<p>Hi, everyone.Im an international student from China interested in studying philosophy. Basically my foremost criteria for a university would be whether it can help me to get into a good graduate school. Ive heard that LACs are great in doing this and Reed has a great record of sending people into Phd programmes. However, Umich has a lot of great philosophers in its department. My concern for Reed is that what kind of graduate programme does its students go to? could it be high quantity but low quality? For umich, im afraid of being unable to interact with the professors. How does it help if you got great professors who never talk to you privately? For umich, i got into residential college and is applying to the honors. does all these programmes help to compensate the disadvantages of a big university? For ucl and st andrews, i dun no if people in america are familiar with it. For those who know the British system, do you think british universities are better in sending people to graduate programmes? Thank you everyone for helping me at this crucial time!</p>
<p>While Michigan is very large, Philosophy attracts very few students. Intro classes may be large, and some may even be taught by TAs. However, intermediate and advanced level classes will be taught by faculty and classes should be small, with plenty of interaction with faculty. </p>
<p>I think you should seek the advice of bclintonk. He is a regular poster who did his undergraduate studies in Philosophy at Michigan and went on to get a PhD at another top Philosophy department. While he knows much about the department at Michigan, he also has a healthy respect for LACs.</p>
<p>Agree with Alexandre that intro classes may be large but upper-level courses will be small. I did a philosophy major at NYU and my upper-level classes sometimes only had 6 people in them and were taught by many of NYU’s very famous philosophy faculty members. </p>
<p>Personally, I would recommend UMich since you can get the best faculty exposure there if you’re looking to take classes from a large number of very well-known philosophers.</p>
<p>Thank you guys! never thought replies would come so fast~~~its so encouraging to know that i might have the chances to meet umich’s professors! do you guys think i may have a chance of getting into the top graduate philosophy programmes if i go to umich?</p>
<p>^^^You already are at one at Michigan!</p>
<p>This following list is taken from Reed’s alumni data base. Berkeley is most common university of Ph.D. award, as might be expected.</p>
<p>[REED</a> COLLEGE LIFE AFTER REED](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/success.html]REED”>Life After Reed - Institutional Research - Reed College)</p>
<p>Reed is the leading undergraduate institution, behind science-only Caltech and Harvey Mudd, in Ph.D. productivity .</p>
<p>[The</a> Colleges Where PhD’s Get Their Start | The College Solution](<a href=“http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/]The”>The Colleges Where PhD's Get Their Start)</p>
<p>At Reed, all students must take qualifying examinations in their major at the end of the junior year and write at full-year thesis in the senior year.</p>
<p>All classes except for intro science ones are small. For example, the required freshman Humanities course covering Greek and Roman civilization meets three times weekly with a professor in groups of 15 or so students, on top a three hours per week of lectures. All humanities and social science classes are taught in a conference or discussion style format with students and a professor. Professors are readily accessible.</p>
<p>If you do well at Reed, you will get you into a better grad school than you would at Michigan, and with funding. Private universities like Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Hopkins, etc. are partial to accepting students from private undergraduate institutions like Reed. As with all humanities fields, getting funding for a Ph.D. to the finish is critical. Attending a well-endowed private university for a philosophy Ph.D. is often a plus.</p>
<p>It would be foolish for OP to turn down Reed for a very large state university like Michigan, which use large lecture classes and grad students as TA’s and class instructors (for budgetary reasons), especially in the unusual case of the same cost for OP.</p>
<p>“Private universities like Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Hopkins, etc. are partial to accepting students from private undergraduate institutions like Reed.”</p>
<p>That’s nice to hear rhg3rd. However, the OP is looking for the very best graduate philosophy programs. None of the five schools you mentioned are among them.</p>
<p>^ I’m fully aware that Michigan is a top 5 philosophy department by faculty. How many years are spent completing a Ph.D. in philosophy on average at Michigan?</p>
<p>Besides that, OP will be a freshman next year and not a grad student. He/she can always choose where to go to grad school later.</p>
<p>Reed is really great for philosophy and in general is an excellent university. Very intellectual, very smart, and very rigorous. Michigan is, of course, the full college experience with everything and anything. I don’t know much about UCL or Andrews but between Michigan and Reed I would say they are both excellent but are very different.</p>
<p>Reed: Intimate setting, small student body, intellectual feel, and very demanding and high quality academics.</p>
<p>Michigan: huge student body, also high quality academics, not as intimate of feel. </p>
<p>I would go with fit between these two. Where would you rather be? Where could you see yourself happy?</p>
<p>it would have all ended if i was able to pay for umich’s deposit: i wasnt because i dun have an american bank account. but that incident gave me two more days and just in these two days i had a second thought: i searched cvs of current graduate students in top philosophy departments and found that there was a shocking lack of presence of umich students and in contrast there were three people from reed—a high number for such a small college. </p>
<p>i know this is not a really reliable method—many graduate students didnt state where they finished undergraduate studies. but at least i found some interesting facts(among the approx. one third who stated their origins of BA):1,there is a fair split between students from public and private universities.2, reed has a larger presence than umich 3, many of umich’s peer schools(especially unc and uc berkeley) are major contributors to those programmes.4, graduate students come from all sorts of colleges, lsa,big us, ivy league—everyone has a share. </p>
