Hiring Statistics

Many readers of this blog are probably aware that I ran some basic hiring statistics last year, both at The Philosophy Smoker and ProPhilosophy. I first ran those analyses out of personal curiosity, but soon found that others considered them needful. I thus aim to run them each year, so long as placement directors are willing to supply the required information. I will cross-post the results here and at ProPhilosophy. 

A Plea: ProPhilosophy has sent out emails to a number of departments, so far hearing back from just 19 of them. (You can find the collected responses here.) Last year ProPhilosophy heard back from 64 departments. I hope that many more placement directors/DGSs/department chairs will find time to respond to ProPhilosophy with the available information (by sending an email to prophilosophy@gmail.com).

Why?

ProPhilosophy's method of directly soliciting information has the potential to yield a more complete database of hires than what is available through self-reporting procedures. Last year I used the information available on the Leiter Blog for the Philosophy Smoker post, which yielded data on 192 tenure-track jobs and post-docs. In comparison, I used the information collected by ProPhilosophy for my post on that blog, which yielded data on 230 tenure-track jobs and post-docs. This reflects a 20% increase in the number of reported hires. This quantitative difference may well come along with a qualitative change in the data, given the fact that data from self-report is prone to self-selection bias.

Hiring information is clearly useful to graduate students, with or without the analyses. Thus, please encourage your placement director, DGS, or department chair to send any information on placement to ProPhilosophy. I will aim to run analyses in late July, early August.