New Placement Data
Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA) has been updated to include information through 2023, and the new data has been incorporated into its interactive interface.
In a post about the new information, APDA’s director, Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced), makes a few observations:
- Between 2013 and 2023, “6,408 graduates earned a PhD in philosophy, 41% of which (2,610) have found permanent academic employment; 33% if we look only at the past 5 years (2019–2023).”
- This data matches up with previous reports, indicating “it is unlikely that permanent academic employment has gone down in the past few years.”
- “It may be that mainstream philosophy departments with higher student ratings do better with respect to permanent academic employment.”
- “Graduates specializing in certain philosophical traditions and areas of value theory currently do better in terms of permanent academic employment than those in more mainstream and formal areas.”
Which programs do especially well with placement? Jennings writes:
While individual program data can be noisy, two programs are two standard deviations away from the mean for the proportion of 2019–2023 graduates with permanent academic employment—but both are small: Cincinnati and UVA (10 and 12 graduates in this period, respectively; 70% or more in permanent academic jobs). A further ten programs were more than one standard deviation away from the mean (52% or more in permanent academic jobs) while also being at or above the mean program size (21+ graduates for 2019–2023; listed in alphabetical order): BU, Columbia, MIT, NYU, Purdue, Rutgers, SLU, CUA, Michigan, and Yale.
More info here.
Interesting! I wonder if anyone has insight into why the placement rate for Philosophy of Mathematics is so low? It was also very low in the report on 2012-2016!
As a young scholar, it’s almost daily that I’m reminded by one advisor or another about how awful the job market is, and how important it is to focus on a ‘sought after’ area of specialization to improve my chances. Metaethics and grounding. I’m so tired of it.
I’m glad to see this data is still being collected. But is it true that the APDA is no longer collecting or disseminating data on differences in gender/sex distributions in hiring? If so, that’s a real loss. When I first started talking with people about what the data pointed toward 10 years ago, the conversations seemed to cycle from “that’s not happening” to “I didn’t know that was happening” to “everyone knows that’s happening” to “once departments make a bunch of these hires, that will probably stop happening”. I would be interested to know whether the data now suggests we’ve reached that last stage.