Well hi, fellow Kyoto School fan! You should DM me, I know some people you could talk to!
With respect to PhD programs in the Anglophone world, though, the only ones I can think of are Hawai'i (as @Olórin pointed out) and Boston College (which has David W. Johnson).
Hello! I'm currently an MA student and my main research interest is East Asian philosophy. My background is more focused in Confucian/Neo-Confucian philosophy but recently I stumbled into 20th century Japanese philosophy and have become particularly enamored with it. I've been trying to do research on PhD programs with faculty who write on this topic (mostly Yuasa, Watsuji and Nishida) but haven't had all that much success. It's not the end of the world if I don't have any luck with this search but I figured posting here wouldn't be a bad idea. Does anyone happen to work in a department with anything close to this area? Thanks in advance!
Honestly, I think you can narrow down your list quite a bit. If you go to any of the solid MA programs - Tufts, NIU, UWM, Brandeis, GSU (in roughly that order?) - you will have a solid shot, provided you perform well, at PGR top 10-20 programs. So, if I were you, I would probably just apply to the terminal MAs and maybe a couple of good but realistic PhD programs, and drop all of the lower-tier ones (BGSU, Washington, ASU, SIU, Kent State, etc.). (Not that those are necessarily bad programs.)
This should definitely not be the case at any of the terminal MAs you're considering, especially not with a good sample and compelling personal statement.
Your wide reading will definitely help you, but I wouldn't, like, attach your reading list to your application or anything. My advice would be to cite the relevant stuff in your sample, and say something modest but informative in your statement about your independent pursuit of philosophy.
I hope this is helpful - please keep in mind that, while I am in a good terminal MA program and thus have some insight into the process (what kinds of people get here, what my profs say, etc.), I have never been on an admissions committee. Good luck!!
Honestly, I think you can narrow down your list quite a bit. If you go to any of the solid MA programs - Tufts, NIU, UWM, Brandeis, GSU (in roughly that order?) - you will have a solid shot, provided you perform well, at PGR top 10-20 programs. So, if I were you, I would probably just apply to the terminal MAs and maybe a couple of good but realistic PhD programs, and drop all of the lower-tier ones (BGSU, Washington, ASU, SIU, Kent State, etc.). (Not that those are necessarily bad programs.)
This should definitely not be the case at any of the terminal MAs you're considering, especially not with a good sample and compelling personal statement.
Your wide reading will definitely help you, but I wouldn't, like, attach your reading list to your application or anything. My advice would be to cite the relevant stuff in your sample, and say something modest but informative in your statement about your independent pursuit of philosophy.
I hope this is helpful - please keep in mind that, while I am in a good terminal MA program and thus have some insight into the process (what kinds of people get here, what my profs say, etc.), I have never been on an admissions committee. Good luck!!
For those who are applying again next year, make sure you look into application fee waivers. You may qualify even if you don't think you would. If you're worried about funds, this may enable to you to apply to more schools than you originally budgeted for. My second time I applied out I was surprised I was able to save $200. One thing you gotta watch is the deadlines for these waivers. Sometimes they are only available two months before the app deadline itself. They need time to approve it before you hit "Submit" on your app. (E.g., give you a promo code)
check out the recent alumni for LPS, I count several software engineers and lawyers and actuaries - so it seems LPS folk might have an easier time on the non-academic market than those coming from a more traditional philosophy program.
https://www.lps.uci.edu/grad/alumni.php
It might be worth trying to chat with a few of them, my recent experience is that people are usually willing to talk with prospective students about their time in grad school.
Hey! I'm a masters student at UWM.
With respect to political philosophy, UWM is actually pretty strong.
UWM has two professors working in political philosophy: Blain Neufeld and Stan Husi. This translates to what courses we can take as graduate students. Last semester, for example, there was a graduate class being offered on political freedom (with Husi), and this semester there's a class being offered on public reason (with Neufeld).
Your choice is a tough one! I've no idea what's going on political philosophy-wise at Tufts. Your interests might also change over the course of your time there. Still, I hope this helps !
I don't know about any CSU schools. But I'll say that if your only concern about UNM is that there aren't other universities around, then things are looking pretty good, especially because Albuquerque otherwise seems like a cool place to live. Stony Brook is also good, I don't think you have to worry about their placement relative to UNM's placement (anecdotal experience, please take it with a grain of salt).
