New Leadership at APDA

APDA began in late 2011 as a pet project, since academic placement statistics were not available for philosophy graduates and I was on the job market for the first time. I looked at a number of categories, including graduate program, AOS, number of publications, and gender. The first findings were sent to a few different bloggers and eventually posted to the now defunct Philosophy Smoker on April 18th, 2012. The available data were quite limited and two estimates of employment into tenure-track academic jobs were provided, yielding a predicted range of 17%–39% for graduates that year. It also reported that "The mean number of peer-reviewed publications for those going to ranked tenure-track jobs was 3 (Median=2), whereas the mean number for all post-docs was 2 (Median=2)." The post received a very high number of comments, receiving far more attention than anticipated.

Interestingly, later findings are similar to this initial rough estimate: several reports have found that around 1 in 3 graduates find a permanent academic position within 5 years, but only around half that find such employment the same year that they graduate.

In May 2012 the anonymous philosophers at ProPhilosophy reached out and offered that I post at their blog (I have never known their identities):

Dear Dr. Jennings,

Some time ago, you posted some preliminary results about the philosophy job market to the Philosophy Smoker blog. There were a number of comments and a fruitful discussion. It was clear to everyone that you performed a valuable service; thank you!

In the month that's passed, a number of other results have come in. Now that the academic year is coming to a close, ProPhilosophy would like to invite you to author a guest post reflecting on these final results. Readers have been helpfully adding appointments since Leiter's job thread closed, and it seems like the final data (or at least something close) are in. Given the response to your first statistical analysis, ProPhi suspects philosophers would be eager for another one. Since you did such a fantastic job on the preliminary analysis, ProPhi hopes you will be willing to do a final one to be posted on ProPhi (and anywhere else that you like). Is this something you are interested in doing?

Sincerely,
ProPhilosophy

Their assistance allowed the project to gather more complete data on 2012 hires, and more accurate analyses. By November of 2012 I noted to ProPhilosophy that "someone had maliciously edited the webpage" for gathering data and they wrote back "I anticipate a lot of malicious editing"—a sign of things to come. We nonetheless continued posting the data we could find in 2013 and 2014.

On July 1st, 2014 (one year into my new job as Assistant Professor at UC Merced) I posted a comparison of placement rate with PGR ranking: https://newappsblog.com/2014/07/01/job-placement-2011-2014-comparing-placement-rank-to-pgr-rank/ . The blowback from Brian Leiter was intense and co-bloggers reached out to support me during "Leiter's latest attack"; Helen De Cruz, for instance, wrote, "Would, in any other discipline, we tolerate that a senior, prominent guy attacks junior, untenured women, who could be potentially damaged by his attacks? Especially given that his attacks are about the mental capacities of these women." Justin Weinberg, who I had never met, wrote a very widely discussed piece at Daily Nous. Much has been written of these events but I especially enjoyed the more creative pieces, such as "Thursday Poem" ("The fair CDJ! Nymph, in thy rankings Be none of my sins rememb'red.") and "The Book of Rankings" ("The Lighter, now even more fearsome, grew wary or perhaps frightened. And he struck at The Gambler with a mighty wind, but The Gambler parried his attack. And then the philosophers found themselves in between two mighty forces. We might call them 'past' and 'future.'")

In light of all this, one co-blogger suggested: "One thing I would like to see happen is for CDJ's rankings to get a separate stand alone web site that we could link to on a side bar. The initiative is extraordinarily helpful to prospective graduate students and it would be nice if the information were easily accessible not just in blog posts."

