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Have money for conference travel. I don't know why you would join a PhD program if you can't go to conferences. And if you are a department that aspires to create researchers and place them in R1 departments, adequate (i.e. generous) conference travel funding for graduate students should be one of your top priorities. (Otherwise, if your faculty can go to conferences while your graduate students cannot afford it, it doesn't make you look very good either.) E.g. ideally, all philosophy students would have airfare and their lodging (e.g. at a hostel or a shared hotel room) to attend the Eastern and Pacific APA paid for by the department every year regardless of whether they are presenting; if this is something the department allocates funds for and organizes, it could get a bulk rate too. Inform those considering your program about the benefits of staying local. If students lose their social support network, they are less likely to do well. Programs are obsessed with getting the best applicants from the applicant pool while students are obsessed with getting into the best programs. In theory, this is supposed to create the best market with the best program-student match. But in practice, it overlooks human psychology (although of course there are some rare deviations). (Studies on happiness, for example, demonstrate the important of having a social support network, making time to see family and friends, and having a community outside work.) If I ran a program, I personally would try to focus more on recruiting locally and, instead of trying to get the best students, would focus on good enough students who will be able to retain their motivation throughout the program and be able to be more resilient (and in general, I am for not gutting communities and instead for building communities) -- but that's personal choice on part of the program because there are only three ways this result can come about: (1) students stay local and don't go to PhD programs that are not in their home state, (2) programs decide to focus on student happiness and wellbeing and, paternalistically, don't admit anyone nonlocal, (3) programs decide to create a certain kind of community and conduct an experiment of whether local students would actually make for more productive students. (1) is about giving prospective students information. (2) is paternalistic, so maybe we don't want that option. (3) is not about the students, but is about the wishes of those already in the program who have a say in it (e.g. it offends me to be part of an institution that is full of unhappy lonely students without a social support network and, since I can't afford to pay to relocate all of the students relatives and friends to where the program is, I would prefer to recruit locally). But in general, information and good advice to students is crucial and, moreover, I believe that it is easier for happy workers/ students to remain productive and hence to get good jobs, whereas some people think that a program has to choose whether its responsibility is to get people jobs or to make them happy. (At the very least, if not happy workers, then properly stimulated workers/ students, not lonely depressed distressed workers/ students.) Have students do research relevant to their dissertation from day 1 in the program. Instead, right now, at least in philosophy PhD programs (but probably all of humanities), 2-3 years can pass before you can even start thinking about your dissertation topic or actually start working on it. This is usually done in the science and I don't see why humanities are to be treated differently. E.g. perhaps we should take statements of purpose and AOS's more seriously? (And if a student wants to switch areas after entering the program, just like in the sciences, s/he is still welcome to do so.) Have dissertation advisors make it a habit to make time for their students. Have faculty meet with their students at least once a week for a few hours to discuss progress or discuss current literature. A good working relationship between the advisor and the student is critical. Just as students should be proactive and set deadlines and deliver on them and stay accountable to their advisors, so should advisors. (And, if the advisor isn't interested in the student's project, then it will be hard for the student to stay motivated too.) Promptly replying to emails and being in touch via phone would be nice too. A student shouldn't have to train his advisor. But right now, people skills and management skills are not part of many humanities faculty's skillsets, nor a priority (since usually their own research is). MA enroute after at most two years. The ideal case is to recruit people fresh out of undergrad or at least students without a prior MA degree so that the enroute MA will mean something. You should be able to get an MA enroute to your PhD after at most two years. This way, if you get scared about the job market or decide that this is not for you for some other reason, you can feel like you haven't wasted your time and leave without feeling like a quitter, with your self-esteem intact. This would be good for the students and the program since it would result in healthy self-selected attrition, instead of either resulting in too many people getting PhDs when they shouldn't (hurting the department's job placement and resulting in degree inflation) or in attrition after 4 years in the program at to the detriment of the student's self-esteem (with increased opportunity costs too). Instead, in some PhD programs, you have to practically go ABD to get an MA and leaving the program is set up to make you feel like a dropout. Fewer hoops to jump through. Focus on research instead. Why would anyone have to take more than 10 courses for their PhD. It just doesn't seem necessary, unless you want to produce really good undergrads instead of really good PhDs. And, it also results in decreasing returns. (Instead, right now, many philosophy programs require 12 to 18 courses, which benefits their faculty, not the students.) My ideal PhD program in philosophy would split your time 50/50 between research and other stuff from day 1, it would require at most ten courses (although students can take more if they want to) and those courses would be geared solely towards your comprehensive/ qualifying exams, which you would take at the end of your first or second year. (E.g. if only 5-6 courses are required, then at the end of your first year; if 10 courses are required, then at the end of your second year.) After your second year, you could be required to take a few seminars (e.g. up to 4), but only to help out the faculty work on their own research problems, unless those seminars were grouped so that you could work on your dissertation instead (though I don't see how this