The Philosophers' Cocoon

7 responses to “An overview of grad school & the job-market in America?”

1. Anonymous

   May 29, 2026

   Yes, in line with what Marcus says above… Different from most PhD programs in the UK and Europe, PhD students are admitted without a set advisor, and then usually take about 2 years of full-time graduate coursework (about 16 courses). During this period they typically do not also do any teaching or TA-ing for other philosophy courses. After this, they often must pass comprehensive examinations (covering certain topical areas, including usually the history of philosophy); but many PhD programs instead have a ‘qualifying paper’ or two, a sample of research that must be approved. If they pass those, they advance to the prospectus/ dissertation proposal stage (usually around year 3 or 4), which may involve a full dissertation proposal, at which time they will have found a dissertation advisor, plus solicited 2-3 other faculty to be on the committee. Also during those years, their financial support package typically involves TAing or teaching their own undergraduate class (perhaps one per semester, so they still have enough time to work on their dissertation). By the 5th year, if things are going well, they will have shared multiple dissertation chapter drafts with at least their advisor and received feedback. Usually they have completed enough of it (and hopefully also published a journal article or two during this phase, presented at conferences or workshops, etc.) to apply widely for faculty jobs during their 5th or at least their 6th year.

   Compared to most European programs this is very long and involved. European PhD programs (as I understand at least the UK’s versions; I held an Oxbridge position for 3 years) involve being admitted directly to the dissertation phase with an advisor already arranged. So they do not have the coursework phase nor the comprehensive examinations stage, and usually do not have significant opportunity to teach undergraduate courses on your own. (And given all these sunken costs and time devoted to it in the American system, you can imagine how much more important, and stressful it is, to apply for jobs to become a full-time philosophy faculty member, as the stakes can feel very high… especially if one has (or wants) a spouse or family, or has formed strong preferences about where they’d like to live long term after spending all these years doing this (also, sometimes, having done a different MA previous to the PhD). It can also be devastating to prove yourself for this long only to not get one, or to get one but that is subpar by not paying enough to support yourself/family, etc.)

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2. Anonymous

   May 29, 2026

   I was educated in Canada, but worked in the USA, as well. I think there is a lot of variability with “dissertation committees”. I had a supervisor and two readers (they read drafts and gave feedback, as well as approved my prospectus). But distinct from that group was the committee that evaluated the thesis. Where I was, your supervisor could not speak during the defense and had NO vote (but could speak in your defense when you left the room for the committee to vote). The examiners included (i) an external, who had veto power (their vote could kill it), (ii) an internal external (someone in another department, at your university), and (iii and iv) two others from your department (but only one could be one of your readers). Another academic chaired the session (in my case, it was my neighbour, a Professor in English literature – their job was merely keeping order and following procedures)
   R1 etc. is as Marcus says. It principally tracks what (and how many) degrees are awarded at a college or university. In America there are many colleges, and some elite, that do not award PhDs, and certainly not in philosophy. So these are not, despite their prestige, R1s. Think Williams College, for example.
   “Going on the market” is a complex phenomena. Keep in mind North America PhD programs go on forever (5 years is not uncommon, nor is 7 years). Many people test the market while they are still PhDs – people outside of the top programs are usually wasting their time, as they are not competitive. After you have defended your thesis then you really are “on the market” – you are aggressively applying for jobs. For those who do not have very many personal restrictions, (for example, I do not want to live on the east coast, in the south, etc.), the market is huge, and it might involve applying for 50+ jobs each year. But the applications are far more generic in North America, though that has changed a bit. So, with 50 applications, going on the market means, among other things, that you are constantly busy, unable to do many things you want to do, and often quite miserable. That is what going on the market means.

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   1. Anonymous

      May 29, 2026

      5 years actually is uncommon at this point… uncommonly short! The median has been 7 for a while now but is creeping up year-on-year. Modal is assuredly 6 .

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3. Daniel

   May 29, 2026

   My impression is that “going on the market” just means looking for jobs; it doesn’t mean you’re in your last year of grad school. I think many people go on the market as soon as they think they are competitive for jobs, even if they could stay around in grad school for longer.

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4. AGT

   May 29, 2026

   Yes, in fact, Europe, for example, is rather different from what is described above. No, PhD students don’t have committees. They have a supervisor, sometimes two, but the second is typically a small, often only formal, role. There is a committee for the viva, but that is in most countries different – and must be different – from those who supervise the student. Categorizing institutions makes little sense, since pretty much all universities are then R1 or R2 (whatever is the difference) in Europe since they will all have MA and PhD programs, and endowment, being state financed, is in most cases irrelevant. Of course, there might be other institutions that are not universities but typically (albeit not uniformly) one does not do a PhD to get a job there. It does seem to me, though, that ‘going on the market’ just means ‘looking for jobs’, except that the market in Europe is rather different from the US. Note also that grad school often does not exist in Europe (these days sometimes funding is given out to grad schools but that is still not the same as what Americans calls grad school) and doctoral students may have no funding either but instead government-run loan schemes or are in fact simply employed as any other member of staff on a temporary contract.

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5. Confused Brit

   May 29, 2026

   OP here – thanks for the thorough reply, Marcus; this is very helpful!

