anyone have data on these other programs? I'd like to add them. That way we can see for ourselves which programs placed better. I have a feeling that Leiter's system isn't going to perfectly correspond with the placement data this year or any year. And I've said in this forum that I believe UMSL is an excellent place, maybe better than some in the T7. In terms of placement, I know UMSL has done well before.

I heard something interesting. I heard that the faculty at GSU tends to steer some students away from top programs on the grounds that those students are better fit for study at lower-ranked programs. These are students who are perhaps not making the highest grades. Now, there's a reason that I said, "I heard that . . . ." This is hearsay, and though it comes from a source that I've come to trust, I wonder whether everyone at GSU would say that it's accurate. Certainly I would want to know whether Tim O'Keefe thinks this is accurate. If GSU does steer some away from top programs, this could be relevant in evaluating its placement record. For what it's worth, at my MA program, my professors seem to encourage everyone to apply widely. So everyone is told to apply to top programs as well as lower-ranked programs. (Again, it's worth noting that "lower ranked" programs are often excellent places to study philosophy. All this judging based on PGR ranking can really be a distraction sometimes.) Also it's worth noting that at my MA program, grades are pretty inflated. I think that's really common among American graduate programs in any field. Not everyone gets a 4.0, but many of us do (or did).

Tim, Thank you so much for giving us the update. It turns out that UW Milwaukee, Brandeis, Tufts, and Georgia State all have solid records this year. Since so many of us quickly judge a placement record according to PGR ranking, I compiled this early draft of placement as I see it now. Obviously we will update these records as we hear more. In my view, a placement record must be judged also by the share of applicants that is admitted to top programs. On that measure, Brandeis comes out looking good. Over 40% of Brandeis's applicants to PhD programs were admitted to T20 programs. Two of these were T10s. That's the kind of record that Tufts usually posts. But UW Milwaukee has 6 of 14 in at T25. It would be helpful to know how many of Georgia State's applicants were shut out. If none, then Georgia State's record is impressive by other measures. The placement records indicate that any one of these four schools will help position strong candidates for success in graduate admissions. Note also that the "Other" and "NR" stuff could be critical. For instance, UW Milwaukee has someone in at Pitt HPS, which is listed as "Other." Brandeis has someone at an Ivy League law school, which is listed as "Other." NR stands for "Not ranked, philosophy program." EDIT: I may have misunderstood someone about the Tufts record. I'm waiting for confirmation, but more than one of these placements may belong to the same person at Tufts!! Obviously that could dramatically diminish the quality of the record! I'll post an update when I can.

SEVEN MORE MINUTES UNTIL THE END OF THE 2014 APPLICATION SEASON. I wonder whether there's any horse-trading going on right now. I know that a friend of mine was told that she could reply to a T10 offer as late as midnight tonight.