can be possible). Teaching loads should not be excessive. E.g. no graduate student should have to grade more than 30 students, especially in a writing intensive class. Graduate students are first and foremost students, not teachers or graders. And if a PhD is a research degree, then their primary focus should be research. But of course at state schools that rely on graduate student teaching for their revenue, this requires reallocation of funds that it is probably not realistic to expect. IMO, programs that cannot provide adequate fellowship support and avoid excessive teaching loads should convert themselves to terminal MA programs and lower their ambitions admitting that they are trying to produce a product that they cannot currently afford and lack the means to produce. (On a personal note, first time I taught as a TA, I had 90 undergrads across three sections while taking 3 of my own courses. The course instructor demanded two drafts on a final paper, two essay exams, and "shorties" -- short summaries. The work demanded was extremely useful to the students and I tried to do a good job on my end to deliver it: my students were working hard, were learning a ton, and were very happy too and very satisfied with the discussion sections afterwards; on weekdays I slept 4 hours a night, had no time for my own research, my girlfriend started to feel neglected, and I ended up having health problems towards the end of the year; my options were either to compromise my teaching standards or burn out.) Improve information. Be honest and don't sugarcoat when you advertise your program on your program's website or your personal website. Websites are probably the most important venue source for those considering going into the field or applying to your department. Nor is it the responsibility of undergraduate advisors to know about individual programs, e.g. including teaching loads (nor do they often understand the severity of market conditions, possible psychological effects of financial stress, etc). But the truth is, the job market sucks no matter where you go for your philosophy or humanities PhD. Some students don't fully grasp this having not ever experienced it or think that if only they go to a top-10 or top-20 program, they will get a good job. Or they hope markets will improve by the time they will get their PhD and don't understand supply-demand free market economics and think that the world is just and rewards those who work hard. Nor do they yet think about things like retirement. The advising and information that is provided to prospective students is inadequate: e.g. many departments represent themselves as five-year programs through their websites, when in fact median time to degree in humanities in the U.S. is 9 years and likely to climb given awful job market conditions, and departments also hide attrition and sometimes make misleading job placement claims. The field of philosophy, for example, is obsessed with (Leiter) program rankings and programs post job placement records trying to outcompete each other to attract the best students. But the race to the top end up being a race to the bottom because what placement records should say, at any school, is "the job market sucks and this degree will take forever". Also, it would be good to monitor students' mental health. E.g. in a study of 3100 grad students at UC Berkeley, 95% stressed out, 53% depressed (whereas the background rate for depression in the general population is only 5%) and 10% had considered suicide in the past year. (Studies at UC San Diego and a few other schools have gotten similarly troubling results and can't be explained away by self-selection either; and if it is self-selection, then graduate students are a high-risk population to begin with, which would warrant programs to be careful.) Reasons for depression students cite are what you would expect: anxiety about the job market, financial stress, unclear goals. Many students go to study something in more depth not only because they love their field, but because they want to be happy and want to be a college professor down the line, so it would be good to monitor give prospective students feedback on where this road leads. Information is also important for purposes of motivation; those who go to PhD programs like to exceed expectations and if, for example, they are told that they should defend in their fifth year (but, because of teaching loads and poor job market conditions or for other reasons, 90% of the do not do so), they start feeling like they have failed to meet one of their goals. (And, if you don't like where you are living or you are sick of being poor or you have other financial obligations, falling "behind" by 1 to 5 years can be very disheartening.) Making current market conditions salient (labor supply-demand numbers and ratios) is critical and is not an easy task, but needs to be done because a lot of people do not get proper undergraduate advising or proper warning when they enter humanities and philosophy PhD programs (and to boot, don't process information rationally when they do get it). Maybe, if people still don't understand job forecasts properly, we can show them proportional pictures of overcrowded buses ;) Balance structure with autonomy. E.g. if your students are TA-ing for you, don't dictate what they have to do in section. Be a resource and make suggestions, but don't give them a section outline that micromanages them. A discussion section is preparation for teaching your own course and a TA should have sufficient autonomy and control over his or her own section(s). Improve labor supply-demand ratios. In humanities, the first place to start is for the majority of PhD programs to stop issuing PhDs and become terminal MA programs. There are too few jobs to have this many degree-granting programs open and the bottleneck that's created later should happen earlier, before people put enter PhD programs, if a PhD is to mean something. Otherwise, by all means, keep programs open, but don't grant degrees. Doing anything else is irresponsible. (Oddly, money is not necessarily the reason there are too many PhD programs because terminal MA programs can still get enough teaching assistants to fund the department, at least at a state school; instead, it's the prestige of having a PhD program.) Decrease opportunity costs to make sure people don't miss out on a ton of retirement benefits, especially when their salary afterwards will be ~$50k a year, if they are lucky to get a job. (Falling behind your peers and trying to catch up later is an issue not only for PhD students, but for MD's too.) Though, no well in hell this will ever happen. Instead of making people pay higher opportunity costs, be more selective in who you admit to the field. After all, you get what you pay for. Keep track of attrition. Right now, people