The Polyanna approach would be to enthusiastically encourage them and, on the subject of job prospects, either implicitly or explicitly lie to them by suggesting that jobs in philosophy are low-hanging fruit. Some people are told this lie and believe it, and they feel betrayed late in grad school if they realize that they won't end up with an academic job.
The scylla to that charybdis is to tell students that there simply are no jobs. We might call this the Pannabacker approach.* It also trades on a lie. There are some jobs. The junior professors at any institution are testament to that. I got a job, and so did many of my friends in the discipline.
A third approach, explicitly advocated by Brian Leiter, is to tell students that they should only go to graduate school if they get into a highly ranked program.** Here's Leiter's advice:
[D]on't go to graduate school unless you get into a strong program. Period. If you get funding to go to a strong program, and you love the subject, then go to graduate school. The odds of securing a tenure-track job, indeed a good tenure-track job, from a strong program are very high.The Leiter approach includes more truth than the other two, but it's weighed down by three spoonfuls of elitism and polyanna extract. Here's what I mean:
1. There are a non-negligible number of graduates from any program who don't get jobs. This is especially true if we look at people working in niche specialties, like philosophy of art.
2. Students at lower-ranked and unranked programs do get jobs. I teach at a department with an unranked program, and we place the majority of our graduates in tenure track jobs.
3. I suspect that Leiter's standards for a what count as a 'good tenure-track job' are skewed to favor prestige. Highly-ranked programs tend to hire graduates from other highly-ranked programs, but not every student wants a publish-or-perish job. There is a sense among both highfalutin and ignoble schools that graduates of the former are not for jobs at the latter. I know people who were discouraged by the placement director at their prestigious program from even applying for jobs deemed to be beneath the dignity of the graduate. I had some APA interviews for jobs at which the interview committee was dismissive about my application because (they thought) my pedigree put me out of their league. (This last point is not meant as bragging; UCSD, where I did my grad work, is well-ranked but not top five.)
4. A big constraint on whether graduates find jobs is how widely they apply. Imposing strong geographic constraints on the job search can sink anyone. This relates to prestige, because higher-ranked programs are more likely to admit traditional students who are willing to move for a job after school. Less prestigious programs are more likely to admit students who select a graduate school close to home and who have family complications that lead them to apply for jobs only in a restricted area. This common cause - student background - explains some of the correlation between prestige and placement success.
5. Yet there are real advantages to attending a better graduate program. It isn't primarily, as Leiter suggests, to avoid having "the albatross of a not very good graduate program around [your] neck." Rather, a better program means more notable faculty.*** This obviously means a greater depth and breadth of courses. But it also equips graduates with better letters of recommendation. Letters, more than just a good pedigree, do matter on the job market.
Better programs also tend to have more active colloquium schedules. This gives students a chance to learn about a bunch of different things, network with philosophers from other places, and learn the mores of professional interaction. Stronger programs also tend to support placement more aggressively.
As important as attending a program that offers these things can be, it's necessary to take advantage of them. A graduate is not helped by a weak, nonspecific letter from a famous person. And students only get something out of colloquia that they actually attend. The plus of a strong program, then, isn't primarily the name of the institution. It's that opportunities are more numerous and more easily exploited.
The approach I do take
So what advice do I give to students thinking about grad school?
Honestly, the job market is terrible. If going through graduate school and not having an academic job on the other side would crush you, then you should probably do something else. This isn't because nobody gets a job, but rather because not having a job is a real possibility regardless of what you do in grad school.
Don't go to grad school if it would mean taking out tremendous student loans. Even success - an academic job at the end - will not mean big money.
If you have strong constraints on where you could go for a job - or on how much you need to earn - then don't look to an academic job in philosophy. A number of graduates from our program who did get tenure-track jobs left them for family reasons or geography. The ones I have in mind found other academic jobs that fit their needs, but they took a serious gamble. That kind of constraint often leads graduates to leave the discipline.
Finally, application to top grad programs is competitive. Even solid candidates can be lost in the noise of the process. So applicants are well-advised to apply to numerous places, selected from various strata of the rankings.
Notes
* I take the label from Leiter's poster child for it, English professor William Pannabacker.
** Years ago, Leiter also started the Philosophal Gourmet Report, which is really the only available ranking of philosophy grad programs. The rankings can create an illusion of precision, but they are a useful guide. So I don't at all mean to be attacking the PGR. I discussed prestige and the PGR briefly in this old post.
*** This is not meant to suggest that there are no luminary faculty at less-than-luminary graduate programs. Rather, the 'more' is about quantity. At a stronger program, there are more likely to be multiple high-profile faculty working in a student's area.
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I am teaching a course in metaphysics this semester. After starting with 'On What There Is', we've been working through The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics. I used a book from the same series in my epistemology class a couple of years ago. They strike a nice balance between including contemporary scholarship and addressing longstanding issues in the field, and they're at about the right level for these advanced-undergrad/intro-grad courses.
Naturally, we spent some time on David Lewis' view that possible worlds are concrete objects. After the first day we spend discussing it, I surveyed student responses to the view. Given three choices, these were the results:
10 at least somewhat plausibleI was gratified at their open-mindedness, although some of the reception was probably due to the fact that I'd spent the last hour answering their puzzled questions about the view.
6 not sure
2 utterly untenable
And it's no surprise that they would have questions. It is an abstruse and kooky view. Nevertheless, metaphysics is the stronghold of abstruse and kooky in philosophy - which is itself already the kingdom of the abstruse. The dictionary I have close to hand gives 'an abstruse philosophical inquiry' as the specimen phrase for 'abstruse.' So kookiness couldn't itself be an objection -
But, lo! It is.
