“Conservative and international students face different challenges: one feels forced to self-censor while the other reports fewer job opportunities. No significant impact on employment is found for either but conservative respondents report higher rates of satisfaction in philosophy.” That’s a brief summary of findings about conservative graduate students and international graduate students currently or recently enrolled in philosophy PhD programs, based on data collected by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA) in its 2025 survey. In the following guest post, APDA founder and co-director Carolyn Dicey Jennings shares the details. [A version of this post also appears at the APDA blog.] International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They Doing In Academic Philosophy? by Carolyn Dicey Jennings In this, the final summer post on the 2025 survey, we highlight two populations of survey participants: those who are or were international students and those with conservative political leanings. (See previous posts here.) We chose these populations for a straightforward reason: both groups show signs of underrepresentation while also seeming to report higher satisfaction in prior surveys. That is, according to an analysis of the 2023 survey results, international students were less likely than local students to find permanent academic employment, while according to an analysis of the 2021 survey results, conservative students are underrepresented in philosophy PhD programs relative to both the U.S. population and doctoral recipients. Yet, in past surveys we have noted that both of these groups appear to report higher satisfaction than local or non-conservative participants (not tested for statistical significance). We thus wanted to better understand the experiences of both populations and the challenges they face in the discipline. To explore this we added two text-based questions to the 2025 survey with a parallel structure. These questions appeared on the final, demographic page of the survey for a subset of participants. The first followed a question on international status: “Are you or were you an international student during your PhD studies?” If the participant answered “yes” (n=383) then they were provided a follow-up prompt: “Please describe the impact of your status as an international student on your academic career (i.e. as a student and in employment or the search for employment, if relevant).” The second followed a question on..

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