I decided (RIP my c.v.) to make APDA a Serious Project. I applied in June 2014 for my first APA small grant, which I received in May 2015. I worked that year with a number of people from many different academic disciplines to build the project, but especially:

• Angelo Kyrilov, a graduate student in Computer Science (now tenured faculty), who built our first database and website, including personalized dashboards and an in-house survey
• Patrice Hazam, a graduate student in Quantitative Psychology (now working at Meta), who developed our more advanced statistical analyses
• Justin Vlasits, a graduate student in Philosophy at Berkeley (now tenured faculty), who helped with data gathering and survey development
• David Vinson, a graduate student in Cognitive and Information Sciences (now at TikTok), who helped with survey development
• Evette Haithcock, an undergraduate in Political Science (now at Curtis Legal Group), who helped with data gathering
• and Cruz Franco, an undergraduate in Economics (now at The Community Solution Education System), who helped with data gathering

Over the years that we were funded by the APA we released a number of reports, with these and other collaborators, which are available at the website: https://www.philosophydata.org/about. Some of our most surprising findings were:

• "gender is a signicant predictor of type of placement (i.e. permanent versus temporary)" (first reported in 2015)
• "women [are] less likely to recommend their program...a significant effect (p .01)" (first reported in 2016)
• "while philosophy PhD graduates seem to prefer academic positions, only those in permanent academic positions seem better off than those in nonacademic positions, in terms of rated fit" and "those in nonacademic positions appear to be making more than those in academic positions. This difference was significant" (first reported in 2017)
• "there is evidence of underrepresentation in terms of race, veteran status, socioeconomic status, and gender...demographic characteristics make a difference to subjective outcomes...as well as objective outcomes" (first reported in 2018)
• "Those with one or more underrepresented factors both rated their PhD programs lower for satisfaction with teaching preparation and found themselves spending more hours on teaching after graduation. Further, they more often mentioned the need for formal training in teaching methods." (first reported in 2019)

(To see all of those who have contributed to this project and what they are doing now, see "past contributors" on the about page.)

In the past five years I have received funding from the UC Merced Senate and Center for Humanities, and continue to work with students to gather data and write reports. The most recent one is from the 2021 survey, published in Metaphilosophy in 2022 with Alex Dayer (now at University of Arkansas). Our planned report on the 2023 survey fell through, but I published a few blog posts on the work, completed with the help of Neelum Maqsood (now at Pakistan's Ministry of Planning Development and Special Initiatives). I have also collaborated with others on research using APDA data, such as a paper on networks in philosophy with Pablo Contreras Kallens and Dan Hicks, and a paper on diversity in philosophy with Eric Schwitzgebel, Liam Kofi Bright, Morgan Thompson, and Eric Winsberg (updating a 2017 paper on women in philosophy with Eric Schwitzgebel).

A few years ago we launched a new website and blog and appointed a Board of Advisors, with twice annual meetings. In Fall 2024 I decided in consultation with the board to recruit two more directors and work with them to complete biennial data gathering and surveys with the help of undergraduate research assistants. That recruitment took place this summer and I am happy to announce the addition of Travis LaCroix and Kino Zhao. Below, the two new directors answer some questions I posed to them with the goal of providing you with a sense of how this project might change shape with the help of their leadership in future years.

My academic trajectory is quite unremarkable – I've been a student my entire life. My undergraduate degree was from the University of British Columbia. I started uni wanting to be a clinical psychologist and I worked in a number of different labs as a Research Assistant. One thing that UBC did which I really appreciated was forcing students to take a lot of electives. I took philosophy without having a single clue of what it was, purely because I thought it'd be cool to tell other people that I've studied philosophy. It ended up fascinating me so much that I took enough courses to graduate with a double major.

Around the time I was graduating, my parents were trying to immigrate to Canada (it didn't work out), and they would only be able to claim me as a dependent if I stayed a full-time student because of my age. So I somewhat last-minute decided to apply to Simon Fraser University's terminal MA program in philosophy. Much to my surprise, I got in. I had such a fantastic time there that I decided to pursue a PhD (at UC Irvine). I sometimes tell people that I got into philosophy for purely pragmatic reasons.

I had actually dropped out of high school and spent a few years working before I decided—slightly on a whim—to pursue an undergraduate degree. Although I didn’t have the requisites to be admitted anywhere, I was able to challenge some of the entrance requirements, which allowed me to start an associate degree in English at Camosun College in Victoria, BC. On the first day of class, after my first philosophy lecture, I came home and told my partner that I wanted to get a PhD in philosophy. (The reply: “Maybe get through this year first…”)

From Camosun, I was able to transfer into a bachelor’s programme at (like Kino) the University of British Columbia. Like Kino, I applied and was admitted to Simon Fraser University’s MA programme in philosophy. And, like Kino, I was later admitted to the PhD programme at UC Irvine.