   For context on my first question, in the UK, the following is very roughly typical:
   • Just two supervisors for one’s doctoral research; usually a primary who is a (sub)field specialist, and a secondary who needn’t be – and often isn’t – a specialist, who is chiefly there to provide non-field-specific advice on the research.
   • There’s some variation between institutions here on how progression through candidature works, but sounds like it’s roughly equivalent (although perhaps a bit less formal and demanding, given that in most cases we’re admitted at the point where you start working on the thesis).
   •For examination, we send out for an external examiner, who teams up with an internal examiner from the department (who, again, needn’t be in one’s own field).

   I wish I had a big picture question to throw out, but instead I’ll pick up on something from Marcus’s reply about “going on the market”: it seems like when grad school ends in the US is a bit fuzzy? As in, there are (strategic or otherwise) decisions to be made by the candidate about when to finish?
   Here you get a specified amount of time in which to write and submit the thesis (usually ~4 years, although most funding runs out well before then). At a certain point you’re out, either because you’ve finished or the university decides you’ve outstayed your welcome.

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6. Anonymous

   May 29, 2026

   Here is the (admittedly odd) lay of the land:
   1) Re: differences in the PhD, it is simplest to say just that it is much more of a production in America than in the UK. This is primarily because most (~80%) of Americans enter their PhD immediately after their undergraduate education, and so the PhD combines all of coursework (you are awarded a pro forma Masters on your way to the PhD, but do not have to do anything like thesis-write in order to receive it), learning to research, and learning to teach. PhD students in America uniformly receive stipends, ranging from $20k (at the penurious) to $75k (at the fanciest of schools), and at most schools (though not the very fanciest) the stipends carry concomitant teaching obligations. Secondarily it is of course a production because of the greater sums of money involved.
   2) Re: Carnegie classifications, the US has gradations of school from R1 to R_n simply because it has so many more schools than the UK. Most countries, in their bourgeois revolutions, took control of the education system from the church and aristocracy. Not so in America; the federal government has almost no control over the university system, and it remains quite decidedly feudal. The government doesn’t have a say in tuition levels, how many universities they are, or what degrees they offer. There are two sorts of go-ahead you need to start a university: one is a pro forma approval from the state (filling out a form, basically), and the second is a sort of drawn-out approval from a club of the *existing* schools in that region. That’s right, our universities accredit themselves! This explains much about their basically feudal character.
   If you would like a heuristic, an R1 is a school that awards more than 70 PhDs per year and spends more than $50 million on research. All the Russell Group and all red-bricks would be R1s by American standards. The plate-glass schools would partition between R1 and R2; I do know that some don’t award quite that many doctorates. R2s are schools that award some PhDs but not very many; they usually do research in a few subject areas, but not the high-spending core-STEM ones. The R3 category is nebulous bordering on meaningless–it is basically a school that does *some* research but doesn’t really award PhDs (well, it actually *does* have a more precise meaning than that, but people aren’t consistent about using it that way). For all intents & purposes you can view it as the ‘everyone else’ partition, because even many community colleges show up in the Carnegie rankings as funding *some* research. Most schools fall in this category (or the one below it, which I’m abstracting away from), because the US has FOUR THOUSAND ACCREDITED COLLEGES/UNIVERSITIES.
   3) Instead of telling you what Going On The Market means, as did Marcus, I’m going to give you a sort of functional geneaology of the phrase instead. Going on the market does, in fact, mean ‘starting to look for jobs’. But it has quite a different tenor than in the UK because *most US PhDs expect, or at least hope, to obtain permanent, full-time positions at research universities as soon as they dissertate*. In fact, ideally, you have such a position lined up *before* you dissertate. Obviously this is not the case anywhere else in the world, where you expect to muck around with a series of postdocs most likely fizzling out into no job at all at some point. And of course this is no longer a realistic hope, even in America. But it shapes how Americans view the practices.
   There are a couple of factors at play in going on the market being more of a decision than just dissertating. The first is that, because American PhD programmes are so long, you can simply stay in them until you are a more attractive candidate and nobody will really notice. Of course you might run out of funding (which in America stretches modally to 5 years, but with many schools offering 6). But nobody will really get peeved at you til ~year 9-10.
   The second is that American schools, unlike British schools, really prize ‘freshness’. About two thirds of the junior tenure-track hires at Gourmet top-20 schools are hired within two years of their defence, and around a third are hired ABD (pre-defence). These ABD hires at the Gourmet top-20 have a modal two publications at time of hire, which obviously would not get you a permanent lecturer position at most countries’ flagship research universities. The accommodations made for youth are extreme, whereas the demerit of having previously worked a contingent job will basically prevent you from *ever* getting a job at the fancy schools. Only 8% of faculty at schools 1-20 on Gourmet have ever worked a temporary/contingent teaching job.
   So, in summary, if you go on the market as a very promising young thing, you may get a tenure-track job at the school of your dreams; hardly any teaching load, supervising PhDs as soon as you’re out of graduate school, making $120k+ a year. But if you go on the market and strike out, and take any temporary job other than a *very* high prestige postdoc like the Bersoff, you’re sort of permanently tainted. You might get a permanent job at a teaching school, eventually, but the odds show you have very little chance of making it to the top schools. Even the senior laterals into the top schools tend to be from very fancy programs and to have had very fancy careers. As you can imagine, this breeds a certain tentativeness and wannabe-strategy to the whole ‘when will I start looking for jobs, when will I schedule my defence’ decision.

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