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    Placement Data News (Update)

    by Carolyn Dicey Jennings

    Over the past three years I have collected and reported on placement data for positions in academic philosophy. (Interested readers can find past posts here at New APPS under the "placement data" category, two of which have been updated with the new data, several posts at ProPhilosophy, or the very first post on placement at the Philosophy Smoker.) This year, placement data will be gathered, organized, and reported on by the following committee of volunteers (listed in alphabetical order):

    –Colin Cmiel 

    –Carolyn Dicey Jennings 

    –Jackson Kernion

    –Justin J. Lillge 

    –Justin Vlasits

    Over the next academic year, we aim to create a website, which will be parked at placementdata.com. This website will include a form for gathering data, a searchable database, and reports on placement data. Until that time, I am suspending updates to the Excel spreadsheet, which contains much of the data used in the past few years, plus the updates I have received over the past few months. (Many thanks to Justin Lillge for incorporating the bulk of these updates into the spreadsheet!) When the website is ready, departments will be able to update their placement data through an embeddable form. Stay tuned for these links in the coming months!

    Update:

    Marcus Arvan, of The Philosophers' Cocoon, had the idea of running a graduate student survey. This was something that the five of us had already talked about (and Justin Lillge had some preliminary work on this), so we have invited Marcus to join us in this project. He has posted s0me initial ideas here. Please do contribute to the discussion if you have insight!

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    4 responses to “Placement Data News (Update)”

    1. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      These efforts are greatly appreciated, as always. If you or your colleagues need any additional assistance doing legwork feel free to get in touch.

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    2. anon Avatar
      anon

      yes, you are all owed a great thanks for this work. (especially to Carolyn who has already been doing this on her own for so long).

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    3. anon Avatar
      anon

      Regarding the idea of a graduate student survey: I appreciate the sentiment behind this project, but it strikes me as a very bad idea in practice.
      I am a professor in a graduate program, and I spend a lot of time mentoring our graduate students—at casual lunches, in reading groups, supervising dissertations, and so on.
      Suppose a survey like this goes out and there are critical comments that make our department look less than great—perhaps because some of my colleagues don’t spend as much time mentoring as they could.
      How do you think I will react to that? Prof. Arvan seems to have the pollyannaish view that I should just redouble my efforts, try to pull my colleagues along, etc. But I am a human being, and I would be deeply hurt. I might begin to think it is not worth my while at all. The potential for creating low morale, or a negative atmosphere in a department, is just off the charts for a report like this.
      Note this would be a significantly different story from an APA-lead climate report, which is initiated by the department and hence antecedently indicates a more receptive atmosphere. Even PGR rankings are typically for departments that in some sense “agree” to be ranked by updating their faculty lists. A report like this which would present “findings” that are not even recognized or sought by departments—likely seriously incomplete, likely anecdotal, likely gossipy, likely statistically unsound—has the potential to create huge mischief.

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    4. David Wallace Avatar
      David Wallace

      To anon: I think there are two arguments mixed together here. At the end of your last paragraph you suggest that any such report would be “likely seriously incomplete, likely anecdotal, likely gossipy, likely statistically unsound”. That would be good reason not to do such a report irrespective of the rest of your post.
      So suppose hypothetically that someone constructs a survey that is reasonably sound and that your department does badly in it. Then the fact that this would be hurtful for the department, bluntly, is tough. The intended audience of this sort of survey is in the first instance prospective graduate students; the incentive to get your house in order isn’t the carrot of being thought better of by people, it’s the stick of not being able to attract good students unless you can sort your reputation out.
      And yes, no doubt it would be upsetting to be a conscientious person in a department where most of your colleagues aren’t so conscientious. But ultimately that’s a general feature of being part of a team, and graduate students are applying to the department as a whole, not to you in particular.

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