Why Study Philosophy?

Here is a likely useful resource for philosophy teachers, to help respond to the question, "Why study philosophy?" 

"Why study philosophy?" "See http://www.WhyStudyPhilosophy.com‪ !"

College Success Books?

Has anyone ever assigned a "college success" or "how to be a successful college student"-type book in any of their classes and has any recommendations on good ones? Many are available and I am wondering there are any that anyone has found to be especially useful in providing guidance for students about how to do better in college. Thanks!

EngagedPhilosophy.com: Using Civic Engagement in Philosophy Classes

EngagedPhilosophy.com: Resources for Using Civic Engagement in Philosophy Classes

EngagedPhilosophy.com, launched with a grant from the American Philosophical Association, provides tools for faculty and students to implement activist or service projects in philosophy classes. 

It includes assignment guidelines, many sample projects, student testimonials, and data supporting use of civic engagement in philosophy classes. 

Founders Ramona Ilea, Susan Hawthorne, and Monica Janzen, of Pacific University Oregon, St. Catherine University, and Hennepin Technical College, respectively, support a model of student-initiated civic engagement that encourages student agency, development of skills for citizenship, and insight into the practice and importance of philosophical reasoning. 

Why try it in your classes? In the words of one student,  

“This [project] enabled me to become impassioned in a new way, and express my realizations, insights, in a different way than an academic exercise usually allows…This forum forced me to make connections I may not have necessarily made. And I am very pleased with the outcome.”

In search of: A philosophy pamphlet

Bryan Frances (Fordham) writes with the following request:

I want to put together a fancy pamphlet that I can give freshman who are enjoying my intro class.  Something with a title more or less along the lines of ‘Why Studying Philosophy is a Good Thing’.  Something with lots of nice pictures, graphs, glossy pages, etc.  I was thinking it would have several sections:
1.       Why Philosophy is Good for the Mind.
2.       Why Philosophy is Good for the Soul.
3.       Why Philosophy is Good for Your Career.
4.       Famous People Who Studied Philosophy [including testimonials]
5.       Some Questions Philosophers Investigate
6.       Why Philosophy is Enormously Influential in the World

I suppose that this has already been done in many other places—and done well.  Could you let me know where to find such a thing?  I’d like to steal it, maybe adjust it a bit for my university, and then get a few hundred to hand out to freshman whom I think are “susceptible” to philosophy. 

I know I've seen a lot of great promotional materials for studying philosophy. Who can help Bryan out?

Philosophy students rule the GRE

The long-established trend of philosophy students being the top scorers on the GRE has continued. Here's a link reporting most recent data from ETS.

The executive summary:

What happens to philosophy majors

Here's a great resource to use when advising students (and especially when recruiting philosophy majors). Satyan Devadoss, a mathematician at Williams College, tracked the career paths of over 15,000 students at Williams College and created this fantastic visualization linking majors to eventual career paths. It's interactive, so you can mouse over different disciplines to see what happens to students who major in those disciplines.

Here's the visualization for philosophy and religion majors:

Whoa there, Perry Mason?

Philosophers Anonymous had a lively discussion recently about whether we should encourage philosophy students to continue on to grad school. I think about that issue from time to time, but the number of students I teach who are both interested in, and qualified, for philosophy grad school is too small, in my estimation, for me to lose much sleep over the matter.

Law school? Another story altogether. Seemingly every one of the majors I teach at least casts a sideways glance at law school. I'm certain that students who consider grad school in the academic fields labor under many illusions about what they're getting into, illusions that I think it is my obligation to dispel. But I've also begun to think that students have many equally powerful misconceptions about law school and the legal profession. This post at Crooked Timber, with many comments by lawyers, highlights many of these misconceptions.

The author, Harry Brighouse, quotes approvingly from Derek Bok's book, Our Underachieving Colleges. Bok argues that colleges don't help students understand the day-to-day realities of life in various professions, with the consequence "that students are rather ignorant of what different careers involve, what they are likely to do within them, how those careers contribute to the society, and what contribution they would make to their own wellbeing." In reference to the law in particular, Bok sayeth:

For students who begin their legal training hoping to fight for social justice, law school can be a sobering experience. While there, they learn a number of hard truths. Jobs fighting for the environment or civil liberties are very scarce. Defending the poor and powerless turns out to pay remarkably little and often to consist of work that many regard as repetitive and dull. As public interest jobs seem less promising (and law school debts continue to mount), most of these idealistic students end by persuading themselves that a large corporate law firm is the best course to pursue, even though many of them fund the specialties practiced in these firms, such as corporate law, tax law, and real estate law, both uninteresting and unchallenging…..

Almost half of the young lawyers leave their firm within three years. Many complain of having too little time with their families, and feeling tired and under pressure on most days of the week. Many more are weary of constantly having to compete for advancement with other bright young lawyers or troubled by what they regard as the lack of redeeming social value in their work. Within the profession as a whole, levels of stress, alcoholism, divorce, suicide and drug abuse are all substantially above the national average.

I'm not a lawyer and don't have close connections with the legal community, but Bok's remarks resonate with me. Defending others' legal interests is a noble calling and one that puts to use many of the skills students learn from studying philosophy. But most lawyers end up as the janitors of human affairs, cleaning up other people's ugly problems, rather than as crusaders for social justice. And oftentimes, it's damn hard work to boot.

How do all of you advise prospective law students? Do students enter law school with their eyes wide open? I try to provide students a balanced picture of law school and of life as a lawyer, but I fear that it rarely sinks in. For that reason alone, I think I'll be directing students who ask about law school to the CT post. It provides a more credible, on-the-ground picture of life in the legal profession than I can provide.