So, I teach at a policy school, and though our core pedagogical enterprise is the MA program, we have a small PhD program that is a mix of political science, economics, and maybe a dash of public administration. Though I have not worked closely with that many PhD students, the ones I have worked have been superb. Still, the job market being as it is, it is always tough for graduates of our program, like any other, to land an academic job. The thing I wonder is: Is it harder for PhD graduates of policy schools to get a job compared to those who graduate from disciplinary programs?
Our students have the advantage of being able and indeed interested in jobs in the policy arena. Some have gone on to quite distinguished jobs at think tanks like the Brookings Institution. We also have a fair number of foreign students who go back home to teach at higher education institutions of their home countries. My worry is that those students seeking an academic job are neither fish nor fowl: they aren’t political scientists, economist, historians, etc. For would-be employers looking at their varied mix of courses, it might be harder for them to understand what our students are and thus putting them at a disadvantage vis a vis more traditionally trained disciplinary programs.
It’s not as if public policy is its own academic discipline, really. (Or, is it? I tend to think not, but how do we know when a new discipline has made it and has enough pedigree and coherent intellectual content to be recognized by others as a distinct area of study?)
I wonder if we are doing our students a disservice but not having a second disciplinary home for them so that if they go out on the academic job market, they can legitimately claim: “I’m a graduate of a policy school, but I am a political scientist or an economist or a historian by training, and I’ve got this set of credentials, with this affiliation with a disciplinary department.” So, I’m interested in the range of experiences that other people have. Is there a program in the country that has figured out this conundrum? For the non-Harvards and Princetons of this world, is there a model that works well?
Joshua Busby is a Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the author of Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-author, with Ethan Kapstein, of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations (Cambridge, 2013). His main research interests include transnational advocacy and social movements, international security and climate change, global public health and HIV/ AIDS, energy and environmental policy, and U.S. foreign policy.
- Josh Busbyhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/jbusby
- Josh Busbyhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/jbusby
- Josh Busbyhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/jbusby
- Josh Busbyhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/jbusby
- Josh Busbyhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/jbusby
- Josh Busbyhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/jbusby
I am new to a professional program that also has Phd program, and I have the same qualms. I don’t know the stats for other places, but I do worry and wonder about the value of the IR PhD in North America.
Since one of your co-bloggers at Duck of Minerva (and I’m not referring to the author of this post) is at an institution that grants ‘the IR PhD,’ why don’t you ask him for his view?
To my reading, there is an interesting tension here: IR as academic discipline and IR as policy/professional program. My PhD from USC was in an academic discipline, but is the assumption that all/most IR PhDs are policy/professional oriented?
I am a PhD student in one of those policy programs and therefore have
the same concerns. On the long list of qualities I’ve been advised
potential academic employers look for are a good publication record, a
good “fit” between the applicants research interests and the planned
direction of the department, an okay teaching record, and the prestige
value of the degree in question. None of those qualities seem to be out
of reach to those in policy programs (I hope). Additionally, while it
would make sense that an applicant should be judged on their mastery and
ability to teach a first-year class on political theory (and other such
poli sci mandatory class), no one has advised me that this ability will
make or break a job application. I’m willing to admit that my rosey assessment of my prospects may be strongly biased by my need to convince myself that I
have not just pissed away three years (and counting) of my life. That
said, If I’ve missed something/misunderstood anything regarding what it
takes to do well in academia I’d really like to hear about it. Do line
departments (eg. poli sci) provide some sort of value-added that would
be beyond the reach of a policy school grad? Is there a line-department
hiring bias that I haven’t heard of?
I think it is more subtle than “you can’t teach course X”, although I suspect there is some of that. Disciplinary departments like poli sci in my experience tend to emphasize disciplinary contributions and engagement with theory rather than policy. There also tends to be a disciplinary style of thinking about problems and talking about them that establishes insiders from outsiders. That said, IR is a much more interdisciplinary field than other areas of poli sci and if faculty from the other subdisciplines are willing to let IR people take the lead on hiring, then the potential disadvantages of a public policy degree might not manifest.
Michigan has an excellent joint model – there are PhD students who are both part of a traditional department (mostly econ, poli sci, and soc) and in the policy school. I think they do very well on the policy school academic market, as well as the policy market itself, and they have a disciplinary home to fall back on. It also creates a nice flow of social and intellectual contact between the programs, as some subset of each cohort in sociology knows a number of political scientists and economists.
Let’s differentiate first between an IR PhD and a “policy” PhD. I think the latter is largely nonsensical, which doesn’t stop there from being an employment market for it especially in my town (Washington DC). But for me a PhD is a degree serving to certify one as an academic, which means a particular blend of research and teaching that is just not the same as working in the policy world.
So to answer your question we need first to ascertain what kind of PhD we are talking about. Should policy schools (like mine, and like yours) offer policy PhDs? In in ideal world I would say no, but practically speaking, there’s a market and the various rating systems don’t distinguish between policy PhDs and what I still haughtily think of as “real” PhDs, so I can’t see such schools abandoning their programs because they’d suffer an attendant loss of prestige. At least someplace like Johns Hopkins is honest about it, splitting their programs between two campuses in two different locations, doing policy PhDs in DC at SAIS and more traditional academic PhDs in Baltimore.
