Academic Philosophy, Uncategorized
Is Graduate School for Me? (My short talk at ISFLC)
The Institute for Humane Studies asked me to give a short talk to a group of undergrads at ISFLC who expressed an interest in grad school. Here, roughly, is the substance of my talk.
A Ph.D. is, really, a professional degree, like an MBA or a JD. It’s designed, somewhat poorly, to make you an academic. So, I’m assuming that most of you are interested in graduate school because you are interested in being a professor. My advice is based on the assumption that when you get a Ph.D., you want to get an academic job at the end.
Here’s what you do when you get a Ph.D.: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
Should you go to graduate school? I’m not a paternalistic person. I’m not here to say yes or no. Rather, I want to have a frank discussion of the risks, rewards, and the odds, so you can make an informed decision for yourself. Most people have no idea what it takes to get one of these jobs and what their chances of success are.
Being a professor can be a glorious job. I get paid to play with ideas. If you have a passion for ideas, there are fewer jobs better than being a college professor. I have a remarkable amount of freedom and autonomy in determining how I spend my days. I spend most of my time every week thinking and writing about whatever I find interesting.
However, I also have one of the most plum jobs. Most people who work in academia have much less freedom than I do. They spend much more of their time doing administrative work. They teach more classes than I do to lower quality students who don’t care. They rarely teach courses on topics that interest them. And they do this for much less money.
Unfortunately, it seems to be getting harder and harder to succeed. I had to do more to get my job than the previous generation did. Five years from now, you’ll have to do even more.
I like reading and discussing economics or political philosophy. It‘s my hobby. Should I go to grad school? You can do all these things without getting a Ph.D. You won’t be as good at it, but you can read and discuss economics while holding down a job as an insurance agent, a lawyer, or a consultant. You might be able to maintain your hobby while making a lot more money.
I’m the smartest philosophy major at my college, in fact, the smartest they’ve ever had. Should I go to grad school? Graduate programs get hundreds of applications for a few spots. Pretty much all of the applicants were the smartest undergraduate majors in their colleges. To succeed in academia, you have to be the best among the best.
How hard is it to get in? At a good graduate program, the acceptance rate will be under 8%. It’s harder to get into a good Ph.D. program than to get into Harvard as an undergraduate.
What do you do in grad school? You take classes for 2-3 years in a wide range of subfields. You’ll write 12-16 30-page seminar papers. You’ll read thousands of pages of material. After that, you’ll usually take some sort of exam to show you have expertise in one subfield and a broad range of knowledge in the other subfields. If you fail that, you’ll get kicked out. If you succeed, you’ll devise an original research project. You then take an exam–a “prospectus defense” to determine whether your project is even worth pursuing. People can and do fail that and get kicked out of grad school. In fact, my colleagues and I failed a grad student’s prospectus defense just a few weeks ago, and as a result, he has to leave academia without even a master’s degree to show for his efforts. If you pass the prospectus defense, you then write a dissertation. Once again, you take an exam when you’re done. If you fail, you’re done. If you succeed, you get the Ph.D. The whole process should take 5 years–less if you do econ–but most people tend to take 6 or 7 years, and in fields like history, they take even more.
You can easily find yourself in your mid to late thirties still a graduate student, making a measly $18K a year living stipend, with no job, no savings, a crappy old car or no car, and a tiny, lousy apartment, while your friends own houses, cars, and make six figures. Think about the opportunity cost. You forgo many opportunities to study for a Ph.D., and there’s no guarantee of a job at the end.
What Kinds of Jobs Are There? There are tenure and non-tenure-track jobs. Tenure-track jobs are the gold standard. You spend six to seven years on probation. If you do good enough work, you get tenure, and then you pretty much have a job for life, unless you do something really stupid or your university has a major financial crisis. Non-tenure track jobs include post-docs and adjunct positions.
There are two basic types of tenure-track jobs, so-called teaching positions and research positions. Both positions involve teaching and research, but the balance is tipped one way or another. Most people would prefer a research job to a teaching job, but your preferences might be different.
A research job means you work at a doctoral or masters-degree granting program. You have higher status in the profession. You will teach 2 courses a semester or less. You will mentor graduate students, have an active seminar program with many visiting speakers every year, and get to teach graduate-level courses. Starting research salaries, in philosophy, are usually about $75K, give or take $15K. At the end of your career, you can make $150-200K, or even more. There are philosophy professors at Rutgers earning around $300K. Economists make more than that–starting salaries are often over $100K. New assistant professors at law schools and business schools make more–assistant professors in highly ranked law and business schools can make $150-200K or more. So, if you want that BMW, try to get a position in a business or law school. In research jobs, your primary job is to publish in good academic journals and presses. Teaching is secondary. You can be a terrible teacher and still get promoted, get raises, and succeed, but you don’t publish, you’re out.
A teaching job means you work at an undergraduate-oriented program. Most of the time, you will teach 3 courses a semester, though it’s not uncommon to teach 4 courses a semester instead. Starting salaries are much lower: you might start at only $45-55K. End of career salaries are also much lower: you might top off at $90K. You will be expected to publish, but most of your job will be teaching. You will mostly teach service courses rather than courses on the topics that most interest you.
