The Admissions Committee met on April 10.  We decided to offer admission to several more applicants.  In some cases, the offers included offers of financial aid; in other cases were were able to offer admission but no financial aid.  We have tried to notify every one of these accepted applicants.  If you have not heard from us, it is very likely that you will not get an offer of admission from UMass. Another possibility is that we tried to inform you of an offer of admission, but there was a problem about the email address that you used on your application: maybe it did not work.  Official letters will be coming out from the Graduate Admissions office shortly.  We received an unusually large number of strong applications this year; we regret that we were not able to offer admission in more cases. 

Please write to Fred Feldman at ffeldman@philos.umass.edu.
We are pleased that you are considering applying for admission to our program. Various links have been provided above to documents containing answers to many frequently asked questions about our department and the admissions process. We hope you will find useful information in these documents. In addition to these links, also consult links to the left, including especially Graduate Program and Graduate Courses. For general questions about the application process, also consult the UMass Graduate School website.
The application process is very competitive. Your chance of admission, and your chance of receiving financial aid, are much improved if you have successfully completed a strong undergraduate philosophy major. Also helpful are high GRE scores, high grade-point averages, and strong letters of recommendation. Although there are exceptions in certain special cases, we rarely admit new students to our MA Program. We are happy to consider applications from students who have completed MAs in philosophy elsewhere.
Summary Admissions Data (for class entering September 2012)
  • Ph.D. program applications received – 133
  • Ph.D. applicants offered admission – 24
  • Students entering the Ph.D. program – 7
If you have further questions about the Department or our admissions process, please contact the Graduate Admissions Director.

Fred Feldman
ffeldman@philos.umass.edu