The CHE has a story on the placement study released at Philosophy News and commented upon here and at Leiter Reports. Unfortunately, the CHE story frames this as "Study Shows X." A better frame than that provided by CHE would have been
The first draft of an on-going, self-correcting, and in-need-of-improvement study of philosophy placement trends at some well-regarded American PhD programs has been published. The author of the study recognizes all its limitations, and has received incisive feedback from people in the profession, a sign that everyone recognizes the need for better placement studies.
Whatever the framing problems of the story, I want to try to list here the data that would make up an ideal placement study. For each school listed (the ideal study would incorporate the Carson study's initial data base, but would include others not listed there) we would want:
- Applications
- Offers
- Acceptances
- Enrollments
- Completion (degrees)
- Time-to-degree / Date of exit of program if pre-degree
- Degree-holders who never pursued academic jobs
- Type of job landed: Business, Government, Non-Profit, Academic Administration
- Type of initial academic placement
- Per Course Adjunct
- Term Adjunct
- Post-doctoral Fellowship
- VAP
- TT
- Time-to-TT placement
- Type of job
- K-12
- CC
- regional state school
- flagship state school
- SLAC
- private research university
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