So between those two schools? Follow the money. Follow the weather. You'll be too busy in a master's program to notice what other universities are doing anyway (a doctoral program is a little different, it helps to have other programs around, especially when it comes to external committee members).
So you chose to go to a MA program instead of going to the top-10 program when you applied out of undergrad? I am just curious; you just didn't like the programs that you were accepted back then?
@originalcoconuts I am glad you are not coming to my department. I like how people are getting shut out and you come on here to whinge about getting into multiple programs. I wish admissions had yeeted you off this continent.
tbh I'm here for this. Like what kind of understanding of the admissions racket must someone have to think admissions is a meritocracy in the first place.
And then what, @Coconuts&Chloroform wanted to be recognized as a super special snowflake for having flouted philosophical norms in the writing sample? Huh? As if norms exist because people valorize not following them, ha. Also, who tf complains about hating mainstream philosophy and then also complains about getting rejected from the most mainstream places there could be, and then also complains about getting admitted to other super mainstream places. Yes, we're all so sorry you get to proceed with a little scratch on your ego. Poor you, that must be really, really hard for you. So, uh, check the entitlement. And don't make a self-pity post about being accepted on a fucking rejection forum when, clearly, you don't know what rejection is.
Imagine making an account just to say this. I'm glad I won't be at your department, either.
1) That's an immensely uncharitable reading of my post (although it was admittedly a screed written in dejection). What I said is that my writing sample probably failed at certain programs because I flouted certain norms. I thought that people would be open to reading something that was written in a less collegiate style, and that maybe some would find it refreshing. I did not claim that I thought people would be impressed by my iconoclastic radicalism or whatever.
2) Throughout your reply you suggest that I am complaining about being accepted. No doubt that would be absurd. But I am not doing that. I am complaining about being rejected. At worst, I am complaining about a state of affairs in which I have been both accepted and rejected. This does not imply that I am complaining about being accepted. This inference is fallacious; I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a counterexample to this inference-schema.
3) Obviously my post was self-centered and is going to just rub that much more salt in the wounds of people who have been shut out. I didn't mean to do that, of course. I can't edit the post now, so it'll remain as a reflection of how I felt immediately after getting rejected from some of my favorite programs. I'm kind of a hot-blooded personality and I tend to react with strong passions immediately after hearing good or bad news. The internet isn't a great place for people like that when the relevant passions are negative ones. It allows you to express those passions to large numbers of people before the passage of time can intervene and return you to a more rational state.
In conclusion I'll just say: rejection sucks for everyone, whether or not you've been rejected to a greater or lesser degree. For the people who have been rejected to a greater degree than I have, I sympathize greatly. Obviously that was never in doubt. But it's entirely appropriate to be pissed about getting rejected even just to a lesser degree. Whether or not my post was a bit much, let's not gatekeep people who have just their dreams denied, whether those be some or all of their dreams.
It's not clear to me that the UT placement record is that much better than CUNY's. In fact, if you look at the people who ARE successfully placed at CUNY, most of them are in your AOI, so I wouldn't let that weigh TOO heavily on you. I hope you hear something from them. I'm pretty excited about having gotten into CUNY after thinking I was going to get shut out of the top 15 (also waitlisted at UNC), but I'm still considering my options.
Current CUNY GC student here. While I've only been here for a year, I've talked with a number of more senior students and there are a couple of factors that, while they may not entirely exculpate CUNY's less-than-stellar placement record, do give some explanations. First is that a significant number of PhD students are international students-- I'd say at least 1 in 3. Couple that with the financial stress of living in NYC on a graduate student stipend and it can cause people to leave before finishing the dissertation. Differently, those who are not dissuaded by this may get caught up with teaching extra courses at the expense of neglecting writing their dissertation. These two types of cases in mind, it is not entirely easy to place people in jobs when they don't actually get their PhDs. Another difficulty is that some of the program's key areas, Phil of Logic+Math, Mind, and Language, and of course the pull that Carroll et al. have for Aesthetics, have not been areas that hire as frequently as, say, Ethics, Social Phil, and Political Phil (just doing some cursory looking at https://www.aerodatalab.org/philjobs-trends ). It might be the case that CUNY is not preparing competitive applicants for these less popular areas compared to other schools with similar strengths. On that, however, I can't say much -- they're not my AOSes so I don't really keep up with those hires/trends.
