Glasperlenspieler

Economy goes down, applications to grad school go up.
Also, since several grad programs are not accepting applications, the number of programs that you can apply to is lower. It's thus not too surprising that the programs accepting applications will see an increase in applications.

Economy goes down, applications to grad school go up.
Also, since several grad programs are not accepting applications, the number of programs that you can apply to is lower. It's thus not too surprising that the programs accepting applications will see an increase in applications.

I agree with Glasperlenspieler; also, increase in applications =/= increase in competitiveness. A number of these applications are likely to be from people who decided to throw their name in at the last minute due to the ongoing recession. I also believe that CMU does not have an application fee, which may have contributed to the drastic increase in applications. Either way, I'm trying not to dwell on it too much at this point and just focus on the things that I do have control over. 

Economy goes down, applications to grad school go up.
Also, since several grad programs are not accepting applications, the number of programs that you can apply to is lower. It's thus not too surprising that the programs accepting applications will see an increase in applications.

NSSR has never fully funded its grad students, so avoid them.
Also: do take the time to talk to grad students who are pretty far into a program. They will have a better idea of the funding challenges than those who are still in the first four years. The funding picture at many institutions sounds a lot better than it in fact is.

Your chances look just fine. But remember that you don't only get one shot at this, and also remember that if you're shut out this year, it's not such a bad thing--it buys you at least one extra year for the job market to get better, to the extent that it ever will (it never recovered from 2008-09, but it did get better after years). Besides, the in-person experience of the first few years of the PhD program is pretty important.
 
This is the part that has me more concerned, although there's obviously no way I can tell to what extent I should be, given the information you've given us. But if you strike out or don't perform as well as you'd like, I'd suggest paying closer attention to this. You don't need to apply to a PhD program with very definite plans (except outside the US and Canada, anyway), but you do need to have some good ideas about what you want to do. You should narrow it down to two or three areas of specialization, tops. You can always change your mind and work on something completely different, but you should give departments some idea of what you want to do and who you might work with. This helps establish fit, and can also make a difference where supervisors are concerned, since departments tend to try to balance out incoming classes and overall supervisory burdens.

Hello! I understand your feelings of anxiety. “Back up” PhDs, however, are not really a thing. ASU, for example, admitted one (I repeat-ONE) PhD student this year (I know because I know her!). While they are planning to admit a cohort this year, it won’t be larger than 4 students (and will likely be closer to 1-2). Whereas there are most likely some much higher ranked schools that will end up admitting closer to 8-10 new students. Not to say you couldn’t be one of those students, but if by “back up” you mean “more likely to get in” then unfortunately I don’t think there are many of those programs out there (even unranked ones). 
 
By far, the best back-up option for you would be to also apply to some funded MA programs that have excellent placement records like Georgia State, Texas Tech, University of Houston, etc. Many of these programs are designed to assist applicants like you (strong student coming from a small/lesser-known department) get into top PhD programs! I would highly highly recommend applying to at least a handful of MA programs (the fees are less than PhD applications usually). I hope this helps!! 

No, this is not an absentee advisor. If you want to present, go and present. If you want to publish, go and publish. Your advisor is there to advise, not to tell you to do things. If you want specific advice, then ask. "Where do you recommend I present a first paper?" "I'm interested in presenting at X Conference, but registration is expensive. What support can I get from the department?" 
I took a course with my advisor for all semesters I was in coursework. It was hard, because it was evident he was harder on me because I was her student. I almost failed one course and she said if I didn't redo the paper, I'd have to leave the program. I re-did because, like yours, it was a crappy paper (to their fairness, she preferred to do that than give me a B). 
All in all, I don't see why you can't meet with her and ask for feedback on how to improve as a researcher, a writer, and a historian. 

@PolPhil I agree about non-PhD postgraduate programs, and how a PhD doesn't help career prospects much if one goes into one of those. On the other hand, many of those programs are expensive (e.g. law, social work, education), so a few years out of undergrad can help one figure out if one wants to spend that money, and (ideally) save a bit, though that's dependent on situation, including the factors I mention above. That's definitely unfortunate to hear you know lots of people who take out loans on top of $30,000 stipends. 
@Glasperlenspieler Totally agreed; that's why I included family factors above as one of the (largely foreseeable) points that should affect grad school economic decisions. Can also apply to, e.g., caring for aging parents. I don't want grad school to be a place where families are discouraged (and indeed, being a grad student parent seems to be gaining more acceptance), but it's undeniable that it's tough to be one, and someone who deems parenthood/partnership as sufficiently important should take that into account. 