Adjuncts have no job security. They make about $3000 per course. Often, they don’t get an office. They get no benefits. They might teach at three or four universities, trying to teach enough courses to make ends meet. The stories you hear about professors on food stamps are about adjuncts.
What Do Professors Do All Day? At Georgetown, officially research is 60% of my job, teaching is 30%, and service is 10%. In any given week, the balance might be different, but those numbers do reflect how I spend my time. As a professor you read others’ articles and books, write your own papers, write grant proposals, do useless tasks and committee work forced upon you by worthless administrators, meet with students, prep classes, teach classes, grade student work, and give presentations at conferences and other universities. The exact mix of these things depends upon the type of job you have and how famous you are in your field.
What Are My Chances of Success? I don’t know any of you personally. I have no idea how good you are. But let’s assume you represent a normal sample of people who begin Ph.D. programs. Statistically speaking, most of you will not get a research job. There just aren’t that many of them. Maybe 1 in 10 TT professors have a “research” job. Also, unfortunately, most of you will not get tenure-track teaching jobs either. Only a minority of people who enter a Ph.D. program ever succeed in getting a tenure-track job. Instead, assuming you represent a cross section of the people entering grad school, about half of you will fail to get a Ph.D. Of those who get the Ph.D., half of you will spend five to six years with short term visiting gigs, post-docs, or adjuncting jobs, until finally, at age 40, you realize you aren’t going to get a tenure-track job, and you move on with your life. The odds are low.
Thus, you should enter graduate school only if you are prepared to do what it takes to beat the odds.
How Do I Beat the Odds? Go to the highest ranked program you can get into. The reputation of your school and your advisors matters greatly. It’s much easier to get a tenure-track job coming out of, say, NYU philosophy than Tulane philosophy. Start publishing right away. You need to hit the ground running, and work on professionalizing yourself the moment you enter grad school. You shouldn’t write seminar papers for your professors; you should use seminars to help you write research articles that will be published in journals. You should plan to leave grad school with 4-5 good journal articles in hand.
[A student asked me, “How can I be expected to write publishable articles as I’m learning the field.” My answer: “Get the syllabus from the professor before the semester begins. Read most of the materials before the semester starts. Come in on the first day of your seminar with a draft of your seminar paper. Then spend the entire semester revising that paper. At the end, you might have a publishable article.”]
Should I try to go to a school with lots of libertarian professors? You should go to the best program you get into, because you want a job. A good advisor will be a good advisor regardless of politics. In fact, your work might even be better if you have to convince someone who doesn’t already agree with you.
By the way, too many people go to grad school just to rationalize–to come up with better and better arguments for–positions they’ve held since they were fifteen. You should pursue graduate studies only if you are willing to abandon your political views. Your commitment should be to the truth, not to classical liberalism.
Is There Prejudice against Libertarians in the Academy? Yes, absolutely. In some cases, there is explicit prejudice against people with non-mainstream points of view. [E.g., Jonathan Haidt asked his academic colleagues if they would knowingly discriminate against conservatives, and they said yes.] But most of the prejudice is implicit bias rather than explicit bias. Most of your colleagues will disagree with you, but they aren’t out to get you. They won’t knowingly discriminate against you. They want to treat you fairly. [Heck, even Corey Robin seems sincerely to believe that he gives conservatives and libertarians a fair hearing.]
However, we all–and you too!–suffer from confirmation bias, intergroup bias, motivated reasoning, and so forth. When non-libertarian referees read libertarian writing, most of them can’t help but judge it to harsher standards than they would judge work that conforms to their own point of view. (The same goes for you, a libertarian, refereeing non-libertarian work.) So, if you have a minority point of view, you have to work harder. Take a look at the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. People tend to judge arguments on the basis of whether they agree with the conclusion, not on the basis of the quality of the argument.
That said, you can not just succeed, but flourish, even if you are libertarian. For instance, Arizona’s philosophy department is ranked #1 in political philosophy, even though it’s well-known that many of its top political philosophers are classical liberals. I’m doing just fine, though I’m out of the closet as a classical liberal.
Will my ideas have influence? Probably not. Something like 10% of the people publish 90% of the work, so chances are you will publish little. Most of what you do publish will be ignored–few papers are widely read. But we don’t know ahead of time who will have influence. You might be the next John Locke or Karl Marx. And, while most of your writing will be ignored, you will have leverage. You don’t just teach, but you teach the teachers. In some cases, you teach the teachers’ teachers.
What fields should I go to grad school in? For the purposes of getting a job, you should do political philosophy instead of political theory, and economics instead of either. There are maybe 18 tenure-track jobs in political theory, and there are about 400-500 people (including a massive backlog of under-employed recent Ph.D.s) trying to get those jobs. A former post-doc at Brown got a 4-3 teaching load, $44K/year job at a low quality liberal arts college. He was bummed about that until I pointed out this meant he was in the top 5% of political theory applicants that year. In contrast, if you specialize in political philosophy, you’ll probably also have a specialty in ethics, and you can expect to apply for 60 jobs even in a bad year. Econ is better because there are more jobs, and you can also work in government or the private sector. You should do empirical, math-based work, rather than normative work. You have a much better chance of getting a TT job in American government than in normative political theory.
Summary: Academia is glorious, but the odds of getting that glorious job are low. If an academic career is your passion, I encourage you to pursue it, but you must commit to doing what it takes to succeed.