By Sam Duncan
As I said in my last post I think the APDA is a much better place for those considering graduate school in philosophy to start than is the PGR, but I think using the APDA as a ranking would be a bad idea and I hope Jennings and others involved will never try to make it into one. Now I won’t deny that I think the PGR is especially problematic for a number of reasons, but I have larger issues with all rankings. Relying on a ranking as a ranking to make a choice like where to go to graduate school is a very bad idea. To paraphrase Kierkegaard here rankings try to make what should be a difficult decision too easy.
To see why let me start with a ranking I cooked up by pulling from the most recent APDA’s ten year placement rates:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (84%)
2. Yale University (77%)
3. Baylor University (71%)
4-5. University of Tennessee/Pennsylvania State University (tied 67%)
6. Vanderbilt University (65%)
7. Rutgers (64%)
8. University of Virginia (63%)
9. University of Hawai’i at Manoa (58%)
10. UCLA (55%)
11. Villanova University (52%)
12-14. University of Chicago/University of Miami/University of Memphis (tied 50%)
15. Duke University (45%)
16. The University of Utah (42%)
No doubt you’ll notice there are a lot of things wrong with it (which is the point). For one the small differences in the placement rates between Rutgers, Tennessee, Penn State, Vanderbilt, and UVA are almost certainly statistical noise as is the similarly tiny difference between Villanova and the University of Chicago, the University of Memphis and the University of Miami.
More importantly, there is of course a huge difference between the kinds of jobs these programs place their students in. Tennessee, Rutgers, and UVA grads all have relatively good job prospects (though keep in mind relatively good is only a bit better than a coin flip) but the graduates who get jobs are going to get different kinds of jobs. To my knowledge UVA hasn’t placed a graduate in a research focused job straight out of the PhD program in the last ten years nor has Tennessee. Many Rutgers graduates who get jobs will get research focused jobs though. Or compare UVA and the University of Tennessee with UCLA and the University of Chicago. The evidence we have suggests that a graduate of the former programs has a statistically significantly better shot at permanent academic placement than does one from the latter. But University of Chicago and UCLA graduates are competitive for research focused jobs while UVA and University of Tennessee graduates usually aren’t.
If all you care about is getting an academic job at all then UVA and Tennessee win. If you only care about a job at a research focused school then UVA and Tennessee are out while UChicago and UCLA are decent enough options. However, what if you prefer a job at a research focused school if you can find it, but think you could be happy at a teaching focused school? Are the somewhat better chances of getting an academic job coming out of the University of Tennessee or UVA enough to outweigh the fact you’d be more or less giving up on a research focused job? The answer to that question is going to vary enormously from person to person. I also suspect that many potential graduate students may underestimate how happy they would be with a teaching focused job and instead defer to an unstated and undefended prejudice that such jobs are not good ones. I say this from personal experience as I wouldn’t have thought I’d like teaching at a community college when I was applying to graduate schools, but I’m honestly quite happy with it.
Or consider Baylor. It has an awesome placement record, but it also has a religious identity that it takes quite seriously. Among other things that has a big impact on the jobs graduates of its program get, which are often at schools that have not just religious identities but theologically and politically conservative ones. A lot of potential graduate students would not be happy with a job at Hillsdale College or Grove City College, then again there are people for whom either might be a good fit.
And what are you interested in and how strongly? Are you really wedded to one area of philosophy and wouldn’t be satisfied researching or teaching anything else? Are you particularly interested in one area but think it likely your interests will change? Do you just like philosophy and haven’t picked an area to focus on?
How you answer these questions will also affect your own personal rankings. If you are in the not sure category, then it makes sense to pick a bigger department where faculty have more diverse interests. Despite its incredible placement record even MIT might not be the best fit for you and you might want to look at somewhere where faculty are more eclectic in their interests. Or suppose you want to work in Chinese philosophy and wouldn’t be satisfied with anything else, then Hawai’i, Utah, and Duke may be the only entries here you should even think about. But what if American Pragmatism is your favorite thing in philosophy but can imagine you’d be happy working on and teaching something else? Should you go to Miami where you could work on that or to say a program with better placement but with no faculty working in pragmatism? I have no idea, but I do know that simply looking at where all your prospects were on my little list or any other like it would be a terrible way to make this decision.
On top of that there are a host of other factors to consider. For one thing, what are your career prospects if you don’t get an academic job? That should count for something but how do you weigh it assuming you even have the data? And good luck getting that data. Of the schools I’ve glanced at only Rutgers seems to be doing a good job listing non-academic placements. It's probably no coincidence that they also seem to be doing a good job placing students in good jobs outside academia.
There are important things to consider besides career prospects. No matter whether you get a job or not and no matter where you get a job if you do, the PhD program itself is going to take up a decent chunk of your life. Probably 4 years at minimum and quite probably more like 7. The quality of those years matters. What is the environment of the PhD program like? If you don’t get a job will you still look back on it fondly as a good experience? Where is the school located and how well will living there suit you? Here too there is no one size fits all answer. If you prefer living in a major metropolitan area and like being able to walk to things, Knoxville is not going to fit you. On the other hand if you loathe winter and like hiking in the mountains it beats Chicago, Boston, or the Philadelphia suburbs hands down.
Deciding whether to go to graduate school and where to go should both be difficult decisions that require one to think a lot about what one really wants and values. If you do it right, there is no one size fits all answer to this question nor any ranking that can tell you what you should do. You have to decide what matters to you. If you rely on rankings, whether mine, the PGR’s or another you are letting someone else make that decision for you. That might be a good enough way to decide what ink pen or coffee maker to buy. It’s not a good way to make a decision about what you want to do with your life. I’ll stop here for now, but in my next post I’ll have more to say about the value judgments that inevitably sneak into rankings
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