Establishment

Congrats, I hope you get in. A&M's looking pretty good for logic-y stuff. They've just picked up Easwaran this year, but already before had Burch, Menzel, and Hand. Those middle two also have had pretty good placement rate records.

It's like dfindley 2.0

Yes, it's true.

Damn, Tufts putting in that work. An MA program beating out Notre Dame, Virginia, Colorado... I was always curious how the top PGR MA programs would fare if included in the overall PhD ranking.

It's certainly something to be considered when looking at one's acceptances. Whether it's 37% from top-5 programs, or 31% from top-10...

To be fair, his complaint might be that he's now too excited to fall asleep in time for class tomorrow.

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/02/pedigree-matters-and-prospective-students-are-entitled-to-know.html

Just chiming in to say you've got some rad interests.

This isn't being particularly fair to Ian. First of all, he says placement is only one factor to consider when deciding between MA programs. Second of all, he's responding to a question on how to evaluate placements. Ian isn't arbitrarily saying Program A is better than Program B. He's saying that when one compares placement records at Program A, B, C, and so on, some programs under a certain criteria (i.e., per-capita placement to PGR top-20 programs) have higher averages than others. There's nothing arbitrary or made up about this. If you think he has his facts wrong, that's one thing. Otherwise, I don't think there's a lot of room for argument. If UWM has a PGR-placement-average of a 44.4 and GSU a PGR-placement-average of 44.1, then UWM is technically #3 in placement, but no stronger claim is being made than just this. It's obvious that any given year one or the other program might switch between #3 and #4. And it's clear that there are other considerations such as financial resources and fit. But again, the OP is asking how to evaluate placement records, and Ian was providing an answer.

Don't forget that it only takes one acceptance, and it's still early. Much success waits for you just a little further ahead.

Here are two rough ranking attempts (you'll want to pay attention however to their methods, as they may or may not reflect your own priorities): https://phiplaces.wordpress.com/placements-2007-2014/ http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/07/job-placement-2011-2014-comparing-placement-rank-to-pgr-rank.html You'll probably have to balance the various possibilities. The ideal department is one that places graduates directly into tenure track top-tier universities (research, liberal arts, etc.). After that you'll have to balance between schools which have a tendency to directly place students TT into lower ranked universities and schools which tend instead to send students to post-docs first before finding TT at higher ranked universities than the aforementioned departments. Perhaps the most relevant data set however is the placement record of those professors you intend to work under/advise your dissertation. Maybe you'll also want to ask students in the department/recently graduated from the department on what their experiences were like. What was the support like? Was there a lot of success to go around? Is the department's website accurate? Maybe a poor record can be explained by less than motivated students. Etc.

Also, while I agree with what Max has said, my point on some fields being not equal to others, I had a much more shallow view in mind which is that every academic subject has its orthodoxy (by which I mean something more generally than whatever the term is usually taken to mean) which needs to be taught. It's only natural that if we take a reputational survey of a department, department's whose members are strong in the orthodox areas are going to be valued/or should be valued higher than those whose members are only strong in some heterodox areas. Be it economics or philosophy. in 2015, you need to know your neoclassical theories of economics even if you're a Marxist. In 2015, you need to know your M&E even if you think metaphysics is bunk. (qualiying of course that whereas Marxist economics is probably incompatibile with neoclassical economics, I don't mean to be drawing an analogy in philosophy. I don't think Chinese or feminist philosophy is opposed, but rather is (as what said above) often just a part of things like metaphysics and political philosophy.)

I'm perfectly fine with other metrics. The Gourmet Report is what it is, a reputational survey (and we can qualify that it's a reputational survey of a particular sort (with biases favoring M&E, composed of certain persons, etc.). But there have been attempts in the past to produce placement based rankings (I believe a grad. student at Duke had one for PhD programs, and I believe a grad. student from NIU had one for MA programs) and there's nothing wrong with those and serve a valuable role.

One might do a statistical analysis on this page: http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/2011/departments.asp to see if there is a correlation. Not that this would directly prove/disprove anything, as the subfield specialties referred to here are a distinct evaluation from how the mass ~300 evaluators evaluate which I was referring to above.

Perhaps, but the evaluators' responses converge nonetheless, so it would seem it works out somehow. Given that there are ~300 evaluators, perhaps for the most part people grade one way. Or, perhaps, there's a correlation between a department getting high scores based on their general philosophical strength, and a department getting high scores based on having multiple, highly rated particular field strengths.

