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There are occasionally situations where the prestige of the university itself is helpful, but I wouldn't make any decisions based on that. Similarly, QS rankings might represent something that's potentially useful, but it really shouldn't have much of an effect on your decision. In truth, for similarly-ranked programs (e.g. comparing "top-tier" programs; comparing programs that are top 25 but not "top-tier"; etc.) what matters the most is your fit with the program (so in other words, whether there are people you'd really want to work with there and whether the program's strengths map onto your interests). All else being equal, strength in a broad range of subfields is also a huge plus, since your interests may change dramatically over the course of getting a PhD. For what it's worth, I would say that someone would need to be an excellent fit for Harvard or MIT and would need to have very specific faculty in mind in order to justify choosing either over NYU, and this is an example where I think that making the decision based on the enormous prestige of the former would be a big mistake for most applicants. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would disagree with me on this though.

I'm not aware of anything like this, but I think that participating in a community like that would be a great opportunity for current grad students and I'm glad that you brought this up. Anyone else have any suggestions?

I do want to point out that while it suggests your application may have been weaker than some others, it's not fair to yourself to say that it was weak full stop. I suspect that the ratio of qualified PhD applicants to accepted PhD applicants is currently at an all-time high, and getting rejected when you're in many cases competing against literally hundreds of other applicants for a number of seats in the low single digits does not mean that you're unqualified, incompetent, or not worthy of attending a PhD program. As a current PhD student who only barely made it into a good program in what I suspect was a much less competitive year, I have no doubt that I would have been completely shut out if I had been applying this year (and yes, I was similarly much more confident about my chances than I should have been). There's often an element of luck in these things when acceptance rates are so low, and I'm pretty sure that there were many applicants just as capable as me (if not more capable than me) who were shut out that year. So don't be too hard on yourself, regardless of the final outcome. Waiting for applications to come back is awful, rejections are soul-crushing, and it's normal to feel miserable about the whole thing. And moreover, while it's important to not give up hope while you're waiting to hear back from the remaining programs, it's also important to remember that the vicissitudes of academic philosophy should not be taken as indicative of your worth as a student or as a human being.

Don't worry, you're far from the only one. If there's one thing that academic philosophy has taught me, it's that it'll break your heart over and over again.

The job market in academic philosophy is a nightmare; but then again, so is the job market in academia in general (and at least for the time being, the job market in many other fields as well). It's not strictly true that you have to be at a top 20 PhD program to get a job, but it certainly helps, and many well-respected PhD programs have shockingly bad placement rates (including several in the top 20). So without overstating it or catastrophizing, I think that "grim" is a pretty accurate descriptor for current job prospects in philosophy.

I'd say that the majority of graduate seminars where I am are focused on discussion, but there are also seminars that involve heavy lecturing and seminars that involve different students doing presentations on the course readings each week. It really varies a great deal from professor to professor. A very small percentage of courses available to graduate students are split with undergraduates, although graduate students are typically welcome to audit undergraduate courses on subjects that they're less familiar with.

Oh wow. This is not entirely unexpected, but also really unfortunate for this cycle's applicants. I hope that things turn out alright for everyone.

Current grad student here: Definitely recommend talking to graduate students about it, in my experience they tend to be fairly knowledgable about these sorts of things. With that being said though, I do think that should probably wait until you've already gotten in somewhere and are strongly considering attending.

Just a word of caution, I know someone who transferred out of the graduate program at Rice after his second year despite having a strong interest in philosophy of mind because he felt that the department wasn't well-rounded enough. Granted, he did have other AOIs, so if you're exclusively interested in working in mind, I could see that choice making sense. But realize that the department's lack of other strengths at the moment could potentially pose some issues down the road.

Started this year at a department in the PGR top 25, and no, it's not at all. Everyone here is extremely friendly and interested in discussing each other's work, classes, interests, etc. There's a strong collaborative spirit here, and I can't say that I've had a single bad experience with another graduate student so far. I've heard some bad things about a couple of departments, but such places are by far the exception and not the norm. It does seem like department culture largely dictates the way that graduate students treat one another (with some exceptions of course), which is why it's so important to talk to as many people as possible on campus visits in order to try to gauge such things.

Just thought I would follow up on this: My application status hasn't changed on their portal either. I emailed the graduate program coordinator and was told that they have contacted everyone who has been accepted or waitlisted. Strangely enough, she didn't say anything about whether they've sent out any rejections yet, although I haven't seen anyone report an official rejections so far. She told me that I am "not among those being admitted or on the wait list at this time", and that "things could still change in the next couple of weeks, but for now we cannot admit you". I am taking this as an implicit rejection, since it seems like they leave a lot of people in limbo between official waitlist and official rejection each year, and as far as I can tell they haven't issued any proper rejections this year. I just wish that they would actually tell those who weren't officially accepted or officially waitlisted that they were rejected, since it seems inconsiderate to needlessly keep people in the dark for so long.

