Readers interested in graduate school in philosophy might be interested to see my seven-part series on PhD admissions, collected here. It's time to start thinking about the application process, if you're aiming to begin a PhD program in fall 2012.
For advice on applying to Master's programs, see the guest post by Robert Schwartz of University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
My impression is that admissions are somewhat more competitive in recessions than in boom times, since there are fewer options outside of academia to draw top students out of the applicant pool. Regarding the job market for newly minted philosophy PhDs, we should probably think of the period from about 1999-2007, bruising and competitive though it was, as boom times unlikely to be replicated in the near future. So don't be misled by departments' placement records from that period. On the other hand, the horrible job market of the past two years is probably also an aberration.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Graduate School Application Advice
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4 comments:
Eric, looking back at your posting on admissions it is remarkable how much the whole process is guided by pedigree. Shouldn't we as a profession at least try for some degree of equality in opportunities? (This point towards weighing the writing samples more than other factors, for instance, a point you also seem to make.)
I agree, Aldo. It's especially a shame that the top programs seem to be practically closed to students without elite pedigree, to judge from my limited experience seeing terrific UCR undergrads *never* crack the top 15 and my impressionistic sense of the situation at Berkeley when I was a student there. I am open to empirical evidence to the contrary, if someone at Harvard or Princeton or the like is willing to present a list of institutions of origin of their entering classes and non-elite institutions are reasonably well represented.
I would love to see some systematic research on the predictive validity of overall GPA, philosophy-only GPA, institution strength, GRE, and maybe (if admissions committees were willing to quantify at time of admission) perceived strength of letters and perceived strength of sample.
Current Princeton grad students by BA (+MA) institution
Ivies
Harvard
Princeton
Princeton + Oxford
Yale
Yale + Cambridge
UPenn
UPenn + Oxford
Brown
Cornell
Cornell + Oxford
Other US News Top-30
Stanford
Stanford + Harvard
Stanford + Stanford
UChicago
Duke
Northwestern + Brown
Rice + Houston
Vanderbilt + Arizona
Johns Hopkins
USC
USC
UCLA
Elite Int'l
Oxford
Cambridge
Toronto
McGill
ANU
Sydney
Top LACs
Amherst
Amherst
Swarthmore
Claremont McKenna
Bates College
Mount Holyoke College
Wesleyan + Tufts
Kenyon College
Franklin & Marshall
Reed College
Reed College
Other US public
Northern Arizona + Arizona State
Colorado
Colorado
Colorado
Arizona State + Nebraska
Nebraska
NC State + Virginia Tech
UMass Boston
Rutgers
Other US private
Houghton College + UW, Milwaukee
St. Vincent College
Biola U
BYU
Northeastern + Minnesota
St John's College Santa Fe + UChicago + Oxford
Other int'l
Western Australia
Melbourne + Melbourne
Alberta
UNAM
Victoria + Victoria
Tel Aviv + Haifa
Buenos Aires
Berlin
__
Apologies for the very rough and occasionally misleading categorization. I'm not a Princeton person (I gathered the information from their website), and I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of undergraduate institutions. Even within the more elite categories there aren't many patterns that stand out to me. And Colorado shares the top "placement record" with Stanford!
Thanks, that's a terrific list!
Although there are some students from nonelite places, my feeling is that it is disappointingly few, given that the vast majority of students graduate from nonelite places. Not a single SUNY or CalState, for example. The effect might even be more evident if you separated nonelite places into those that are very good or have widely-known philosophy departments, such as Rutgers and Colorado, from the rest.
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