<p>point 2 and 3 threw me into confusion again. although reed has only a slight lead(3 over 2,but the two from umich are all in, well, umich—which means none outside umich), if size is taken into account the result is really significant. well at the same time i can also see that people from big state universities do have a great chance in getting into such programmes.</p>
<p>one good thing is that i do not treat this dilema as a life or death matter any more—point 4 shows that personal efforts rather than school reputation may be more important.</p>
<p>hope this long post doesnt put you off~im not driven crazy by this thing yet. i think i would need some more days to think through all of these again~~~what do you guys think about my analysis? is it reliable to any extent?</p>
<p>University College London is probably the best of these options, and great location! You’d also have the opportunity to delve deep into philosophy since English universities don’t have breadth requirements</p>
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<p>The best available data on PhD completions is here:
<a href=“https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/[/url]”>https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/</a></p>
<p>Unfortunately, the NSF does not break out the numbers for Philosophy PhD completions. The closest it gets is “Other Humanities” (besides English/Lit, Foreign Languages, History, Religion & Theology, Arts & Music).</p>
<p>In the years 2006-2010, 14 Reed College alumni earned PhDs in “other humanities”. 11 Michigan alumni earned PhDs in “Other Humanities” in the same years. These are absolute numbers, not per capita numbers (adjusted for school size). So, a much higher percentage of all Reed students earn PhDs in these fields.</p>
<p>Make of this data what you will. It does not tell you how many alumni begin these programs and don’t finish, or how many even bother to apply. It does not tell you where students earn their doctorates. The Reed web site indicates that the 15 grad schools most frequently attended by Reed alumni for PhD programs include Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Michigan, in addition to several state universities in California and the Pacific NW. ([REED</a> COLLEGE LIFE AFTER REED](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/success.html]REED”>Life After Reed - Institutional Research - Reed College)).</p>
<p>As for class sizes, here is detailed data for Reed:
[REED</a> COLLEGE AVERAGE CLASS SIZE](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/averageclssz.html]REED”>Average Class Size - Institutional Research - Reed College)
96% of Reed classes had fewer than 30 students in Fall 2010.
I think you’ll find that at Reed, small classes predominate even in the introductory classes, where you start building a foundation. This may be one reason (along with the thesis and oral exam requirements) Reed students seem to be well prepared for grad school.</p>
<p>Really can’t go wrong with Reed or UMich. I’ll also recommend checking out Rutgers; top-tier philosophy department and a large number of Chinese international students.</p>
<p>Since nobody is weighing in on the 2 UK unis i think i should give my 2 cents.</p>
<p>For Philosophy, UCL is better than St. Andrews as it has a bigger department and is ranked higher.</p>
<p>UCL is also the third tier down from Oxbridge, LSE/Imperial</p>
<p>This should probably boil down to Michigan and Reed.</p>
<p>Realize that at top philosophy departments, getting As is going to be very difficult. It has nothing to do with the quality of the students, but with the limits they have on giving As. I was in a class where i was one of only two students out of 40 to get an A. There are plenty of A-s/B+, but getting the pure A is difficult.</p>
<p>My advice is to go to Reed. Although Michigan undoubtedly has the better department, your writing looks like it could use a lot of work. Michigan likely wouldn’t be able to give you the attention to improve your writing that a small LAC like Reed could. Given that your writing sample will be the most important determinant of whether you get accepted into top programs our not, it should be of paramount importance.</p>
<p>You should also realize that philosophy is most U.S. departments is analytic in style. Analytic phil. isn’t for everyone. I’ve met some professors that love it, and some that hate it. Some of the major interests in analytic phil. are reference and identity, and historically there are a few big figures of analytic phil (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and maybe others like Quine thrown in, and contemporary stuff by Kripke) and the stuff that was going on in the 20th century (e.g. the death of logical positivism.)</p>
<p>Now, certainly these topics won’t dominate your studies, but they will likely be of major research interests to the faculty at the colleges within the U.S.</p>
<p>Although Michigan is much larger than Reed, I would be surprised if Michigan had more Philosophy majors than Reed. At Michigan, Philosophy is known for attracting very few concentrators (roughly 30 per graduating class), while at Reed, I heard that as many as 10% (roughly 35 per graduating class) of undergrads major in Philosophy. So I would not expect to see more Michigan graduates than Reed graduates enrolled in graduate Philosophy programs.</p>
<p>Reed lists the number of graduates per department here:
[REED</a> COLLEGE BACCALAUREATE DEGREES BY DEPARTMENT](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/gradbydept.html]REED”>Baccalaureate Degrees by Department - Institutional Research - Reed College)
11 philosophy majors have graduated in each of the past three classes.
(The CDS, section J, shows 8% majoring in philosophy and religious studies.)</p>
<p>According to Michigan’s 2011-12 CDS, only 1% of Michigan students major in Philosophy.
About 6100 first year students matriculated that year.
According to the US News site, their 4 year graduation rate is 73%.
So at those rates, there must be about 45 philosophy majors per year.
Maybe it’s lower than that in some years.</p>
<p>Go with fit OP. Where do you think you will be happiest?</p>
<p>Poster beyphy in #15 above has made a good point about OP’s writing skills. OP should carefully examine Reed’s freshman humanities writing requirements as the road ahead may be a difficult one.
[Reed</a> College | Humanities 110](<a href=“http://academic.reed.edu/humanities/hum110/index.html]Reed”>Humanities 110 - Reed College)</p>
<p>I had decided for Umich! This maybe my best or worst ever decision~~~who knows. I realised that maybe I still want some other aspects of college life rather than only academics and i think it is mainly personal efforts that get one into grad school. as for the writing problem~well, i couldnt even speak a line of english 5 years ago when i first came to singapore so im quite used to learning new things. hope it will still work this time~
anyway, thanks everybody for your precious advice!</p>