"This report ranks graduate programs primarily on the basis of the quality of faculty. In October 2011, we conducted an on-line survey of approximately 500 philosophers throughout the English-speaking world; a little over 300 responded and completed some or all of the surveys." Leiter and a ~50-person board (which includes people like David Chalmers, Alex Rosenberg, Jason Stanley, Michael Forster, Allen Wood, Timothy Williamson, etc.) come up with a list of people to invite. I'm not really sure what more you want short of just emailing every professor out there. This seems like a pretty conventional opinion. Not just the areas you listed, but say mathematical logic too, which I do, and other areas. But these are minor areas compared to what the big hitters are. Not all areas of study are equal to each other. But this is beside the point, as there's no way to indicate this based on the information given (http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/reportdesc.asp). Some evaluators judge a department's strengths on the whole (so see the former point), and others judge just based on their own areas of expertise.

Perhaps you come from a privileged position of being well integrated into the academic philosophical community and in a position to judge for yourself the objective worth of a philosopher's quality, but many undergraduates, myself included a few years back, are not. I didn't know who was well-regarded in philosophy. I didn't know which programs were regarded as good. My professors didn't know either because they were largely continentalists and doing their own thing. So while reputation results might not be interesting to you, they're pretty interesting (and valuable) to other people who would like to know these purely subjective matters that are subject to feedback loops, because they are nevertheless inherently valuable. If the philosophical community thinks that program x is a top-10 program, I'm going to believe there is some merit to their claim and use it to orient my own school search.

He also has a history of reporting on how sexist gender biases affect student evaluations of professors (a second time), advertising a discussion space for people to discuss discrimination and disadvantages in the philosophical community (advertising a blog on what it's like to be a person of color in philosophy) (advertising a blog for female job seekers in philosophy) (advertising a chicago-area women in philosophy workshop) (advertising a post on Feminist Philosophers on legal advice for victims of sexual harassment and assault) (advertising a study regarding the imbalance of men in philosophy compared to other fields), mocking college provosts who think that sexual harassment is not a problem at their own universities, wishing that the Eastern APA would discontinue its practice of job interviews which additionally burden job candidates, deciding to join in the boycott against Illinois over its treatment of Salaita, raising a discussion on how best to retain undergraduate women in philosophy, a post on what sexual harassment can do to a victim, that students from MA programs are producing better writing samples is to the credit of MA programs, encouraging women to stay in philosophy, a networking and mentoring workshop for graduate student women in philosophy, summer program for undergraduate women philosophers, and another, seeking advice for a young, junior faculty member trying to get tenure Okay, I'm going to have to stop here. I've only been able to go as far as back as... Dec. 2013... and he's been tagging posts with "Issues in the Profession" since 2007. So I'm still missing a lot. I'm not unequivocally defending Leiter's views and actions. But let's try to keep a level head about who he is as a whole. EDIT: Perhaps more precisely put, I'm very skeptical of the claim (both empirically, and causally) that Leiter specifically targets persons in vulnerable or disadvantaged positions.

For those wondering how that math is suppose to work out, apparently Leiter was sneaky last time and had 51 schools in the top-50. So, both UW and BU fell out for SLU.

It looks like U Washington -- Seattle dropped from 43 to out of the top-50's, as well as Boston U which was 44 before, and now also out of the top-50's.

Is this a Star Trek Voyager reference? Because if so, I have an upvote locked and loaded just for you.

While writing samples are the result of institutional prejudices, can't it still be the case that writing samples serve a central place in evaluations? One might be able to identify that Candidate A from nowhere shows a lot more promise in his writing than Candidate B from an MA program, and that all Candidate A needs is the proper support.

That seems the most proper way of doing philosophy. One writes a paper, and receives feedback from their peers, be they undergraduates, graduates, professors, or a combination of both. Through getting published one must have their paper evaluated by their peers and often receive some written feedback. There's this insinuation (mind you, I didn't see this insinuation in your post, but it came up in a Leiter discussion before so I wanted to address this prejudice anyways) which is that MA writing samples are somehow "coached" by the professors and are not a good representation of one's written work. Anyone who has any experience with MA programs will know this isn't the case (and the overwhelming response in that Leiter discussion was to this effect). While I don't think writing samples give pure insight into one's academic ability since there is an unfair playing field, I do think they are by far and away the best (and only real) source. The courses an individual has taken might tell more about about the candidate as a person, but they tell me nill about the candidate as a someone capable of doing (that is, writing) philosophy. (And I say this as someone who is suspicious that they were admitted to MA/PhD programs two years ago based on factors other than their writing sample, and who has henceforth discovered that they can't write to save their life.)

Can confirm. I and everyone I knew that applied to UConn was waitlisted. edit: which really made me feel really less special afterwards I also wonder how their recent increase in prestige will affect their admissions process. They seemed to carry a long (though at times too long) waitlist out of necessity, with few people pursuing it as their top choice. That might not be the case anymore.