Nature: "Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities"

[marshwiggle]

The dream of being a professor and getting to, in effect, make a career out of staying in school is a powerful, powerful thing for those who have spent their whole youth succeeding in school and being commended for that.

That's it in a nutshell.

[Wahoo Redux]

A follow-up query would be, put simply, is the calibre of instruction and research/ dissertation expectations at many of these lesser-ranked programs always, ahem, up to par? 

Again, depends. 

In my last post I mentioned an MA program at an urban university.  There I met the toughest and one of the best professors I have ever had, undergrad or grad.  Overall, the instruction was very good.

I also met a professor there (who did not have a PhD) who taught out of Cliffs Notes (literally, hu opened hu's folder one day at the lectern and the Cliffs Notes booklet came tumbling out----I mean, honestly, these are not bad refreshers and basic guides, but still, don't use them for a grad level class).

Every school has a dud and a superstar or two. 

[Wahoo Redux]

The dream of being a professor and getting to, in effect, make a career out of staying in school is a powerful, powerful thing for those who have spent their whole youth succeeding in school and being commended for that.

That's it in a nutshell.

Even people who were not star students but who decided, for whatever reason, that they wanted the sweet job and prestige of being a professor.  It looks so easy from the outside.

[quasihumanist]

A follow-up query would be, put simply, is the calibre of instruction and research/ dissertation expectations at many of these lesser-ranked programs always, ahem, up to par?  If the students themselves are of lesser academic merit, but the instruction is up to top-ranked program standards, presumably many of them would wash out, whereas if the instructional standards are similarly deficient, they would still be likely to 'graduate' with a PhD?   I confess that, well, I went to an R1 grad school dept where, ahem, well...

We'd certainly be capable of teaching better students, but our program standards at all levels are pretty low.  Practically speaking, none of our PhD graduates have a reasonable chance of getting a job that requires a PhD, though many of them get lecturer type jobs where PhDs are highly preferred.  Our students scrape a pass on their qualifying exams at the beginning of their third year, and I would say more than half of the students entering a top PhD program could pass the exams when they start.  This leaves us with just a couple years for them to learn something well enough to write a dissertation, and it inevitably means they don't really know the context of their dissertation nor even know enough to learn more.  Both of the dissertations I have supervised could have been written by me as an undergraduate with guidance from the right advisor, though they were both a little bigger than the scope of my undergraduate thesis.

Now I am talking to a couple seniors about grad school, and both of them have seriously no idea of how far behind they are - both knowledge and skill wise - compared to their competition, because they are among the best students here.

[jerseyjay]

To perhaps state the obvious, top programs often graduate better-prepared graduates. I am not sure how much of this is because top schools can skim the cream, and how much is value added by the program itself. No doubt there are some really good students who do excellent work but end up at not stellar programs for various reasons. No doubt there are people who would shine even without a PhD. No doubt there are people who look good upon entering top programs then burn out.

It seems that some of the important stuff that a top-ranked program offers is:
--more resources (better labs, better libraries, more grants to do research)
--more stars and/or cutting-edge professors;
--better networking;
--more prestige.

For example, I ran into an Ivy grad student at the microfilm machines at the local research library and we got to talking since we shared similar research interests. (They had actually heard of me, which was sort of gratifying.) The student seemed quite bright, although I don't know if they were brighter than a student at the local public university. But they had the support of a well-known advisor; money to visit my local research library; and resources to study various languages necessary to do the research their doing. I don't know how much of this the same student would have been able to count on at a lesser-school.

All that said, I have met several graduates from top-tier programs who were not at the top of their program. These people tend not to get jobs at top-tier schools, but are often quite competitive at lower-tier schools--even if they might not be the best professor for a particular type of school.

As a general rule, in advising history students about PhD programs, after I point out there are no jobs in any case, I stress that (a) nobody should pay for graduate school themselves; and (b) nobody should go into a PhD program in history that is not, at least by some criterion, a top school.

I remember reading once that the World Bank and the IMF were staffed by bottom-tier graduates of top-tier economics PhD programs. I don't know if it is true (I am not in economics or have anything to do with the IMF) but it stuck with me.