Both @PolPhil and @Marcus_Aureliusmake some very good points here. I would add one thing though:
I suspect the relative financial security of being a Ph.D. student is going to look a lot different for single people than it is for partnered people/people looking to start a family, as well as the relative long-term desirability of either of those two life trajectories.
As a single person with a high stipend in a relatively low-cost area, who has access to extra funding in different forms (who also entered grad school without debt, but has been financially independent for a while), I'm in a pretty good place financially all things considered. But I suspect things could feel very different if I had people who were financially dependent on me.

Both @PolPhil and @Marcus_Aureliusmake some very good points here. I would add one thing though:
I suspect the relative financial security of being a Ph.D. student is going to look a lot different for single people than it is for partnered people/people looking to start a family, as well as the relative long-term desirability of either of those two life trajectories.
As a single person with a high stipend in a relatively low-cost area, who has access to extra funding in different forms (who also entered grad school without debt, but has been financially independent for a while), I'm in a pretty good place financially all things considered. But I suspect things could feel very different if I had people who were financially dependent on me.

@Marcus_Aurelius I wish I had more time to provide hard data, and generally, I am going off of anecdotal evidence from the philosophy blogs and talking to my professors, some of whom are struggling adjunct profs (despite being at top institutions. However, I have some reservations about your argument:
For one, my point is that instead of going into a PhD program, you could be starting your career elsewhere, e.g., academic administration. Sure, your initial salary would not be very high, but over the course of 5-7 years, you'd have a decent chance of earning a decent living. Given that many PhDs end up in these kind of positions anyway, you'd be ahead if you went straight into one as opposed to spending those first 5-7 years in a PhD. Alternatively, most people don't just do a BA. These days, most people do some kind of post-graduate work, often in more particular professional fields. The opportunity cost that you have to consider is not just the cost of working for 5-7 years. It's the cost of going into a new field after undergrad (which may entail more education), which most people do anyway. If you do that instead of a PhD, I find it hard to believe that your career prospects upon graduation wouldn't be significantly better than if you fail to secure a tenure-track position or some other position requiring a PhD, as so many PhDs do. You also have to account for the fact (as you mention) if you're like the large percentage of PhDs that end up in adjunct positions, you'll be living precariously, not knowing where your next salary is coming from. Most people do change career tracks, but it's not clear that they are changing tracks to enter new fields at entry level. This point is a bit subjective, but most people I would think do not tend to regard a PhD stipend as "financially secure." Sure, you know what you'll be making for those 5-7 years. But I would imagine that for most people this is a concession, not a selling point. Most graduate students that I know take out loans on top of their PhD stipend because $30,000 is simply not enough in many markets. Again, perhaps you'll only be making a similar amount at a job if you were not in a PhD, but that would likely increase significantly over those 5-7 years. I think you hit the nail on the head when you characterized a PhD stipend as an "entry-level salary." My point is that you would no longer be "entry-level" after 5-7 years. And many PhDs end up in entry-level positions anyway, especially if you're attending a non-prestigious program. Anyway, a lot of this is conjecture, and I agree with many of your points, but I'm not convinced that any optimism about PhDs as a financial investment is warranted, even assuming that most people with just an undergrad degree wouldn't be making much anyway. In part, this is because I'm assuming that you wouldn't necessarily stop at an undergrad degree if you decide not to pursue a PhD. Note that my view might be biased for the Canadian context, where most people come out of undergrad and do some other kind of (non-PhD) post-graduate work. On that note, Canada is the most educated country in the world by some metrics, so I could see how my reasoning might not apply elsewhere.

I generally agree with what @Marcus_Aurelius says above, but I do wonder about this claim. Certainly there are such people, I'm just curious how large such a population really is. I like to think I wouldn't be devastated if I fail to get a tenure-track job when this is all done, but if I'm being honest, I'm not really sure that's true, despite my deep ambivalences about academia. The culture of Ph.D. programs is such that it often encourages one to think that a tenure-track job is the only metric of success, and this sort of thinking is, in my own experience at least, very hard to combat. 

