Brown

[philstudent1991]

I was perusing Brown's PhD placement, and I must say it seemed particularly abysmal. They seem to produce very few PhDs, and almost none landed TT jobs (some post docs, some part time positions, and even a high school teacher. One went to Berkeley law (as a student, not a professor), although it was misspelled on the site (Berkley).

 

Does anyone know why this might be? Is Brown not a strong department? Is there something I am missing? Just curious...I won't be going there this time around (maybe in a couple years though).

[Establishment]

I was perusing Brown's PhD placement, and I must say it seemed particularly abysmal. They seem to produce very few PhDs, and almost none landed TT jobs (some post docs, some part time positions, and even a high school teacher. One went to Berkeley law (as a student, not a professor), although it was misspelled on the site (Berkley).

 

Does anyone know why this might be? Is Brown not a strong department? Is there something I am missing? Just curious...I won't be going there this time around (maybe in a couple years though).

 

Welcome to the job market.

[philstudent1991]

Welcome to the job market.

Don't downvote that lol he is right. But it does seem Brown fares worse than most, especially for such a prestigious school and well ranked (PGR and US News) school.

[Establishment]

Don't downvote that lol he is right. But it does seem Brown fares worse than most, especially for such a prestigious school and well ranked (PGR and US News) school.

 

I'd downvote my comment.

[jeremy2014]

Welcome to the job market.

This is not helpful. Almost everyone knows what the job market is like. philstudent1991 is asking why BROWN has such terrible placement records.

[maxhgns]

This is not helpful. Almost everyone knows what the job market is like. philstudent1991 is asking why BROWN has such terrible placement records.

 

 

Actually, I think most of us don't really understand what the job market is like until fairly late in our graduate careers. Sure, we all know to parrot the line that it's bad, but... it's worse.

 

As for Brown... their placement doesn't look abysmal to me. Their student body is comparable to ours (31 vs. 30), and we both graduate between 2-3 students a year, on average. That seems pretty normal to me. Yes, the bulk of their academic positions in the last two years have been postdocs--that really is just the job market doing its thing, though. Postdocs are a new normal, and the TT-job-out-of-grad-school is no longer the paradigm we're operating under. What you really want to see is TT jobs for those who graduated more than two or three years ago. And that's where you start seeing some, though not many. 'Course, the collapse of 2008 is doubtless partly to blame.

 

Now, I'll grant you that their placement record is no all-star like Princeton's, and in terms of TT placements, it's worse than its nearby Gourmet buddies. But, honestly, it doesn't look terribad. Those recent postdocs actually make it seem decent, and it looks like their students have had some success with their Plans B.

 

 

As for the reasons why... well, Brown's got a small department (15 faculty), and it's a lesser Ivy (so although it has the Ivy glow, it's got way less than Princeton/Yale/Harvard). Being fairly small also means that unlucky years look worse on the placement record, since there are fewer job seekers total to pick up the slack. And if just one person decided to abandon philosophy post-PhD, that also makes the placement record look worse for that year, since that might be all or half of the year's graduating class.

 

Those are my 0.02.