Area of Specialization and Permanent Academic Placement: A Micro Analysis

A placement director reached out to me to ask about area of specialization and how it interacts with permanent academic placement. While we have looked at this issue in earlier posts, an updated analysis might be useful. For this micro analysis I looked at graduates between 2021 and 2026 and compared those who have had any permanent academic job to those who have not. The broad finding is that those in Value Theory and History & Traditions (n=1125) have a higher proportion in permanent academic placement (p<.0005 using Chi-squared) than those in LEMM or Science, Logic, & Math (n=864). While 32% of all graduates in the past five years with known AOS have permanent academic placement, the numbers vary by AOS category: 28% of LEMM, 36% of Value Theory, 34% of History & Traditions, and 28% of Science, Logic, & Math. Unknown AOS has a much lower permanent academic placement rate: 17%.

A couple of notes of caution: 1) We include in our database only first-listed AOS, which does not capture the full range of each individual's specialization and may incur confounds (e.g. if there were a tendency to list alphabetically, rather than by primacy). 2) Recent data tend to be skewed toward those who find permanent academic jobs (since those are the ones placement directors are the most likely to report on their websites); a complete picture (i.e. one that accurately shows the AOS denominator) would take a few more years to collect.

For the more fine-grained numbers, bolded are all those with a higher than average permanent academic placement rate (32%).

For the "big" areas of specialization (those with more than 100 graduates in the past 5 years), the highest placement was in Social/Political (37%; n=254) and Ancient (37%; n=101), followed by Ethics (36%; n=274), Epistemology (33%; n=165), Philosophy of Science (29%; n=102), Metaphysics (28%; n=112), and Philosophy of Mind (25%; n=151).

For the "mid-sized" areas of specialization (those with between 20 and 100 graduates in the past 5 years), the highest placement was in Law (60%; n=25), followed by Medieval/Renaissance (52%; n=23), Gender/Race/Sexuality/Disability Studies (48%; n=56), Philosophy of Physics (40%; n=25), Logic (33%; n=39), German Philosophy/Kant (31%; n=68), Applied Ethics (31%; n=85); Modern Philosophy (31%; n=36), Historical Philosophy (29%; n=28), Continental Philosophy/Phenomenology (29%; n=56), Metaethics (26%; n=34), Philosophy of Religion (25%; n=20), Philosophy of Language (24%; n=70), Value Theory (22%; n=27), Cognitive Science/Psychology/Neuroscience/Linguistics (22%; n=73), and Philosophy of Technology (20%, n=40).

Finally, for the "small" areas of specialization (those with less than 20 graduates in the past 5 years), the highest placement was in Education (100%; n=2) and American/Latin American Philosophy (100%; n=2), followed by Philosophy of Action (67%; n=3) and African Philosophy (67%; n=3), Philosophy of Biology/Environmental Philosophy (45%; n=11), 19th/20th Century Philosophy (44%; n=16), Metaphilosophy/Experimental (40%; n=5), Asian Philosophy (38%, n=8), Decision Theory (31%; n=16), Philosophy of Economics (23%; n=13), History of Analytic Philosophy (22%; n=9), Aesthetics (18%; n=11), Philosophy of Math (17%; n=18), Comparative Philosophy (15%; n=7), and Other (0%; n=2).

A final point worth considering is that hiring trends come and go, and this analysis is not future-facing/predictive. Yet, the headline success of those in Value Theory and History & Traditions appears to be consistent across past analyses. For instance, in 2024 I reported that "graduates specializing in certain philosophical traditions and areas of value theory currently do better in terms of permanent academic employment than those in more mainstream and formal areas." In 2017 the categories had more similar values (between 33 and 36%) and Science, Logic, & Math appeared much stronger as a category. That is, almost 10 years ago I did an analysis on graduates for a similar time period (four years prior, 2012–2016) and found an overall permanent academic placement rate of 35%, with higher than overall numbers for Value Theory (36%); Science, Logic, & Math (36%); and History & Traditions (35%), but lower numbers for LEMM (33%; these differences are not statistically significant). In terms of detailed AOS, the big areas of specialization with a higher than overall placement rate in 2017 were Ancient Philosophy (48%; n=103), Ethics (37%; n=309), Social/Political (36%; n=193), and Continental (36%; n=122). The top three of these are also the top three big AOS's in this analysis, whereas Continental now has half the graduates it did then.