Brian Leiter has a “nice response”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001241.html#001241 to an article in the _Village Voice_ on “the job market in the humanities”:http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0417/kamenetz.php. I mostly agree with Brian’s points, though this wouldn’t be a blog if I couldn’t find a few nits to pick.
First though one point Brian is too modest to mention. We know a lot about departments, especially top departments, have done recently on the job market. And in large part this is because of the pressure Brian brought to bear on them to release data on their recent successes (or otherwise) at placing grads in jobs. This is really valuable information for prospective graduate students to have, and Brian deserves thanks I think for getting it out in the open.
OK, onto the criticisms. I’m not sure Brian is right that philosophy is typical. I suspect philosophy graduate students might be better off than English or history grad students when it comes to the job market. At the very least, the anecdotes from other disciplines sound worse than ours. More data from more disciplines on completion rates and placement rates would be good.
I would also heavily qualify Brian’s assertion that “one’s [job] prospects are directly a function of the quality of the graduate program you are enrolled in.” I think that’s somewhat _true_, but misleading, especially when it is taken as a reason to choose one graduate school over another. It’s true that a higher percentage of graduates from better schools end up with jobs, especially good jobs. But there’s some reason to doubt that means it is important for prospective students to go to those departments if they want to be employed.
For one thing, as Richard Heck notes in the comments “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000576.html, differences in perceived quality of philosophy programs, at least at the top, don’t make a _huge_ difference to placement rates.
Second, even if grad schools had no effect on how frequently their graduates got jobs, you’d expect a correlation between grad school quality and placement rates. That’s because better schools have a larger choice of incoming graduate students, and the qualities we’re looking for in incoming graduate students are often the same qualities departments are looking for when hiring. In other worse, as far as the data shows, Princeton’s success rates may be largely due to good recruiting not good training. This isn’t to say the data suggests at all this is true, it just suggests that the null hypothesis, that all good departments do equally well in preparing their graduates for the job market, is not refuted by the differential placement rates, because they are a non-random sample.
My gut feeling is that at some stage as you go down the ‘perceived quality rankings’, the quality of the school starts to seriously tell against the graduates looking for work. I don’t know quite when that happens – maybe once you’re outside the top 20, probably once you’re outside the top 30. But to really check we’d need examples of students who could have got into Princeton or Michigan but turned them down to go to a school outside the top 20 or 30, and see how well they did on the job market compared to their couldabeen classmates. I don’t think there’s enough data points to run such a study. There are examples though of philosophers who went to non-top-20 schools doing badly early in their careers and then doing very well later on, and I take those cases to be some evidence that going to a not-top-20 school hurts your initial job market prospects, though we’re really talking about a small sample here.
Having said all that, I agree wholeheartedly with Brian that the profession would be better off with fewer PhD programs and more terminal MA programs of the quality of those offered by Tufts, Arizona State, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and their peers. 110 PhD programs in American does seem too many to me, and I shudder to think what the placement record of some of those schools must be. As Brian says, the trend of dropping good MA programs in favour of yet more PhD programs is really regrettable. It’s hard to see how this benefits students, the profession, or even the schools making the change.