When CUNY does finally send out decisions, people on here can feel free to message me with any questions about the program and I'll do my best to answer. There will be a prospective students day in early April, so hopefully y'all get your decisions sooner rather than later in order to make the appropriate travel arrangements.
I think you should consider an unfunded offer the same as a rejection. Don't pay for an MA in philosophy. Just don't. (Say you pay for an MA, and you get into a PhD after. Great, now you have debt, you have peers with fancy MAs that they did not pay for, and you'll feel bad about not having waited the extra year like they did to apply to funded MAs.)
Only go to The New School with a 100% scholarship and an independent source of income that is not loans. It would be a bummer to move to New York City, have three roommates, work outside of school, commute 45+ minutes to campus every day, and STILL HAVE DEBT.
Is the question not whether you should give an accept/decline response, but whether you should reply at all? In that case, I'd say definitely reply to the email to say thanks, and that you'll be in touch later once you've had time to think about your decision. Might also be a good idea to ask questions about the program if you had any.
If you continue in academia you will quickly learn to take the accolades of your teachers with a grain of salt, especially your undergraduate professors.
I am second to Olórin. No one can know the likehood of getting into a PhD program in philosophy based on such an information you provided, because applicants are evaluated mostly by letters and writing sample. And as far as I know, no top program cuts off applicants just based on their GRE. Admission committee are not stupid and they are fully aware that GRE doesn't really show the intelligence of applicants. Letters of recommendation and writing sample are two most important factors in getting admission, and then GPA.
Assuming that your writing sample is really good as you described, it may be that the topic you picked out is not very good for the writing sample. Even if programs like Columbia and NYU have philosophers working on those areas, it is very likely that your writing sample would be read by someone who doesn't know anything about Heidegger and Spinoza. And those are not so favored figures in the analytic tradition, even for the programs like Columbia.
Even if a school has people in your concentration, it might not consider you a good fit. Columbia has a large enough continental contingent, but NYU is very analytical (in addition to being a top-3 program). Unless you demonstrate a solid training in analytical philosophy, you are unlikely to get in (this may even be true for Columbia). I'd imagine you get in somewhere with those grades, solid recommendations and a stellar writing sample, but your lack of analytical background (assuming that your sample is a good gauge of your background) and low GRE scores might shut you out of top programs. The low GRE scores are especially going to be a problem at public universities, where they are often unable to secure funding for applicants below a certain GRE cutoff.
Have hope though! None of us here know enough about your application to be able to say anything definitively. At worst, you may have to do an MA to prove that your grades are not a fluke (which is what the GRE is supposed to do) and that you have an adequate analytical background.
It doesn't matter that you took "only one math course". While that can explain a pretty low 149 Q score to the admission committees, it will not explain your 153 V score (which is just as bad) since you must have taken lots of philosophy courses. I would suggest retaking the GRE and reapplying, because schools usually have cutoffs for low GRE scores. A low GRE score can have a more significant bad effect than a high GRE score can have as a positive effect. This is why people on this forum mistakenly say that the GRE doesn't matter as much you think. The reason they think it doesn't matter as much is mainly because getting a 168 vs 162 doesn't make that much of a difference. But, getting a very low score can impact your application very badly, mainly because the whole point of requesting the GRE scores in the application is to make sure that good student records are also tested on a school independent and fairly-objective scale.
Otherwise, schools will be letting in a lot of people that get away with cherry picking their courses and befriending professors who give them inflated grades (and trust me I've seen this happen a lot) or people who pay others to write all their essays. Thus, I would say that if your application is solid, you should try to retake the GRE, get a respectable score, and you will definitely have better luck in the next application season.
