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Job-Market Reporting Thread (2025-26)
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How will the new PGR rankings affect job-candidates?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

With the new Philosophical Gourmet rankings coming out, I was wondering if folks could chime in about how they think the rankings impact, if at all, hiring PhDs from the ranked schools. I don't mean to reopen the question of whether they are good rankings or whether rankings are good at all, just the practical question of whether and how the ranking of a candidate's degree-granting department indirectly or directly affects a candidate's chances.

Good question. I suspect that a lot of people hiring at "non-elite" institutions probably don't pay much attention to these matters. But maybe people hiring at (elite) R1s might?

Do any readers have any helpful insights?

Posted in ,

12 responses to “How will the new PGR rankings affect job-candidates?”

  1. sahpa

    Sorry to be a bit disagreeable, but: is this a good question? I don’t see how OP or anyone similarly situated should alter their behavior in light of whatever the answer is. Unless you see your home department absolutely cratering in a very public and dramatic fashion (which no departments are doing right now — I’m talking major scandal, massive layoffs/resignations, that kinda thing), or your department skyrocketing in a similar way (which no departments are doing right now, not even JHU), the change in your chances will be impossible to calculate or detect.
    This isn’t a ‘practical’ question at all, I daresay. But I am happy to be corrected.

    Reply
  2. don’t worry

    My guess is not at all. One good principle to remember is that people will think of a PhD-granting institution in terms of its strengths and weaknesses when a candidate was there, not its current or later strengths. So, for instance, say Univ X was strong in area Y in 2010, but then lost all its strong Y faculty to other departments in 2015. If a candidate has a 2010 PhD from Univ X and works on Y, everyone (or at least almost everyone among those who count) will understand that the PhD was granted when the department was strong in that area and evaluate accordingly.

    Reply
  3. Michel

    Small counterpoint to don’t worry: most people seem to have no idea about which programs are strong in which specializations. They mostly export their sense of the general rankings to their sense of the specialty rankings. And since those basically don’t change much, and since general perception of the rankings lags well behind new releases… Nothing much will change.
    Besides, it’s not like prestige works by rank order on the hiring side. It works by people going ‘ooh, Yale!’, regardless of whether it’s seventh or tenth or whatever, and nobody going ‘ooh, Utah!’, regardless of its being 47th or unranked or whatever.

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  4. don’t worry again

    @Michel, FWIW, I completely agree. My points about prestige perception changing over time is more of a general observation I’ve made recently than a point about this year’s PGR. In any case, the answer to the question does seem to be, “Not at all.”

    Reply
  5. JDF

    I’m likely to be on a hiring committee this year and was on one last year.
    Your letters matter. I need to be able to trust them, which means they need to be either from someone whose reputation, as a letter writer, I know or they need to have details which authenticate the evaluation in them. (Obviously, both is better, and the latter is more important than the former.)
    The name of your PhD program does not matter, and the fact that your program is good at X does not matter if you don’t have letters from relevant people in that program testifying that you in particular are good at X.

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  6. something is rank around here

    The other part of the answer to this question is that there is nothing the candidate on the market can do about where they did their PhD now. So relax. Do not try to make a stressful situation even more stressful. When I worked at a state college, the only one who focussed on ranking was the faculty member who had graduated from one of the lower Ivies. But she was, herself, completely unaccomplished as a scholar. Rank really matter to her.

    Reply
  7. Cap

    Just to counterbalance JDF, in case his comment is freaking anyone out, I have been on a few hiring committees recently and no one on the panel cared much about letters at all.
    As usual, I guess, it’s the wild west out here!

    Reply
  8. Timmy J

    I agree with cap. I don’t just not care about letters—I refuse to read them. I can’t figure out how to use them (there’s apparently a magical skill some people claim to have called “reading between the lines”. It looks to me a whole lot like “inventing things that aren’t there”. Either that’s what it is and I don’t wanna do it or there really is a skill and I don’t have it and either way the letters do nothing for me) so I ignore them.

    Reply
  9. Kapto

    Re. the comments about letters: I’ve been on three hiring committees in recent years, and I can say that letters do matter when it’s a research hire and the subfield isn’t an AOC of ours. But less so, I’d say, the substance of the letter. I, too, am stumped by the code we’re supposed to decipher, the differences between e.g. “without reservation” and “utmost enthusiasm” and “highest recommendation” and so on.
    So I tend to treat them as a kind of threshold indicator. It’s assumed that, generally, candidates of a certain caliber can get at least one first-rate scholar in their subfield to rave about them. So the question is: did this particular candidate meet that benchmark? Did they, too, get some first-rater to gush?
    A “no” answer won’t sink a candidate, at least for me, but all else equal it’s one of the boxes to check.
    The rankings, and especially the specialty rankings, become relevant in signaling that a certain recommender counts as a leading specialist. But as a long as a department is ranked top 20, or the subfield in the first or second group in the specialty rankings, they serve the purpose. 

    Reply
  10. Forget about it

    Just want to put this out there, but for many AOSes my department would actually be interested in hiring in, I’d be way more excited to see a candidate from Utah or mizzou or Wisconsin or CMU than Yale. 🙂

    Reply
  11. No

    Just yet another counterpoint to some of what’s been said: I work at an R1 with a strong phd program and I don’t care who wrote your letters or where you went to school. I care about your writing sample, less so that you’ve published or I can confidently assess that you will, the specific content of what your letter writers say about your work, and your ability to communicate with people across subfields, and interest in engaging with stuff outside of what you are working on.

    Reply
  12. A little lost

    To be a little contrarian, when hiring in our non-US department Leiter rankings have mattered to us because they are something we can use to convince the non-philosophers we have to convince. “I know you’ve never heard of this US university but look here it’s ranked higher than Stanford in the field” carries a lot of weight.

    Reply

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