How does prestige correlate with placement in academic philosophy? There’s good stuff on this already, like this post by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Pablo Contreras Kallens, and Justin Vlasits.1 This post uses the same data sources, but emphasizes different things (visualization, North American PhDs, and primarily tenure-track jobs). TT Placement in North America Let’s start with a simple question of broad interest. In North America, how well does the PGR rating of one’s PhD-granting program predict one’s chances of landing a tenure-track (TT) job?... Read more

How much does a PhD from a prestigious program help you on the job market in academic philosophy? It makes a big difference to where you get a tenure-track job, if you do get one (see here). It also seems to make some difference to whether you get a tenure-track job (though maybe not as much as one might have thought: see here). But here I want to consider whether it makes a difference to how long it takes to get a tenure-track job, if you do get one.... Read more

This post is the second of two devoted to an idea of David Wallace’s: applying Google’s PageRank algorithm to the APDA placement data. Part 1 Part 2 Source on GitHub Last time we looked at the motivation and theory behind the idea. Now we’ll try predicting PageRanks. Can students who care about PageRank use the latest PGR to guesstimate a program’s PageRank 5 or 10 years in the future?... Read more

This is the first of two posts devoted to an idea of David Wallace’s. Part 1 Part 2 Source on GitHub Suppose you pick a philosophy PhD program at random and you go visit their website. There you pick a random person from the faculty list and see where they got their PhD. Then you go to that program’s website and repeat the exercise: pick a random faculty member, see where they did their PhD, and go to that program’s website.... Read more