The sense I've gotten thus far, and the advice I've received from all of my professors, is that in philosophy, unlike many/most other humanities fields, it's actually more about the program than the particular person you want to work with. If you're a historian and you want to work on China, it's not really going to help you that there are lots of Europeanists and Africanists also in the department. But if you're a philosopher doing, say, language, then it will be very important to also be quite competent in related core areas like mind and metaphysics, and so it will be important that the department has people working in all those areas. Sub-areas of philosophy are pretty interconnected. So if the person at school B is the only person you'd be really interested in working with, then it might be better to opt for school A, where even though it's not a perfect match, there are at least multiple people qualified to supervise your work.
Take this with a grain of salt since I'm not done with this whole process myself, but I'm just relaying what I have found helpful myself.
Also, I'm sorry to go off-topic here, but I had to ask about this. How is John Searle a phenomenologist??
I don’t want to give out too much information about myself, so I will merely say that I'm someone who’s either currently at some PhD program at UT in the College of Liberal Arts, or who has graduated from such a program--or left it--within the past years. What I will say here is based, first, on my experience as a PhD student who is deeply interested in philosophy and is well-informed about philosophy programs and admissions, and secondly, on conversations that I’ve had with philosophy PhD students at UT. I am someone with first-hand experience of the funding situation at COLA, and I can confirm with a very high degree of confidence that everything that I will say here applies to the philosophy department, which shows very similar patterns with respect to funding as other COLA departments (for instance, the funding situation in philosophy is quite similar to that in psychology, history, and the French and Italian department). Also, this will be a ridiculously long post. But given your strong interest in obtaining information on what’s going on with UT, I feel the length is justified.
Now first of all, I would like to congratulate you on your offers from WUSTL and UT. This speaks very well of you as an applicant. The list of programs that you're applying to is an ambitious one, but the two offers you've had so far constitute a reason for some optimism. I would also like to clarify that almost none of what I will say below reflects on the staff or the faculty at UT, who are overall quite excellent and supportive. I'm very fond of them, and what I will say below is mostly an indictment of COLA and UT admin. (That said, there ARE some systematic issues within various departments at UT which are not the fault of any particular individuals, but for which the individual departments as a whole do seem to have some responsibility. This is quite understandable, though. No place is perfect).
Also, very importantly, this doesn't mean that UT doesn’t have a philosophy program that might be worth attending for many people. From what I’ve heard, it offers a great education in a relatively healthy environment (there are some climate issues, but they have been improving, and unfortunately, this is a problem that almost every philosophy department faces). It also offers modest, but still realistic, job prospects. Moreover, I am told that it has some tremendous strengths in various areas of ‘core’ philosophy. All this means that it won’t be entirely ruled out as a sensible choice for many applicants.
With all this in mind, I will state in the following some negative issues concerning funding that affect COLA in general, and the philosophy department insofar as it is a member of COLA. The philosophy program at UT has a great reputation, but as things stand, the funding is low enough that, unfortunately, many students will probably find that it is a significant factor weighing against UT program-choice wise.
In a nutshell: The funding situation at UT--subject to some qualifications having to do with occasional additional sources of funding--is very, very dire, and in my mind, extremely unjustified given the high ranking of many programs at UT’s COLA, including the philosophy department. I can avow that, at least in my program, the responsibility for this is entirely due to COLA. The professors, staff and students are great, and this awful funding situation is there despite the tremendous efforts of the staff and the professors to redress it. But unfortunately, there are few signs of improvement in sight in the short term. UT is a great place to do a humanities PhD in many respects, and it will be a perfectly sensible choice for many people. But you need to think things through very carefully if you are only offered the basic funding package, especially if you have better funded offers from other high-ranking departments with a good placement that would be a good fit for you.
I hate to say things that may discourage some people from accepting a UT offer, and making this post was a difficult choice. But the funding situation is something that has to be brought into the light and that needs to be addressed, in the interest of openness and in the interest of fairness to graduate students in general. I will explain now why the funding situation is so bad. In my opinion, COLA has created a punitive system that borders on being exploitative and that has deleterious effects which go beyond the fact that students receive very limited financial support. This post is made entirely in good faith, and my only hope is that it will make some difference, however small.
To begin with, you mention that you’ve been offered 15k per year. This is what students with a Master's get as part of the basic funding package at COLA. Sadly, it can be even worse. Students without a Master’s get only $13,700. This is without discounting taxes (luckily in Texas you only pay federal taxes). Now this certainly sounds low, but that alone doesn't capture the whole extent of the funding inadequacy.