Unfortunately, immigration to the United States proved to be a major barrier, so I had to figure out a way to complete my PhD while not physically remaining in the USA. Fortunately, thanks to the support of my supervisor and others, I was able to register “in absentia” to complete my dissertation while being a visiting researcher at Mila – Québec AI Institute in Montréal, QC. In many ways, I would not be in the position I am now without the support of individuals who allowed me to take slightly unorthodox paths through the (often hostile) academic system, which has significantly shaped how I see the importance of community in academia.

I genuinely do not remember; although, I do not recall looking at it when I was deciding where to apply for PhD programmes, so maybe I became aware of it after 2015?

One thing that I appreciate about our discipline is the sheer volume of resources available to the community—between The PhilPapers Foundation, The Philosophers’ Cocoon, The Daily Nous, etc. For better or worse, I am not aware of any other disciplines that have such organised and ample resources available for professionals, young scholars, and students to help demystify and make explicit the many unwritten conventions of our field. In this context, APDA feels (to me) like something that has always existed as a part of this suite of resources.

I have been casually writing about my academic experience online for many years, mostly in Chinese but sometimes in English. A consequence of this is that students would seek me out for advice on a variety of topics, some of which I am better positioned to answer than others. In 2018, I was a 3rd year PhD student who just defended my dissertation prospectus and was feeling a lot more legitimate in academia as a result. I decided to create a workshop that tells prospective students -- especially those who are first-generation, are in undergraduate-only institutions, or are international to where they want to study -- what the process of applying to PhD programs is actually like. The result is Wonder Philosophy which debuted in 2019.

Because I didn't want it to simply be "how I got into grad school", as part of the preparation, I read everything I could find online about philosophy grad school. At that time there was a lot of discussion about the problems with ranking systems. That was when I first came across APDA as an alternative way for students to decide where to apply. Since then, I have also relied on APDA when answering various questions students would ask of me, such as job prospects of philosophy PhDs. I was glad to have an alternative source of information about academic philosophy that isn't just "here's what me and my friends did".

When I first began using APDA in Wonder Philosophy, I had a lot of trouble getting prospective students to see what I wanted them to see out of the data. In 2020 Carolyn started a series of blog posts where she randomly took two departments and compared them on various axes where data had been gathered. Even though everything she included was already in the datasheet and she was not making any ranking-like judgment, I found it to be a much more contextualized way to understand the numbers. That is my favourite sub-project of APDA.

Another aspect that I really value is the fact that APDA has been around for long enough that it is now possible to track trends within the discipline, such as the number of PhDs completed in philosophy and employment trends. We can now see whether our favourite pet peeve observation about the profession is empirically accurate!

One of my favourite aspects of the project is its adaptability. As Kino mentions, the longevity of the APDA survey has allowed for trend-tracking within the discipline. However, as the project has evolved over time, the focus of the survey has changed as well—in part in response to topics of interest in the discipline (i.e., the kinds of things we might want to know about general trends within the field). This means that, although the APDA project started out as one thing, it can be updated as certain features of our field become more or less interesting.

The initial goal of the APDA project (as I understand it), was to fill a data gap on academic placement statistics for philosophy graduates. The early growth of the project saw more complete data and accurate analyses. But, as the survey itself evolved and questions were added (as Kino highlights) we were able to track trends within the discipline across time.

To the extent that the APDA project has a defined set of goals, I want us to better understand what those goals are, why they are what they are, and for whom. (Although, this is just one of many possible directions!) Along with Kino and Carolyn, and all the other scholars and students involved with the project in some capacity or another, I am excited to see what we can come up with!

Working on the APDA project puts me/us in an interesting position where we are gathering data about ourselves and for ourselves. In addition to the numbers we get on the excel sheets, we also know what it's like to live those numbers and how people who have given us those numbers talk about them. Moving forward, I would like to write more about the benefits and limitations of using data such as the APDA to inform personal, one-shot decisions such as where to apply to grad school. Hopefully together we can keep the APDA project both methodologically rigorous and experientially relevant!