Relatively obscure PhD programs

[759]

First off, I want to apologize if this topic has already been discussed to death. Basically, my question is about obscure PhD programs--programs that don't have a whole lot of prestige (aren't on the philosophical gourmet report, etc.). I know the popular advice seems to be 'screw rankings, go where you best fit in with the faculty/research', which sounds nice, but what does this mean professionally? How difficult is it to find a job with a PhD from an obscure philosophy program? (Of course I don't mean that the larger university necessarily be obscure, but the philosophy department specifically). If I eventually would like to work in academia (teaching, researching, etc.), is it imperative that I go to a highly visible PhD program? Or is finding a job more about the quality of your work? Perhaps equal parts program prestige/work?

 

Sorry for all of the question! I know there probably aren't completely concrete answers to these questions...

[sidebysondheim]

Other people than me can probably say more about this, but my intuition is that prestige plays a lot bigger role than work, solely because of how bad the job market is, hiring departments can be more picky. Are you even going to look at unranked university X graduate seriously enough to factor in work if you can instead look at these 15 top-25 university graduates? Again, this is my intuition, but it seems like in order for your work to even shine, you need to catch a hiring committees eye, and prestige does that. 

[maxhgns]

How difficult is it to find a job with a PhD from an obscure philosophy program? (Of course I don't mean that the larger university necessarily be obscure, but the philosophy department specifically). If I eventually would like to work in academia (teaching, researching, etc.), is it imperative that I go to a highly visible PhD program? Or is finding a job more about the quality of your work? Perhaps equal parts program prestige/work?

There are no jobs, and nobody gets them (because there are none). Sadly, that's not much of an overstatement. Philjobs has about 125 TT jobs across the US, Canada, UK, and Australasia this year. 125. You can expect a few hundred fresh new philosophy PhDs to graduate this year. And, alas, the jobs are not equally available; they're divided up by AOS/AOC combinations. So if your AOS has no jobs in a given year, tough luck. You might get an "open" job, but you're competing against everyone for those--literally, a thousand or more applicants.

The jobs in general actually go to people from a fairly wide mix of programs. The high-status jobs (those attached to a PhD program--any PhD program), however, go almost exclusively to graduates from Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard. Almost a third of them, in fact, go to graduates of these three programs.

A non-negligible chunk of the rest of the high-status jobs go to graduates of Pittsburgh, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Stanford, Rutgers, and Yale. The rest is negligible. A smattering come from UCLA, Michigan, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, and Toronto. And the smallest trickle comes from elsewhere. The key to remember is that one typically moves down the rankings from one's graduate institution. Far, far down.

 

Status and haloes matter a lot in this profession, and in academia more generally. They matter because we're only starting to really become aware of our systematic biases. They also matter because of the professional opportunities they net you, the access to grants and conferences and networks. There have been a few scandals recently where certain high-profile journals were shown to publish work almost exclusively from a handful of schools, or people affiliated with those schools. Status matters to the administrators who have the final call on hires, or who open hiring lines or decide to fund/cut departments. If your PhD comes from a recognizable university, you're better off than the next person down. If your PhD comes from a recognizable university that's deemed to be very good internationally, you're better off. If your PhD comes from an internationally-recognized top university that's tops in philosophy, you're even better off. And so on.

 

That said, your advisors actually matter a lot more (as does what you actually do while in your program). If you've got a big-shot advisor at a recognizable university (in the US, that generally means a top public or a private; elsewhere, it's generally one of the tops in that country), you do have a chance. Inasmuch as anybody--even the Oxford/Princeton/Harvard grads--has a chance. Which isn't much of one, really.

 

I guess the short answer is this: research jobs are really, really hard to get if you're not from Oxford/Princeton/Harvard, and they're exponentially harder to get as you go down my list. If you are, they're just hard to get. Teaching jobs are also hard to get, but at a glance they appear to be much better distributed (although again, there's a status hierarchy of teaching jobs!). Any one grad's chances of getting any kind of full-time employment, however, are vanishingly small.

[overoverover]

Here it goes: programs have prestige for a reason. I don't mean to say that prestige of a department = quality of work at the department. I think that instead, prestige is a product of some mix of quality of work and how popular/well-liked the profs are. But even then, you can see that prestige is going to matter when you're on the market. Consider the two following ways it plays a role.

1) You get letters from people who produce really good work. The people reading those letters know that those people produce good work. It's a fact of human psychology that we value the opinions of people we consider to be experts more than the opinions of non-experts. The letters you get will mean more than if they are from people whose work is not as well known.  So, you want letters from people who produce good work, which (roughly) correlates to getting letters from people at well-known, well-established departments. 

 

2) You get letters from people who are popular/well-liked in the field. The people reading those letters know those people and, presumably, like them. It's a fact of human psychology that we value the opinions of our friends more than the opinions of our, um, not-friends. The letters you get will mean more than if they are from people who are not as popular or not well-liked. So, you want letters from people who are popular/well-liked in the field,  which (roughly) correlates to getting letters from people at well-known, well-established departments (with an important caveat: some departments have highly respected jerks in their midst, and so you might not want letters form jerks).

Work is important, but prestige matters, probably to a greater degree than many will admit. You want letters with people with 'contacts' (so to speak) at various departments, which can help you get a leg up. That means your app gets a little extra consideration.

[759]

Thanks for all of the input. I understand the role prestige plays in getting a job, I mean it's the same in non-academic fields as well. I guess I was more wondering if getting a PhD from an obscure university is pointless (aside, of course, from the inherent value in studying philosophy at all). If there are literally 0 jobs for people who don't go to top 25 universities, then how do these non-elite universities even attract students? And I'm not just talking about getting a job teaching at Princeton or whatever, but jobs at mid-ranked research universities, state colleges, community colleges, etc.

Edited October 19, 2015 by NWE

[sidebysondheim]

Adjuncts, my friend. They all come from somewhere.

[maxhgns]

 I guess I was more wondering if getting a PhD from an obscure university is pointless (aside, of course, from the inherent value in studying philosophy at all). If there are literally 0 jobs for people who don't go to top 25 universities, then how do these non-elite universities even attract students?

As I said, people from more obscure programs do get jobs--they just almost never get to supervise and teach graduate students. As far as I know, mine was the most comprehensive attempt to figure out where people employed as philosophers got their degrees from, and I only looked at a hundred or so PhD and MA-granting departments. I still haven't finished with all of the SPEP schools, and it's just not feasible for me to count primarily undergraduate universities and community colleges too. I can only speculate about those, but my impression is that the range of PhDs that's employed when you get to that level is much, much larger.