Even elites use grad students to teach. If school has doctoral programs those students are teaching as part of their program. My D is PhD candidate at Yale and is teaching undergrads this year. Religion but some classes are cross listed. Started in a state school honor program with majority small classes, so another option to look at if you have the stats.
Iâm guessing PhD students can come from anywhere - they do at Rutgers - but it trends toward elite colleges because those likely to end up in PhD programs probably enrolled in those to begin with. But clearly not all so if itâs an option, great and if not, thatâs great too.
Thatâs right.
The ideal information to have is the size of the graduate Philosophy program. Yaleâs has approximately 35 students at a time:
https://philosophy.yale.edu/graduate-program/description
Student Body
There are approximately 35 students in the PhD degree program every year.
So that means a lot of teaching is being done by graduate students (see the Teaching section).
The most obvious way to limit graduate student teaching is to go to a college without a graduate Philosophy program. Although as previously noted, sometimes those college will use upper class students as TAs as necessary.
But some graduate programs are larger or smaller. Rochester, for example, has about 19 Philosophy graduate students at a time:
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D is in another department, but 35 PhD students total? So assuming 5 year program, in year 1-3 students are in course work. In years 4 and 5, one year will be dissertation year (no other responsibilities) in general. Other will be TAs, not solo teaching. So not a lot of solo doctoral students teaching, but there will be some, again, anywhere there is doctoral program. Classes D has been TA in has been to sun discussion sessions, grade and maybe lecture one w or twice.
My earlier point was not to say most schools have tons of GA teachers but to point out it doesnât have necessarily anything to do with quality of experience
Yeah, I am not actually joking when I say I thought I did a really good job. But to be blunt, I donât think all my fellow grad students were great at teaching. But nor were all the professors.
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One aspect to consider might be that, when considered numerically, philosophy appears less relevant to the undergraduate academic atmosphere at Rutgers than at some smaller institutions. In the case of Rutgers, 1 out of 265 students in a recent year graduated with a âfirst majorâ in philosophy. This would make it unlikely that you would encounter other philosophy majors in random social interactions. In contrast, at a smaller school with a solid philosophy community, the ratio of philosophy majors may be in the vicinity of a relatively impactful 1 out of 45 or so.
Thatâs a good observation, although personally I would be interested to know how it looked in the Honors College, and indeed what in practice being in the Honors College meant at Rutgers (different honors colleges and honors programs can be more or less active in bringing the honors kids together in various ways). In general, kinda the point of such things is to give some kids at a big public like Rutgers a version of the small LAC experience. But in practice, sometimes less, sometimes more.
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