First, in absolute terms: The cost of living in Austin is very high, and it's ever-hiking. For one thing, lots of very well-paid people are moving there for tech, etc. For another thing, student enrollment is also increasing, which again leads to higher demand. 15k is extremely little money. We're talking about $1,162.50 per month after taxes. To give you an idea of how a short way that goes, the rent for a very ‘modest’ one-person studio (a very small place with hardly any comfort) is at the very least $800 if you want to live within cycling distance from campus. Which means that if you want to have a more-or-less comfortable standard of living with your UT stipend, you'll have to share with at least two more people and live away from campus, at say, a 30-minute bus commute. Once you do that, the stipend does become livable. Your rent will be around $500, and you can find yourself a good gig with some nice fellow students. But the point is, unless you have other sources of income, you will not be able to live as an independent adult. You're going to have to keep playing the rooming game for the foreseeable future. Without a Master’s your income decreases by about $100 more, so the situation is even worse.
Second, in relative terms: Many other universities with top liberal art programs have much better funding than UT. Many of these places give you almost twice as much funding. And many of these places have lower costs of living. Furthermore, the reason is not because UT isn’t a wealthy Ivy that couldn’t possibly compete with those places. UNC, Pittsburgh, and Rutgers are all state schools with funds and overall reputation comparable to UT, yet UT is the only philosophy program that pays its grad students so little. Why is UT the only one that can't measure up to those standards?
So the money at UT is low, both in absolute terms (here I mean what you can do with the money in Austin, not in the sense of ‘disregarding geographical cost of living variations’) and in relative terms, compared to other universities with top humanities programs. That’s not the whole of it, though. There is a high probability that you will be severely overworked at several points during your PhD. The key thing here is: UT is a massive state university. Very often, enrollment in the courses students TA/AI for are very high, so you'll have a lot of work to do. For instance, if you're a 'reader' (basically a TA, but you only grade exams), you could find yourself with up to 80 students to grade. Imagine you have to grade 4 essay assignments for 80 students throughout the semester, plus holding office hours, plus attending lectures, plus keeping up with the lectures’ material. All in your first semester. This is, to be fair, the absolute worst that could happen, since there is a cap at 80 students per reader. But it happens regularly, and every semester one or two unlucky students across several COLA departments find themselves in this dire situation.
There are also disparities in the funding distribution, which seem arbitrary and unfair to many students. As mentioned, all students with a Master's make more. Students with an AI-ship make yet a bit more (still a very low amount). Perhaps this has some justification, since UT is a state school, and it probably is required to have some qualifications-based compensation scheme. But there are other variations in funding that seem more problematic.
A very great additional source of disparity in funding comes from 'competitive' fellowships that COLA assigns. That there are such fellowships might sound like good news, and it is, to some extent, since it means that at least some students do receive a more acceptable level of funding. But the structuring and allocation of these fellowships is deeply flawed in many respects. Let’s have a look at what the situation is.
Fellowships fall into two categories. First, there are certain recruitment fellowships that some people are offered when they start their program. Some of these are fairly decent. Some of them come with 20k per year, some even with 30k per year. Some of them come as well with two years free of teaching. The problem is that it's extremely opaque how these recruitment fellowships are allocated. Sometimes, there is a year where, inexplicably, 3 out of 8 people are in this sort of fellowship in a given department. Then another year, no one is. Then another year, people in some department get a one-off $5000 bonus for the first year, and sometimes also for the second year, etc., as a sort of mini-recruitment incentive and instead of getting a full-blown fellowship. But again, the whole process comes across as very opaque. Sometimes people get this extra funding because they have offers from other places, sometimes it's because they negotiate, sometimes it's because they seem 'promising'. (UT has many excellent students, but I think it would be fair to say that the consensus among COLA students, including those on recruitment fellowships, is that it’s not clear at all that the fellowship recipients are systematically more promising or more achieved than non-recipients. And overall, who receives or not a recruitment fellowship is a very poor indication of who will be more successful in the program.)
I won't go into many details concerning these recruitment fellowships, again, to protect my identity. I neither claim nor disavow to have benefited from any of this additional funding. However, one thing I can tell you is that almost every student would agree with my assessment that the process of allocation is very opaque. In fact, people often have no idea that other people are getting so much less or so much more money until they find out about it by coincidence.
