AOI Competitiveness

[Flossifer]

I'm guessing that while different schools have their own specialties, there are probably general trends regarding the competitiveness of the various AOIs. For example, if there are plenty more applicants for philosophy of mind than philosophy of aesthetics, it should be harder to get a spot in a top program for the former than the latter (provided, of course, that there are a comparable amount of spots available for each AOI).

Does anybody know whether this is the case? And if so, which AOIs are more competitive than others? I would imagine that mind/ethics/epistemology/metaphysics are rougher than, say, logic/math/ancient/science?

[maxhgns]

Admissions committees do often seem to try to balance the distribution of areas of interest across the program, and within cohorts. So if a program has a smaller number of specialists in a popular subfield, it will often be harder to get a spot there than if you were applying to the same program but in a subfield with more faculty in it, or in a less popular subfield. Some subfields have very poor representation in North American doctoral programs, however, and that can make gaining admission to those programs in those subfields harder. Aesthetics is like that, for example: there are fewer applicants, but many, many fewer viable programs and supervisors (several of which attract students from multiple subfields). You can always, of course, change your AOS once you've been admitted somewhere.

Having said all that, I don't think it's worth trying to game the system. It's pretty complicated, you're probably not a good judge of the state of things yet, and different programs follow different admissions procedures. Just apply to the programs that interest you, for the work that interests you. Do bear in mind that it's better for you if your intended programs have multiple faculty working in your area of interest, however (although that may not be possible for smaller or lower-status subfields).

[thursday]

People on adcoms are aware that what one ends up specializing in is quite likely to be different from whatever specialization one applied with (even if most applicants don't seem to think that's the case!) so although admissions decisions have to do with areas of interest in that, yes, programs like to have a nice distribution of interests, and a specialist in whatever you write your sample on will be reading your work if you get to a certain stage of the process, I don't think that decisions have to do with areas of specialization or fit to quite the degree that people on this forum think they do. Or at least in my experience they didn't!