Pick programs, pick the specialties that matter to you, weight what you actually care about — get a tier list back, not just a table.
The Philosophical Gourmet Report ("the Leiter Report") surveys philosophy faculty across the English-speaking world, who rate PhD programs 0–5 on faculty strength — overall and within 35 specialty areas. This tool uses the 2024–2025 edition (philosophicalgourmet.com) as its source data, and layers on three independently researched factors (GRE friction, funding certainty, interdisciplinary strength — see Step 3) that the PGR itself doesn't track. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the PGR; report data errors to the PGR directly, tool bugs to this project.
Search and add the programs you're actually considering.
Your Fit score is computed only from the specialties you select here — real 2024-2025 PGR specialty rankings, not a guess. Click a specialty to add it, then click the dots to rate how much it matters to you, 1–5 — Fit weights higher-rated specialties more heavily instead of averaging everything equally.
Slide to taste. Base factors include: Funding Certainty and Interdisciplinary Strength. This has been pre-researched across all 90 programs (but as always, double check if it's important, programs can change!). Don't care about a factor? Slide to 0, and it gets weighted out. Weights auto-normalize to 100% — the numbers/bars just show relative pull; raising one weight doesn't shrink the others' underlying values, it just changes how much each counts toward your total.
A few notes: If most of your selected schools are in the top 10-20, I wouldn't weigh prestige too highly, because it will already be biased in that direction.
Add your own weighting. Examples: do you have a letter writer with ties to a particular school? Have you heard excellent things about a particular program? Use the custom factor builder to add your own properties to the tier-list. Once you add it here, it will show up above.
Tiers are relative to this shortlist and your selected weighting, not an absolute judgment — a program in Lower Priority or Reconsider isn't objectively weak, it's lower-priority relative to the other excellent programs on this particular shortlist, given your selected preferences and weighting.
Click a school to see how its score breaks down.