The Philosophers' Cocoon

In the comments section of my post on last year's job numbers by AOS, an enterprising commenter, 'Curious', writes:

I was curious so I spent a couple hours going through the AOSs of recent graduates (2012-17) from NYU, Princeton, Rutgers and Michigan. Here are the results:

Total: 194
Ethics – 39 (20%)
Epistemology – 28 (14%)
Metaphysics – 27 (14%)
Mind (inc. Action) – 25 (13%)
Language – 15 (8%)
Science – 13 (7%)
Political/Law – 13 (7%)
Ancient – 11 (6%) (NB. These are ALL from Princeton, so this is misleading)
Math/Logic – 9 (5%)
History (excl. Ancient) – 8 (4%)
Aesthetics – 5 (2%)

I interpret this as pretty bad news for budding epistemologists and metaphysicians, given the job numbers. Obviously more departments would have to be gone through to really get useful numbers. Princeton has a unusually large number of dissertations in Ancient (same for Rutgers in epistemology and Michigan in Law).

Another reader, 'Also Curious', then added:

I suspect – suspect – that the "relatively booming specialties" that you identify are areas of growth in "lesser" departments, that is, departments outside the top 20 (perhaps top 40) on Leiter's rankings.

Two decades ago, there was very little interest and training in applied ethics at elite (and even below that) schools. Bowling Green, for example, was noted as one of the best in the USA. That again is an area where there are great teaching "needs" at non-elite schools.

Because I too was curious, I quickly looked up Carolyn Dicey Jennings' 2016 update on her earlier job-market report, and found the following chart:

As you can see from the purple parts of the pie-charts (indicating graduates whose dissertations were in "core" areas), many departments appear to be graduating somewhere between 20-40% of their PhDs in core areas…when only something like 8% of available jobs appear to be in those areas.

One can also pretty plainly see some anecdotal support for Also Curious' hypothesis that lower-ranked departments may be graduating more people in "booming" areas of the job-market (i.e. value theory). Just looking at the chart, one can see that departments like Depaul, Vanderbilt, Georgia, Marquette, McMaster, Rochester, Sussex, Hawaii, and Macquerie are graduating comparatively larger proportions of PhDs in value theory than some more highly-ranked programs.

Although I don't have the time to look more closely, I'm sure an enterprising reader or two could use Jennings' data to better evaluate Curious' and Also Curious' hypotheses!