There are also some continuing fellowships. Each semester two or three of these are awarded in each COLA department. They carry a 10k award and a temporary respite from teaching duties. The allocation of these is a bit less obscure and more meritocratic. But they're not that generous, and you should only expect to receive them once, during one semester, in your entire PhD. (Contrast this with how students at many other top universities have a guaranteed two years of teaching-free fellowship.) Also, many cohorts have more than 6 people, so out of sheer arithmetic some people will never get these fellowships. Very occasionally, people also get a very generous one-year scholarship from COLA, but those are a far shot, and should carry minimal weight in evaluating the funding prospects at UT.
In any case, the take-away from these disparities in funding among students is this: Some of the extra funding allocations, particularly the special recruitment scholarships, are enough to leave those few students who receive them with a funding package comparable to what other top humanities programs at highly regarded universities offer. But most people won't get that extra funding, and they will have to make do with very paltry funding. Furthermore, the funding disparity is very pronounced, all but random, it is the result of an opaque process, and it introduces a seemingly arbitrary rift between, so to say, a group of haves and a group of have-nots among the students. This does give rise to some tensions in an otherwise fairly healthy graduate student community. Also, I see little justification for creating these disparities. I have never seen anyone reject an offer from a top 10 program in their area just because UT gave them a generous recruitment scholarship, so there isn't even the justification that such incentives are being used to attract particularly strong candidates who'd otherwise go elsewhere. At most, it may influence someone's choice to go to UT instead of another program which is more or less equal in terms of reputation, or instead of a less highly regarded program that would nevertheless be an excellent fit for them. Creating such a strong disparity among graduate students seems to me a high price to pay for such a marginal potential benefit.
Furthermore, there are very little funding opportunities for the summer across COLA (two or three spots every year), and they are allocated (this time more understandably) in very haphazard ways.
About tuition fees: You’re guaranteed a significant remission, but there’s still a non-negligible gap left of a few hundred dollars. Usually, the staff at some departments manage to get COLA to give them extra funding to cover the gap, but this is not at all guaranteed. Therefore, sometimes you'll have to cover the gap out of pocket at the beginning of the semester. Also, international students have a whole host of extra costs to deal with out of pocket, so you should bear that in mind if that applies to you.
The one thing that is decent is insurance, which doesn't have such terrible co-pays, etc.
So this is the funding situation. Inadequate, unequal, unprincipled, opaque. Yes, it's very bad, and quite unusually bad, even among humanities programs, given the high reputation of UT’s COLA departments. Moreover, the funding situation has a real impact in the overall program quality.
For one thing, unless you are one of the lucky few with additional funding, your quality of life will be low without other sources of income. You'll have to live fairly modestly, and you'll be stressed. The housing market in Austin is very tough, and even tougher without money. Also, many other students will have more resources than you. Most STEM PhDs make vastly better wages than COLA students. There are many rich kids at the undergrad level. This means that you're one of the poorer people in the market (apart from the poorest bracket of undergraduates who can’t even afford a private room). This will considerably increase the stress associated with finding adequate housing. And unless you're independently wealthy, you might have to work in the summer, which takes away time that you could be spending on your PhD. Inevitably, this damages the COLA programs because it undercuts student performance.
Also, as I said, the funding situation is very unequal. People are unhappy about this. I’ve met philosophy graduate students. They get along very well, and the people on fellowship would never lord it over the students not on fellowship. But all students aware of the unequal distribution of funding, and it makes things at least a little bit tense. Furthermore, as already said, the allocation is opaque and it seems to have little justification in terms of recruiting good students. Moreover, people feel undercompensated relative to other top-notch programs. It really, really hurts when students from other departments visit and people at UT learn just how much better humanities students have it elsewhere. Usually, the visiting students just can’t believe how bad it is at UT. I’ve seen it, and it is pretty messed up. And overall, people feel undervalued. Some people, I gather, even feel like UT is exploiting them by using them as cheap grad student labor.