"Even with a good stipend, most people come out of a PhD with PhD debt..." 
Do you have some evidence for this? Honest question; I'm legitimately curious. It's clear that many PhDs have debt: According to National Center for Education Statistics data, average total loan balance for PhDs not in Education increased from $48,400 to $98,800 from 2000-2016. But how is this debt distributed, particularly with reference to quality of stipend?
A PhD in Philosophy certainly isn't a good financial investment. But, for many people, it's really not a bad one. We're only talking here about good stipends, which I'll say for the sake of argument means about $30,000+. (Extra paid teaching opportunities are also possible some places.) Starting salary for recent BAs seems to average about $50,000, but that's dependent on getting a decent job, which is difficult for many. Anecdotally, I'm two years out from undergrad, and several of my friends with Humanities BAs haven't found jobs they're happy with; the pandemic made finding a job even harder. 
Someone in a PhD program with a good stipend may be pretty financially secure, depending in part on whether they have significant other costs, e.g. large undergrad debt, a family, very expensive housing market, or high personal medical expenses. Most of the costs I've just outlined are reasonably predictable at the time of admission. (It seems perfectly doable to begin paying undergrad loans on a good stipend if one's other costs are not too high; federal loans can also be deferred while in a PhD.) Anecdotally, I'm exceedingly fortunate to be making close to $40,000 this year (incl. some summer TAing and a part-time job outside the program ~7 hrs/week). I quite want an academic job, but I'm content to have to leave academia if needed, and as far as I can tell I won't be financially harmed if that happens.
Many programs have shamefully low stipends. It's a problem. So the share of programs worth attending might be pretty small, and it's likely skewed toward prestige and institutional resources. But getting a stable job for 6 years that pays a fine entry-level salary shouldn't be undervalued, especially in an economic downturn. The pandemic sucks for many reasons, but last spring I was able to find comfort in knowing I had a job for several more years that wouldn't be downsized. All of this is to say that professors should be frank with undergrads about their chances of admission to good programs. But acadmic jobs should be one criterion among several for potential PhD students; one can want an academic job without being devastated at not finding one.
I'll conclude by saying that attending a PhD program is good career experience, as is being increasingly recognized, seemingly by both employers and graduate programs. Plus people change careers a bunch of times (Boomers have held about 12 jobs, on average), so there's nothing odd about spending 6ish years on one job and then transitioning. Adjunct hell is awful, but if one is willing to go outside academia and can explain why the PhD is relevant experience, the 5-7 years aren't at the expense of other opportunities for career advancement. Odds are only very high that graduating PhDs won't have a job if you're defining "job" as "stable academic position." (I'm assuming that finding a job is at least not harder for a PhD than it is for someone with just a BA. Although a PhD can lead employers not to hire someone for being overqualified, eligibility for other jobs seems to balance out that factor. I defer to any research on the topic.) 
TL;DR: Attending a program with a good stipend is a reasonable economic choice for many. 

Since I think it was me that used that phrase: the criterion I was referring to was funding. If a Ph.D. program does not provide tuition remission and a *livable* stiped, then it's not worth attending. This is both because a graduate degree in the humanities is a poor financial investment (a tenure-track job in philosophy is hard to come by and that's probably getting worse; a Ph.D. in philosophy doesn't adequately prepare you for other lines of work; and even if you do get a job as a philosophy professor, it probably won't pay enough to make paying off years worth of student loans an easy feat) and because having to find other ways to support yourself is almost certainly going to get in the way of doing good philosophy and making adequate progress towards your degree.
I think other criteria are important, but are less clear as thresholds. Placement is definitely important and is imperfectly correlated to rankings. The overwhelming majority of professors hired by top ~20 PGR programs got their Ph.D. at a top ~20 program (cf. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/11/where-untenured-tenure-track-faculty-at-the-us-top-20-programs-got-their-phds-2019-20.html). Elite liberal arts colleges tend to have similar hiring practices. Non-R1 universities are sometimes less prestige focused, so it would be a mistake to assume that people outside of the top-20 don't get jobs and there are other hiring trends once when gets outside of elite schools/R1s. (Some programs do very well at placing students in jobs at colleges in the same geographic region; Catholic universities have a strong tendency towards hiring PhDs from Catholic universities). Looking at placement rates is important, especially for lower-ranked, unranked programs (some such programs are very good at placement, while some highly ranked programs are not). If a program doesn't provide comprehensive placement data, that's a red flag. If a program isn't placing students on a regular basis (pre-pandemic), don't assume you will be the exception (especially post-pandemic). Advisors are important too. It might be the case that a certain professor does a very good job of placing their students, even if the program as a whole does not. Conversely, if all of the students getting jobs from a given program have the same advisor, don't assume you will be so lucky attending that program and writing a dissertation under a different advisor.