Oh okay, I didn't realize that they sent out solicited responses at all. It didn't seem like anyone had had any luck with that, so I didn't even bother trying to contact them. If you don't mind me asking, who did you solicit the status update from? I might give that a shot if I haven't heard anything from them in a few days.

So just to clarify, nobody has successfully solicited a rejection from UT Austin yet, right? I think that I've decided to accept one of my offers, but I don't want to commit until I've heard something definite from Austin.

If this information is helpful to anyone: I've already declined MA offers from Houston and GSU, and I will be declining an offer from Brandeis and a waitlist from Milwaukee as well.

Just chiming in to agree with the last two replies. As with most things, just as it's bad to blindly accept the PGR rankings, it's also bad to blindly reject the PGR rankings (obviously, I'm not accusing anyone here of falling into either of the above camps, but people of both of those varieties are definitely out there). Regardless of how objectionable Leiter's past conduct has often been, the PGR rankings are useful and remain a fairly accurate measure of certain factors that are really important when choosing a graduate program.

My impression is that the current faculty expects the placement record to be completely different in the coming years, given how drastically the department has been changing for the better recently. They've started to emphasize building up PhD students to have stronger CVs, and I would imagine that having letters from any of the new faculty members would really bolster one's chances on the job market. I've also heard from a very reliable source that Irvine will be making several additional senior hires in the next couple of years, which will no doubt also help. In most cases I do think that past placement records reflect what future placement will look like, but it's important to not ascribe too much significance to past placement when a department has made so many enormous changes of this sort so rapidly.

Ah okay, that actually makes a lot of sense. I appreciate the clarification, contemporary continental philosophy is definitely an area of relative ignorance for me.

Sven Bernecker works on German idealism, and David Woofruff Smith works on Husserl and phenomenology. Admittedly, I don't know much about how continental philosophy is studied today, but don't both of those qualify as continental philosophy, the latter being 20th century continental philosophy? Also, another factor which may impact their ranking is that Martin Schwab is a professor emeritus there, and his primary research interest is 19th and 20th century continental philosophy. I don't doubt that the PGR rankings for continental philosophy are not entirely accurate, but it's not like they just picked names out of a hat in order to determine those rankings.

Sorry to dredge up this (somewhat) older topic, but after seeing the new PGR rankings, I thought that it would be a good idea to follow up on this. Besides Irvine's overall ranking moving up a few notches this year, it is now quite well-ranked in epistemology (now in Group 3 with MIT, Toronto, UNC, UCLA, and Pittsburgh among others; was not previously ranked in epistemology at all). This can be attributed to the new senior hires made in the time since the last PGR report, namely Duncan Pritchard, Annalisa Coliva, and Karl Schafer. My sense is that the non-LPS department is taking major strides with its new hires, and that it will continue to improve in the next few years. If your concerns about the strength of the non-LPS department weren't already assuaged before this, I thought that this might help.

It's currently the middle of the night, but I just received an email from UMass Amherst telling me that a decision letter had been posted! It was generic, so I assume that a bunch were all sent out just now.

I received an email earlier today notifying me that I'm on a short waitlist at UBC, I'm pretty happy about that.

Why take the "prestige" of a university with a recognizable name if their philosophy program is weaker? NYU has the best philosophy faculty in the world in a tremendous number of areas, and their program has one of the strongest placement records that you can find anywhere in the field. I know that one might not be inclined to care less about the first point if their particular AOI isn't one that's a major focus at NYU, but the department has an incredibly diverse set of interests, and if you're interested in something that NYU does focus on, there's a very strong chance that theirs would be the best program to attend. It really wouldn't make much sense to weaken your philosophical education just so that you could attend a more "brand-name" university.

Wow, CONGRATULATIONS! I'm glad that you presumed incorrectly, even getting to see your signature's reversal from NYU (presumed) to NYU in real-time was exciting.

I never received an email from Yale, just checked the portal and found a rejection there. There wasn't some email that didn't make it past my spam filter either, the email was just never sent. Apparently a few other people experienced the same problem, but this definitely wasn't typical.

So I still hadn't heard anything back from UCLA, but I solicited information from them on Friday and received a response just now... Apparently due to a "clerical error", my application status was conveyed incorrectly, so while I was no longer under consideration, I wasn't issued a rejection. I really shouldn't have gotten my hopes up for being on the waitlist at UCLA, since this definitely stings more than just having received a proper rejection from them, but there's not much that I can do now.