Plus, this all has a clear effect on recruiting. The philosophy department lists on its website its acceptance rate as '1 in 16'. (Apologies to whoever made that decision. I understand that other departments report their numbers similarly, so UT must do so as well in order to avoid being left at a disadvantage.) However, the offer rate is 1 in 8. The reason is they have to give out twice as many offers as they have spots, in order to fill them up. This is extremely puzzling for an excellent program that has recently been making senior hires like crazy and that Brian Leiter, a prominent philosophy blogger, has singled out as on-the-rise. The reason, sadly, is the low funding. People who have offers from other top departments usually just choose not to attend UT simply because the funding is better elsewhere. The recruitment scholarships try to make up for this. But the reality is, again, that UT’s humanities programs are very good, but they are, for the most part, not the absolute best, and it would be extremely difficult for someone admitted at a program at the absolute pinnacle of its area to be swayed by a COLA fellowship. Also, it is very hard to make sure that the fellowships do go to the best candidates who are considering other programs at a similar level of desirability as UT’s COLA programs. Inevitably, the fellowship allocations end up scaring away sometimes very good candidates by giving instead the scholarships to candidates that turn out to be less good in the end.
Now many of the students at UT are very good. Everyone I’ve spoken to agrees that UT certainly has a student body worthy of a high-flying university all across COLA. But the truth is, many of the better candidates choose not to accept UT’s offer. Which, unfortunately, does mean that UT doesn’t end up with as many strong students as other places whose overall reputation is comparable to UT’s. Moreover, many students are overworked and under financial strain, as I said. People aren't able to focus enough on publications and CV building. The funding for conferences, etc., is also limited. Hence, UT students in general underperform in publications and job placement relative to what you’d expect from students at a department with so much potential.
(Here, a small aside: You wonder why UT does this rather than recruit fewer, better-funded students. But the issue is that UT needs an army of TAs to do the work. UT has a lot, a lot of undergraduate students in very large classes. So there have to be at the very least 55 graduate students or so at any given time. The problem is especially pronounced in philosophy. Just to give you an idea, even with many people having to TA for courses with over 50 students--sometimes even 80--on their own, this is not enough. Sometimes the philosophy department has to get students from other programs to TA for the philosophy courses, including literature students, etc. So, plain and simple, UT is recruiting large swathes of underpaid and exploited graduate students in order to be able to cater to their humongous undergraduate student body. For more details on how bad the situation is, just look up the student protests that have been taking place recently at UT and the totally disappointing response by UT admin.)
So the situation is very bad. Atrociously bad funding with very real effects on the program quality. Now, you occasionally hear that it’s not too bad, since there are many positive things to UT’s philosophy department. This is quite true, but I think it is important to be realistic about UT’s limitations. (The following is based on my conversations with philosophy people and on my own research.)
Something that is often mentioned is UT’s placement record. But truth be told, it is, at best, a very shaky record for a top 20 department in philosophy. UT’s had some excellent people who've placed in departments like,Northwestern, UC Davis, St Andrews, Claremont, Yale NUS, CUNY. But something like that happens about twice every three years. So only about 1 in 15 people get a top deal like that. The rest of the people get mostly very modest TT appointments at places without a graduate program, if they do manage to get a TT appointment. Many people end up only with postdocs, and many just leave the profession altogether. Only 50% end up with a permanent appointment. It saddens me to say it, but most other top-20 departments in philosophy have a noticeably better placement.
A qualification: UT’s placement is better than that of most non-top 20 programs, so you are still indeed better off at UT in this regard than outside of the top 20, and especially outside of the top 25. But you need to be aware of the harsh fact that you will only get a good job coming out of UT if you’re the absolute best in your year. Also, note that I have overall been assuming that you’re aiming for the kind of job that students in top 20 departments usually want to get. If you really want to teach, etc., your views on how good UT’s placement is might be different. And as always, you should bear in mind that rankings are only a rough guide to how good a program might be for you and for your job prospects. There is a tendency for the better departments to study at to be near the top, but this is only one data point, and you should always make a holistic assessment of departments.
