By: Eric Winsberg
Here's how students in other disciplines apparently choose a PhD program (h/t Bryce Huebner)
http://www.andyfugard.info/choose-a-phd-programme
This strikes me as extremely good advice, and in the modern age of the information overload, a perfectly adequate method once a prospective graduate student knows where to start. That suggests to me that all we really need, by way of "rankings," is a list of departments that have strengths in each of the sub-disciplines in philosophy. (And perhaps, for some subdisciplines that seem to be badly fractured, like continental philosophy, there could be a separate list for each movement within the subdiscipline.) Such a list could either be generated by a representative panel for each sub-discipline without too much fuss. Or it could even be a wiki where departments could list themselves in any category they like. On the second method, it might become necessary, for some of the more highly represented areas, for a panel to cull the list down to a manageable size, or to split it into two or three tiers. What prospective graduate students really need, it seems to me, and not much more, is help generating a list of 12-15 schools to research given a particular area of interest. They really do not need ordinal rankings.
UPDATE: In response to comments below, I concede that the link I provided does not provide terribly useful advice (in its details!) for American prospective students. It does seem much more tailored for the UK. Having said that, I think my main point still stands. In the cases in which I have advised students on finding a graduate program, the PGR has primarily played the following sort of role: we use it to collect a list of programs that are strong in the area the student is interested in, and then I give them several "homework assignments" on how to do futher research. I tell them to look at placement; to read papers by the people who work in the area that they are interested in; to look at citati0n metrics; I give them a list of journals and presses that I think are strong in the area that they are interested in, and I tell them to look at CVs of scholars in their area of interest and to look for those presses and journals etc. To the extent that ordinal rankings play any role in my advice, it is mostly as a predictor of how difficult it will be to get into the program in question--but I take it that's a feature of the PGR that is mostly self-fulfilling.
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