Now, should those schools offer PhDs in IR? To me that’s part of a broader discussion about a) whether IR is a thing one can and should be able to get a PhD in and b) whether the US higher education system is set up in such a way that policy schools offering IR PhDs makes sense. To both of those questions I would answer “yes.” IR, particularly global IR, is increasingly and to my mind very fortunately outgrowing the cocoon of U.S. Political Science, so we need programs in the U.S. (like programs elsewhere in the world) in which one can do advanced coursework and research in IR and prepare to teach IR at the university level. And because of the sad accidents that constituted U.S. IR as a subfield of U.S. Political Science, there are few places *except* policy schools in the U.S. where one can get a PhD in IR that is not a PhD in Political Science.
Where can those people get academic jobs? Other IR PhD programs, whether in the U.S. or, thank goodness, the much wider world outside of the U.S. borders in which the idea of IR as a distinct academic field makes more widespread intuitive and institutional sense than it does here.
Fascinating replies to my post. I hadn’t thought about a distinct IR PhD. I tend to agree woth ProfPTJ that in an ideal world, we wouldn’t have separate policy PhDs but we have them and they are likely not going anywhere. Still, it’s one thing to come out with a policy degree from the Kennedy School and to carry the Harvard imprimatur. I think aside from the brand/market signal of the degree (however inflated it may be), the success of policy PhDs may depend on the degree of rigor of their training. Some programs may require/offer more core courses than others.
Perhaps more important than the “qualified to teach” predicament is whether or not hiring committees (at least on the academic side) will evaluate policy PhDs with an eye towards “qualified to research.” Part of an applicants’ ability will be on the basis of course work, but I think the proof is in the written work. Increasingly, I think the expectation for newly minted folks, particularly if you are not coming out of a top five program, is to demonstrate that your ideas and methods already pass muster in the field by being vetted, minimally at conferences but also through publications. So, for students who are in a PhD policy program of this kind, they need to take an array of methods classes, go to methods camps (CQRM, ICPSR, EITM), go to conference, and publish (all before graduation).
They also may need to change their market signal by getting a pre or post-doc, which will give them a bit more time to polish the work, publish pieces of it, get their name out there, and turn the diss into a book.
For programs themselves, the decision is more difficult because you may not have enough faculty to teach both MA courses and PhD specific courses. Do these “over/under” courses work well? In my experience, it’s better to have a dedicated PhD course rather than an MA policy course with a couple of PhD students along for the ride. It may behoove these policy programs to see strategic partnerships with disciplines so that their students have access to a rigorous set of PhD oriented courses and also have the opportunity to be co-branded as public policy/discipline of their choice graduates.
In my experience, over/under courses end up being one or the other kind of thing, depending on who teaches them and on the general center of gravity of the whole program. Whenever I taught MA courses they were basically PhD courses; conversely I have colleagues who teach courses that treat PhD students as indistinguishable from MAs.
I would, however, question the notion that “strategic partnerships with disciplines” is the only or the best way to get rigorous PhD-level courses. There is such a thing as scholarly IR as distinct from the policy-wonk-y kind of IR, and one can teach that without any kind of “strategic partnership.” Ann Tickner and I are co-teaching an “advanced IR theory” seminar for PhDs in the Fall — no strategic partnership necessary, and no institutionalized academic discipline either because we’re reading history, philosophy, political science, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies — and for my money that’s the way to get PhD-level IR instruction.
I am almost feeling the need to write an IR Declaration of Independence. Maybe for the 4th of July.
Any chance you’d be willing to share your syllabus for the advanced IR theory course? Sounds interesting.
PTJ’s syllabi (and others) are available on the ISA Theory Section page: https://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/isa-theory-section#lists
Although I don’t think the co-taught one is there yet. It will be at some point.
I’d also well appreciate it if you shared the syllabus.
I get the feeling one can’t really have it both ways, to be a policy wonk or an IR academic.
Why don’t you all survey your own students what they want? Are they pursuing PhDs for higher intellectual scholarship to be an academic? Or are they looking towards the policy world of think tanks, government, etc? I wager that most of the students aren’t really sure themselves,
(Personally I am caught in the middle of my never-ending and quixotic existential crisis to be both, that’s why I’ll hold off on pursuing the PhD until I figure this out a bit more)
I think you’re right that most students aren’t really sure themselves. But surveying them wouldn’t help even if they were sure, because education isn’t ultimately a species of customer service: it’s our job as academics to design programs that deliver what people need, not necessarily what they want. And I think that what people looking to study IR at the post-graduate level need is to be made painfully aware of the tensions between the scholarly and the policy-wonk-y route. Maybe the ideal post-graduate IR program starts everyone off in the same place and then features a branching pathway after a year of coursework, PhDs here, MAs there. In the absence of such a program I think it incumbent on all of us to help our undergrads understand the stakes of that distinction before they commit to a graduate program of either sort.
Not sure I agree that a PhD is a program that certifies one as an academic. I’d like to see the figures on this, but having worked as PhD coordinator in various places, not all people entering a standard academic program (not a policy one) intend to follow academic careers. If we sold academic PhDs on the ‘this only qualifies you to be an academic basis’ I suspect we might see a steep decline in admissions.
as a grad student, that’ll be excellent. more funding for me ! (does it work that way though?)