People also bring up the fact that UT has recruited three senior people in the past year in philosophy. This is true, and these people are excellent. This is exactly the kind of thing that UT should be doing! There are rumors (endorsed by Leiter) that this will catapult UT into the top 15. This, indeed, could, and should, happen, given how good the faculty and the new hires are. But you need to take into account that a lot of the senior faculty members at UT are retiring soon. I have it on good authority that Michael Tye and Galen Strawson, whom you mention, seem safe in this regard. But at least five very senior faculty members have all either confirmed their retirement or are close to it, from what I’ve heard from various philosophy people. True, many other people in other places are close to retirement. I don't imagine McDowell, Kripke, Field, etc. will occupy full-time positions much longer. But it remains to be seen how the rankings will react to all these shifts, and whether UT's new hires will be enough to leave it in the top 15, or whether UT will only manage to maintain its top 20 status due to the inevitable retirements coming down the road. (Again, I’m assuming you care about rankings.)
Also, people sometimes highlight how the funding package lasts 6 years, as opposed to 5. But the thing is, 6 years under a crushing excess of workload plus maybe, just maybe, one semester of fellowship simply doesn’t stack up favorably against the 5 years of generous funding with a light workload and two years free of teaching duties that you’d get at some other places. Many students fail to finish their PhD within 6 years, and when the funding runs out, they are in a very dire situation. This is because many people won't have Texas residence, so the fees hike, etc. (since being a TA doesn't count towards establishing residence). So I’d say that, all things considered, 6th year funding doesn’t make up for the deficiencies in the basic funding packages.
About the only good thing that comes out of all this is that you’ll get a lot of teaching experience. That helps. For example, many students at MIT and NYU get very little teaching experience, and this occasionally lowers their job prospects. But this is a relatively small advantage that UT offers. The reason is that UT is stuck in a very awkward middle. Due to prestige bias, the students are not seen as good enough to consistently have a decent shot at research jobs (7% vs the 40% success rate of MIT/NYU), but they are seen as ‘too good’ for teaching jobs such as those found at community colleges, etc., where they’d be considered a flight risk.
So what’s the take-away from all this? I’d say: UT’s subpar funding means that its philosophy PhD program is not what a top PhD program should be in every respect. You’d think its being in the top 20 and making all these excellent new hires would mean that it is, but it is not. Despite the awesomeness of the faculty and staff, the bad funding and general COLA/UT admin crappiness undermine, to a non-negligible extent, the many positive aspects of the department. And it’s not just a little bad funding-wise. Given UT’s top-20 status in philosophy and in other COLA departments, the funding situation is, quite frankly, nothing short of a disgrace. Of course, I’m sure the philosophy department is still a good enough program overall to count as worth pursuing under certain circumstances, especially since it seems that the faculty are great, and they will give you a great education. (At least that was my experience in my own program.) If you manage to secure a special recruitment fellowship, then it certainly can be a very attractive offer which is worth accepting. And you will have at least some chance of getting a good job. But you need to think things through very, very carefully if you don’t have additional funding.
So if you feel like you MUST do a PhD (which is why almost all of us end up irrationally doing a PhD, ignoring all the odds against us), AND if you have no other offers from a comparable program with better funding, then I’d say, yes, you should do it. You will struggle, you’ll be stressed and you’ll feel undervalued relative to other students from top-notch departments. Still, you’re better off at UT than in a place that is too lowly ranked and/or not a good fit, assuming you’ll do a PhD anyway. BUT if you have an offer from another top 25 program with strengths in your area, or from a place that would be a particularly good fit (even if unranked), I would think about the UT offer really, really carefully unless you’re independently wealthy, etc., and/or you really feel like you have to work with someone there and/or you get one of the special fellowships.
About WUSTL: I would say that 27k offer will go a very, very long way. Unless you can negotiate a better offer and you really want to work with UT’s mind people, I would say: think about it very, very carefully. It totally is the case that you might be better off at WUSTL. If you get any top 20 offers from places with strengths in your area, you should take them, unless there’s a very strong reason against them. The prestige bias is so overwhelming that you’d most certainly be better off there, even if UT offers you a fellowship.
Finally, once more, I want to emphasize that every department in COLA has great people, including the staff, the faculty and the student. Pretty much all the problems that I described have to do with COLA and with UT admin, and they exist despite the great people that you find within every individual department. Unfortunately, UT Austin admin just doesn’t care about its humanities graduate students, and it’s letting down many excellent people that deserve to be in an environment where they can thrive free of financial stress.
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