Since I think it was me that used that phrase: the criterion I was referring to was funding. If a Ph.D. program does not provide tuition remission and a *livable* stiped, then it's not worth attending. This is both because a graduate degree in the humanities is a poor financial investment (a tenure-track job in philosophy is hard to come by and that's probably getting worse; a Ph.D. in philosophy doesn't adequately prepare you for other lines of work; and even if you do get a job as a philosophy professor, it probably won't pay enough to make paying off years worth of student loans an easy feat) and because having to find other ways to support yourself is almost certainly going to get in the way of doing good philosophy and making adequate progress towards your degree.
I think other criteria are important, but are less clear as thresholds. Placement is definitely important and is imperfectly correlated to rankings. The overwhelming majority of professors hired by top ~20 PGR programs got their Ph.D. at a top ~20 program (cf. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/11/where-untenured-tenure-track-faculty-at-the-us-top-20-programs-got-their-phds-2019-20.html). Elite liberal arts colleges tend to have similar hiring practices. Non-R1 universities are sometimes less prestige focused, so it would be a mistake to assume that people outside of the top-20 don't get jobs and there are other hiring trends once when gets outside of elite schools/R1s. (Some programs do very well at placing students in jobs at colleges in the same geographic region; Catholic universities have a strong tendency towards hiring PhDs from Catholic universities). Looking at placement rates is important, especially for lower-ranked, unranked programs (some such programs are very good at placement, while some highly ranked programs are not). If a program doesn't provide comprehensive placement data, that's a red flag. If a program isn't placing students on a regular basis (pre-pandemic), don't assume you will be the exception (especially post-pandemic). Advisors are important too. It might be the case that a certain professor does a very good job of placing their students, even if the program as a whole does not. Conversely, if all of the students getting jobs from a given program have the same advisor, don't assume you will be so lucky attending that program and writing a dissertation under a different advisor.

Since I think it was me that used that phrase: the criterion I was referring to was funding. If a Ph.D. program does not provide tuition remission and a *livable* stiped, then it's not worth attending. This is both because a graduate degree in the humanities is a poor financial investment (a tenure-track job in philosophy is hard to come by and that's probably getting worse; a Ph.D. in philosophy doesn't adequately prepare you for other lines of work; and even if you do get a job as a philosophy professor, it probably won't pay enough to make paying off years worth of student loans an easy feat) and because having to find other ways to support yourself is almost certainly going to get in the way of doing good philosophy and making adequate progress towards your degree.
I think other criteria are important, but are less clear as thresholds. Placement is definitely important and is imperfectly correlated to rankings. The overwhelming majority of professors hired by top ~20 PGR programs got their Ph.D. at a top ~20 program (cf. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/11/where-untenured-tenure-track-faculty-at-the-us-top-20-programs-got-their-phds-2019-20.html). Elite liberal arts colleges tend to have similar hiring practices. Non-R1 universities are sometimes less prestige focused, so it would be a mistake to assume that people outside of the top-20 don't get jobs and there are other hiring trends once when gets outside of elite schools/R1s. (Some programs do very well at placing students in jobs at colleges in the same geographic region; Catholic universities have a strong tendency towards hiring PhDs from Catholic universities). Looking at placement rates is important, especially for lower-ranked, unranked programs (some such programs are very good at placement, while some highly ranked programs are not). If a program doesn't provide comprehensive placement data, that's a red flag. If a program isn't placing students on a regular basis (pre-pandemic), don't assume you will be the exception (especially post-pandemic). Advisors are important too. It might be the case that a certain professor does a very good job of placing their students, even if the program as a whole does not. Conversely, if all of the students getting jobs from a given program have the same advisor, don't assume you will be so lucky attending that program and writing a dissertation under a different advisor.