A standard reply to Lewis' view is the incredulous stare. Ted Sider writes
It is an interesting question why most philosophers so vehemently reject Lewisian worlds.... Perhaps I speak for the majority when I say that I do not really know why I find the incredulous stare compelling; I only know that I do.[194]When we discussed the incredulous stare, several students asked how it's even an argument. The answer, of course, is that it's not. It is an objection by ridicule rather than by argument.*
Where Sider talks about the view of "the majority", Thomas Crisp puts matters in stronger terms. He dismisses without argument "that brand of possible world realism peculiar to Lewis" [240].**
One reason that I'm teaching metaphysics is for the chance to think more about these issues. I have never actually taken a course in analytic metaphysics; everything I know has been picked up en passant. Nevertheless, I have always found Lewis' view appealing. Now I've talked myself into believing it.
So, as I mentioned to my students, Crisp's descriptor should at least be ammended to include me.
* Thomas Reid thought of our God-given capacity for ridicule as the natural counterpart to reason. Where appropriate, we should make arguments. But there are other times where we should just respond to a view with ridicule. There may be something to this, but it was not one of Reid's better ideas.
** I read this as meaning that no one but Lewis holds the view. If Crisp didn't mean to say that, then he could have just called it "Lewis' brand of possible world realism."
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When I have teach logic to one or two hundred students, the class is in one the university's lecture centers. All the LCs have digital projectors, so I can put up tables and charts as needed. Mostly I work through examples which I adapt on the fly, however, so I use the board.
The old lecture centers, which I have used in the past, have actual chalkboards. Admittedly, the fluorescent strip lights over the chalkboards do not all work. Some have graffiti recording the date many years ago when they broke down: no mere dead bulb, but bent and twisted fixtures.
This semester, I'm in a lecture center with new whiteboards and strip lights. The functioning lights make it feel less like a post-apocalyptic movie from the 70s, but I hate the whiteboards. To be precise, I hate whiteboard markers. There is no way to tell by looking at one whether it will write well enough to be seen at the back of the room. It is not enough to test it as I leave the office, either, because a marker that is just fine now may go all ghostly after a few lines of scribbling.
Yesterday, both of the markers I brought went wispy. So I sent my TA back to department to fetch more and muddled along until he got back. He handed me two black markers. One was a whiteboard marker, which got me through the rest of the hour. The other was a permanent marker that had been in the drawer of office supplies. He was in a hurry and grabbed the markers that he could find, and luckily I noticed - but that could have gone horribly wrong. My examples are not so witty that I want them to be tattooed on the board for the weeks it woudl take for someone to come in with marker solvent.
So I have a strong preference for the old lecture centers, with their dysfunctional lights and their chalkboards. There is a wonderful practicality about chalk. I can grab a few pieces on my way to lecture and be sure that they'll write for the whole class period. And each piece of chalk fails gracefully - rather than continuing to make spectral marks long after it's effectively dead, a nub of chalk will produce readable white lines until it is too short to hold.
Some people complain about chalk dust, which admittedly gets all over the place. I get it on my hands over the course of lecture, and from my hands it finds its way to my shirt and pants - but it washes off easily. Although whiteboard markers don't always end up on my hands and clothes, when they do it's a bad scene.
And whiteboard markers use up ink and solvent, leaving behind their plastic carcasses. So chalk is more eco-friendly. Even the boards are green.*
This all makes me feel like a curmudgeon. Should I have waited until tenure before getting so crotchety?
* This is a joke, but I suspect that chalk is less resource intensive. If you actually know about this, say something in the comments.
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I wrote forall x primarily for use in my own logic course, to fit my syllabus in a way that was affordable for students. I made it available under a Creative Commons license primarily in hopes that other instructors might adopt it.
I get occasional e-mails from people who are using forall x to teach themselves logic, and that's cool too. Since it's designed to be accompany lectures and office hours, it's not perfect for self-directed study - but people say they find it useful.
Dave Morris at the University of Lethbridge was one of the first people to adopt it up as a course text. He was teaching abstract math, rather than philosophical logic, so it wasn't a perfect fit. Later, the CC license allowed Morris to use it as a starting point in writing his own textbook. He and his wife have written an abstract mathematics textbook called Proofs and Concepts which incorporates a lot of material from my book. They acknowledge this and provide a full citation in the front matter of their book.
This is not something that I had really thought through when I released forall x, but it is one of the great features of CC licenses. Once I have made something available, people find uses for it that I hadn't anticipated.
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I recently stumbled across Forbes' America's Best Colleges, which was published last year. The assessment is explicitly intended to break the hegemony of U.S. News & World Report's rankings of American colleges, which seems like a good thing whether or not ratings are ultimately a good thing.
UAlbany comes out in the middle of the pack (295th out of 569), which is not at all bad. Among SUNY centers, we are ranked behind Binghamton (119) but ahead of Stony Brook (332) and Buffalo (436). The rankings seem plausible.
Nevertheless, the methodology is disturbingly weak sauce. A full 25% of each institution's score is derived from the number of its alumni who appear in Who's Who in America. I was recently contacted by Who's Who and asked for biographical information so that I could be included. I did not reply, because Who cares? Forbes magazine, that's who.
A further 25% of each institution's score is derived from student evaluations at RateMyProfessors.com. Now, I think it's a fun website. It allows students to gossip about which prof is good for which courses, and I get pretty good marks there. Yet, as I said in an earlier post, "it would worrisome if an unrepresentative and deliberately somewhat frivolous resource came to play an important part in campus life." Now Forbes expects it to play such a role.
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