There needs to be a moratorium on _all_ philosophy departments admitting PhD students.
Here is a lengthy first draft, unedited post with some argument sketches in support of this claim:

As indicated above, there are far fewer jobs now than in the past. If there are not immediately fewer PhD students, then there will be the same number of job applicants for fewer jobs. So, there is guaranteed to be a group of people who worked to get a PhD but who cannot get jobs in philosophy.

Suppose we continue to produce PhDs at the normal rate. If hiring trends do not adjust upward dramatically, then each year there will be vastly more people with PhDs in philosophy seeking jobs than there are jobs available. So, the probability that those already on the job market will get jobs decreases accordingly.

Either those with PhDs but without jobs who are seeking jobs drop out, or they continue to live precariously as they seek permanent academic employment as philosophy profs. Those who drop out of the job hunt will have gone to great lengths (i) to get a PhD and (ii) to attempt to get an academic job, only to end up, usually just around the age of 30, having to start new careers, often with limited experience relative to their age cohort. Those who stay on the job market simply became part of an ever larger reserve army of un- and underemployed PhDs. This has very, very unwelcome effects.

First, consider more seriously those who get PhDs, don’t get jobs, and then drop out of the academic market to seek a new career. They will have spent the better part of a decade preparing for a career that they cannot have. The economic opportunity costs are massive. They have lost nearly a decade of earnings. They have lost nearly a decade of networking. They will have lost nearly a decade of making a home somewhere with good job prospects. Additionally, there are often huge emotional and psychological costs to spending nearly a decade training for a career, struggling to get a job in that field, and then having to abandon that project.

It is wildly irresponsible for even the “best” PhD-granting programs to create the conditions in which this terrible outcome is guaranteed. Even if only NYU and Princeton produce PhDs, these new PhDs still add to the competition faced by the older PhDs on the market. By increasing the competition for stable employment, the “best” programs increase the cost to older PhDs in precarious employment. And, even if the new PhDs are more likely to get jobs than the older PhDs, it remains the case that not all of them will get jobs. So, not only are departments negatively affecting the life chances of older PhDs, they are creating more bad outcomes by producing new PhDs who will not get jobs.

A caveat emptor rule for the person who freshly enters a grad program therefore fails to capture the negative externalities the production of new PhDs generates for the community of existing PhDs seeking jobs. For, while a new grad student may enter a PhD program with their eyes wide open to the likely failure they will experience on the job market, existing PhDs did NOT invite more competition onto the job market. Some of them may have entered their programs nearly 10 years ago (e.g., they got their PhD in 2016, have had a lengthy postdoc and an adjunct position or two). These people’s prospects are made significantly worse through no fault of their own when scores of new PhDs are granted each year.

So, it is a structural problem and not a problem of the aggregation of individual irresponsible acts committed by 22 year olds with dreams of being the next Haslanger or Scanlon. This problem can only be addressed by suspending all admissions to PhD programs for a number of years.

The remaining reasons to have a PhD program are mostly to benefit existing tenured professors. These professors benefit from teaching seminars to PhD students, where the professors work out their latest ideas. This is all well and good but it should not come at the cost of vulnerable people, namely, those who are unemployed or precariously employed in our academic community.

But, there is an additional well-known nefarious feature of PhD granting institutions.

Many PhD programs exist to produce casualized teaching and research labor. These people, nominally students but really mostly workers, do much of the teaching and marking that tenured professors do not want to do. As TAs, grad students lead sections, do the tedious labor of marking endless papers on the same few topics, and often filter the best students from the average students for tenured profs by meeting with the many many average students while gently nudging the best students to meet with the prof. Additionally, grad students sometimes teach their own classes. But, these are often service classes, such as intro this and intro that. This relieves tenured profs of this task, and allows them to teach lower enrolling but more interesting advanced classes. This is a good deal for colleges and departments because grad students are paid orders of magnitude less than profs. They also have no job security. So, it is a “good” economic deal for the department and the university.

Many schools are moving away from TA-heavy teaching. But, this is possible only because there is a reserve army of existing PhDs desperate for employment (see above). Once there are more people seeking adjunct jobs than there are adjunct jobs, PhD students can be relieved of all requirements to work since universities and departments can rely on the temporary employment of people with PhDs to do all the work once handed over to grad students. This dramatically limits the capacity for labor organizing – it’s much harder for adjuncts to get to know each other and there is little of the ‘natural’ solidarity that exists amongst grad students in the same department.

Nothing I’ve written here is news. I do think that it’s worth spelling it out over and over and over. And then we must ask: “Why are departments – any departments, from the Leiterriffic to the less Leiter-loved – still admitting PhD students?”

I can see no all things considered justification for this practice. It is, at the very least, directly contributory to a structural disadvantage of existing PhDs without jobs (and these people are often much more vulnerable than younger students entering grad school since the existing PhDs may have children). And at the very worst it is viciously exploitative.

There needs to be a total moratorium on admitting PhDs. Perhaps there should a full cycle moratorium, eg., six years.

Justin and I have disagreed about this in conversation. But now I’ll disagree with the internet! Sorry for typos and other infelicities of prose. I’ve not got the energy to edit this.