I think "there are no safety schools" should be understood as "there are no safety schools among the programs worth attending." With a funding structure like that (not to mention that I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone talk about Dallas's PhD program in philosophy), I'd be inclined to say it falls in the category of programs not worth attending.

Since I think it was me that used that phrase: the criterion I was referring to was funding. If a Ph.D. program does not provide tuition remission and a *livable* stiped, then it's not worth attending. This is both because a graduate degree in the humanities is a poor financial investment (a tenure-track job in philosophy is hard to come by and that's probably getting worse; a Ph.D. in philosophy doesn't adequately prepare you for other lines of work; and even if you do get a job as a philosophy professor, it probably won't pay enough to make paying off years worth of student loans an easy feat) and because having to find other ways to support yourself is almost certainly going to get in the way of doing good philosophy and making adequate progress towards your degree.
I think other criteria are important, but are less clear as thresholds. Placement is definitely important and is imperfectly correlated to rankings. The overwhelming majority of professors hired by top ~20 PGR programs got their Ph.D. at a top ~20 program (cf. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/11/where-untenured-tenure-track-faculty-at-the-us-top-20-programs-got-their-phds-2019-20.html). Elite liberal arts colleges tend to have similar hiring practices. Non-R1 universities are sometimes less prestige focused, so it would be a mistake to assume that people outside of the top-20 don't get jobs and there are other hiring trends once when gets outside of elite schools/R1s. (Some programs do very well at placing students in jobs at colleges in the same geographic region; Catholic universities have a strong tendency towards hiring PhDs from Catholic universities). Looking at placement rates is important, especially for lower-ranked, unranked programs (some such programs are very good at placement, while some highly ranked programs are not). If a program doesn't provide comprehensive placement data, that's a red flag. If a program isn't placing students on a regular basis (pre-pandemic), don't assume you will be the exception (especially post-pandemic). Advisors are important too. It might be the case that a certain professor does a very good job of placing their students, even if the program as a whole does not. Conversely, if all of the students getting jobs from a given program have the same advisor, don't assume you will be so lucky attending that program and writing a dissertation under a different advisor.

Since I think it was me that used that phrase: the criterion I was referring to was funding. If a Ph.D. program does not provide tuition remission and a *livable* stiped, then it's not worth attending. This is both because a graduate degree in the humanities is a poor financial investment (a tenure-track job in philosophy is hard to come by and that's probably getting worse; a Ph.D. in philosophy doesn't adequately prepare you for other lines of work; and even if you do get a job as a philosophy professor, it probably won't pay enough to make paying off years worth of student loans an easy feat) and because having to find other ways to support yourself is almost certainly going to get in the way of doing good philosophy and making adequate progress towards your degree.
I think other criteria are important, but are less clear as thresholds. Placement is definitely important and is imperfectly correlated to rankings. The overwhelming majority of professors hired by top ~20 PGR programs got their Ph.D. at a top ~20 program (cf. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/11/where-untenured-tenure-track-faculty-at-the-us-top-20-programs-got-their-phds-2019-20.html). Elite liberal arts colleges tend to have similar hiring practices. Non-R1 universities are sometimes less prestige focused, so it would be a mistake to assume that people outside of the top-20 don't get jobs and there are other hiring trends once when gets outside of elite schools/R1s. (Some programs do very well at placing students in jobs at colleges in the same geographic region; Catholic universities have a strong tendency towards hiring PhDs from Catholic universities). Looking at placement rates is important, especially for lower-ranked, unranked programs (some such programs are very good at placement, while some highly ranked programs are not). If a program doesn't provide comprehensive placement data, that's a red flag. If a program isn't placing students on a regular basis (pre-pandemic), don't assume you will be the exception (especially post-pandemic). Advisors are important too. It might be the case that a certain professor does a very good job of placing their students, even if the program as a whole does not. Conversely, if all of the students getting jobs from a given program have the same advisor, don't assume you will be so lucky attending that program and writing a dissertation under a different advisor.