simply disappear from PhD programs. Those who graduate usually make it to the online placement record. But those who, e.g. at a state school, taught for the department and were part of the community, but had to leave -- those get no mention. No mention is made on the website of attrition numbers and no email ever goes out (at least in my department) to the listserv saying "we thank so and so for years of service and we are sorry to see them go". Nor do we really keep track of why people leave (whereas well-run corporations have HR conduct exit interviews to make sure they can improve things). Instead, the student feels like a dropout and we assume that it is a problem with the student, not the program. But PhD programs can have really high turnover and in humanities this isn't because they have better places to go. So why do people leave? (I know why, but that feedback needs to get back to departments and departments need to address this; though of coures if a firm loses an employee or burns out an employee, this is a loss for the firm, whereas it doesn't seem like the same incentives are as strong for PhD programs.) Benefits. While it's okay to be willing to live like a monk to do something you love, your basic needs should always be met; and basic needs include things like healthcare and retirement. Also, as an aside, why do PhD students not have the same health insurance as regular faculty? (And why do adjuncts not have the same benefits as regular faculty too?) Considering how long some degrees actually end up taking and the age of many graduate students, this is a serious issue. And if this is something we cannot provide, then we should at least warn people that, unless they have a working spouse through whom they will get decent benefits, they should really think twice about applying to our PhD program -- information and advising issue. Reconceptualize. Thinking about things a little bit differently can change what people will want to do even in light of the same information. This is important because the philosophy job market (as well as other academic markets) is oversaturated right now because of the actions of three types of players: (1) those who want to enter PhD programs (who are mostly kids who haven't been in the real world yet), (2) those who compete for the best students and recruit them (programs and their faculty who mostly have spent their entire lives in the Ivory Tower), and (3) faculty who inspire their students to go pursue a PhD(who have the most influence on these kids), undergraduate advisors who advise them, faculty who write recommendation letters (without which you cannot apply to a PhD program), and the kids' parents (who probably have the least influence on these kids at this point). Here are some examples of thinking about things differently. If you decide to try your luck and pursue a PhD in philosophy, you are not only taking a severe personal risk; you are also contributing to the overcrowding of a field. This is akin to squeezing onto an already overcrowded bus, when society obviously needs you elsewhere (since your marginal contribution would be much higher elsewhere). If you take this risk and succeed, someone else who has worked hard to get a PhD will go unrewarded (e.g. resorting to adjuncting). And if you fail, you will be very very disappointed and will have paid huge opportunity costs (especially if you are over 30 by the time you graduate or drop out and not inependently wealthy). So either way, it's not good. You will be climbing to the top of a very wide and tall pyramid with a very narrow top and you will have to climb over a lot of people (people you might never meet or even know about). And you will be receiving poor training for the job that you will actually have to perform (if you arelucky enough to get it) since most jobs are teaching jobs while a PhD is a research degree (not a teaching license or a teaching apprenticeship, no matter what people tell you). In fact, you are training for a job that might not even exist (with the odds of it not existing being somewhere between 60 to 90% percent). Moreover, if you try to pursue a PhD, you are trying to join an institution that does not treat its workforce and its members very well (since many go without benefits, miss out on years of retirement, struggle with adjunct jobs even with a PhD in hand, and depression rates are abnormally high). Sure they joined the institution voluntarily (no one force them to), but many end up sorely disappointed (because there aren't enough job for everyone at the other end of the pipeline or because the pipeline turns out to be too long or too arid and void of vegitation) and then it is too late for them to turn around and leaving turns out to be much more costly for many than they have anticipated. So if you want to be a part of an institution like that and support it with your time and your labor, that seems a little odd, especially at the start when you haven't made a huge investment in it yourself. Same can be said of programs that irresponsibly open a PhD track when there is no increase in job market demand and when no tenured faculty or administrator posts sobering and accurate information or takes any responsibility for starting collective action to improve information standards. Right now, higher ed and academia in the U.S. are very libertarian. As long as there are programs willing to admit more students and students willing to enter those programs, we think consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they want. There aren't even any information and disclosure standards. This is not good for individuals and this is not good for the field. This kind of hypercompetitive market does not select for the best people; instead, it selects for people who have sufficient resources to get through things, who have nerves of steel when facing a job market abyss, and other characteristics that have nothing to do how good of a teacher or researcher someone can be. But instead, many faculty think that to get a job you just have to be good and work hard, not understanding how the element of luck increases as market conditions worsen. We also (mistakenly) think that students are always free to leave a program if they become unhappy with working conditions or job prospects or lack of benefits and, if students don't perform or drop out, we blame the students or say that they were soul searching or left us for something better. But of course in humanities and philosophy, transferring or dropping out is very costly. (E.g. you have to uproot, you can't transfer much coursework, etc.) Start with faculty and graduate students. Everyone and their mother has a website nowadays. If you have one, you can start improving information there. Once these things are done, come back and ask me about other improvements that can be made. |