Since I think it was me that used that phrase: the criterion I was referring to was funding. If a Ph.D. program does not provide tuition remission and a *livable* stiped, then it's not worth attending. This is both because a graduate degree in the humanities is a poor financial investment (a tenure-track job in philosophy is hard to come by and that's probably getting worse; a Ph.D. in philosophy doesn't adequately prepare you for other lines of work; and even if you do get a job as a philosophy professor, it probably won't pay enough to make paying off years worth of student loans an easy feat) and because having to find other ways to support yourself is almost certainly going to get in the way of doing good philosophy and making adequate progress towards your degree.
I think other criteria are important, but are less clear as thresholds. Placement is definitely important and is imperfectly correlated to rankings. The overwhelming majority of professors hired by top ~20 PGR programs got their Ph.D. at a top ~20 program (cf. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/11/where-untenured-tenure-track-faculty-at-the-us-top-20-programs-got-their-phds-2019-20.html). Elite liberal arts colleges tend to have similar hiring practices. Non-R1 universities are sometimes less prestige focused, so it would be a mistake to assume that people outside of the top-20 don't get jobs and there are other hiring trends once when gets outside of elite schools/R1s. (Some programs do very well at placing students in jobs at colleges in the same geographic region; Catholic universities have a strong tendency towards hiring PhDs from Catholic universities). Looking at placement rates is important, especially for lower-ranked, unranked programs (some such programs are very good at placement, while some highly ranked programs are not). If a program doesn't provide comprehensive placement data, that's a red flag. If a program isn't placing students on a regular basis (pre-pandemic), don't assume you will be the exception (especially post-pandemic). Advisors are important too. It might be the case that a certain professor does a very good job of placing their students, even if the program as a whole does not. Conversely, if all of the students getting jobs from a given program have the same advisor, don't assume you will be so lucky attending that program and writing a dissertation under a different advisor.

Since I think it was me that used that phrase: the criterion I was referring to was funding. If a Ph.D. program does not provide tuition remission and a *livable* stiped, then it's not worth attending. This is both because a graduate degree in the humanities is a poor financial investment (a tenure-track job in philosophy is hard to come by and that's probably getting worse; a Ph.D. in philosophy doesn't adequately prepare you for other lines of work; and even if you do get a job as a philosophy professor, it probably won't pay enough to make paying off years worth of student loans an easy feat) and because having to find other ways to support yourself is almost certainly going to get in the way of doing good philosophy and making adequate progress towards your degree.
I think other criteria are important, but are less clear as thresholds. Placement is definitely important and is imperfectly correlated to rankings. The overwhelming majority of professors hired by top ~20 PGR programs got their Ph.D. at a top ~20 program (cf. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/11/where-untenured-tenure-track-faculty-at-the-us-top-20-programs-got-their-phds-2019-20.html). Elite liberal arts colleges tend to have similar hiring practices. Non-R1 universities are sometimes less prestige focused, so it would be a mistake to assume that people outside of the top-20 don't get jobs and there are other hiring trends once when gets outside of elite schools/R1s. (Some programs do very well at placing students in jobs at colleges in the same geographic region; Catholic universities have a strong tendency towards hiring PhDs from Catholic universities). Looking at placement rates is important, especially for lower-ranked, unranked programs (some such programs are very good at placement, while some highly ranked programs are not). If a program doesn't provide comprehensive placement data, that's a red flag. If a program isn't placing students on a regular basis (pre-pandemic), don't assume you will be the exception (especially post-pandemic). Advisors are important too. It might be the case that a certain professor does a very good job of placing their students, even if the program as a whole does not. Conversely, if all of the students getting jobs from a given program have the same advisor, don't assume you will be so lucky attending that program and writing a dissertation under a different advisor.

I think "there are no safety schools" should be understood as "there are no safety schools among the programs worth attending." With a funding structure like that (not to mention that I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone talk about Dallas's PhD program in philosophy), I'd be inclined to say it falls in the category of programs not worth attending.

I think "there are no safety schools" should be understood as "there are no safety schools among the programs worth attending." With a funding structure like that (not to mention that I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone talk about Dallas's PhD program in philosophy), I'd be inclined to say it falls in the category of programs not worth attending.

I think "there are no safety schools" should be understood as "there are no safety schools among the programs worth attending." With a funding structure like that (not to mention that I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone talk about Dallas's PhD program in philosophy), I'd be inclined to say it falls in the category of programs not worth attending.