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

[Wahoo Redux]

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

Specifically, the study, published in Nature on 21 September, shows that just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across the country between 2011 and 2020 (see 'Hiring bias'). No historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) were among that 20%, says Hunter Wapman, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and a co-author of the paper. One in eight US-trained tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

It's good to be the king.

[RedArrow]

The headlines on this story have been misleading.  The survey "included tenured and tenure-track faculty members who worked at PhD-granting institutions [emphasis added] in the United States between 2011 and 2020, for a total of 295,089 people at more than 350 institutions".

That leaves out a lot of faculty members.

[mythbuster]

UC Berkeley and Michigan each produce 2,000 PhDs per year. Per google, in 2014 Howard University graduated 100 PhDs. So how much of this is just a sheer numbers game?

[jerseyjay]

I do not find the overall picture that strange--i.e., that a relative small number of universities provide a large share of professors.

The conclusion that "academic researchers have little opportunity to obtain jobs at institutions considered more elite than the ones at which they were trained" seems almost axiomatic. That is, it is what I have long been told is the rule.

I do have some questions about the details. I don't expect anybody to answer them here, but these include:

I assume this is true across fields. I wonder if there is variation (either in the breadth of credentials or in the specific schools) in different fields (i.e., is field X more open than field Y, and field Z is just as closed as field A, but with different schools).

I am curious if one looks at higher education as a whole, if the trend is still valid, or if at different levels there are different patterns.

I am curious if HBCUs, MSI, and HSI tends to pull more PhDs from their own type of schools, or do they replicate the broader pattern?

I am curious how non-PhD degrees factor into this, i.e., is there more homogeneity among doctorates than among bachelor degrees? Or are the same schools over-represented at all levels?

I am also curious if this a stable pattern of if it has changed over time.

Finally, I was somewhat surprised by which schools were NOT on the list of five elite schools: such as Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, Yale

[Ruralguy]

For a long time, my school pulled from regional state schools. But now they pull from more or less everywhere. I think there's still a slight over-rep from regional schools and maybe a handful of national elites, but probably more than 50% are from everywhere else.

[Sun_Worshiper]

There is prestige bias, but top schools also produce the most PhDs, so hard to know what to make of the article without digging into the numbers/methods.

[Puget]

There is prestige bias, but top schools also produce the most PhDs, so hard to know what to make of the article without digging into the numbers/methods.

Yes, it really needs to be normalized by total number of PhDs/year, otherwise it is mostly a list of the biggest PhD granters.
When you do this on the other end, for undergraduate institutions of PhD students, many elite SLACs turn out to have a much higher % of grads entering PhD programs, even though the absolute numbers are of course much smaller than those from big universities. The discrepancy is no doubt less for PhD institutions, as many top programs are also fairly large (at least in my field), but it will change the picture at least somewhat I suspect.

As others have noted, it is also inaccurate to say "most US professors" as they only looked at TT/T faculty in PhD granting institutions, which is certainly a minority of US faculty.

[dismalist]

Gee, what academically diverse faculty y'all have! Economics is, shall we say, highly selective:

We find that 1) over half of the faculty of each of eight top
departments received their PhD from one of these same universities; 2) at least half of faculty from
all top-25 departments come from top-15 universities; 3) over half of Harvard and MIT faculty
received their PhD at either Harvard or MIT; and 4) over half of all faculty in the study come from
top-15 universities, with Harvard, MIT, and the rest of the top six disproportionately represented.
The first and third findings are more pronounced for female faculty.

From here: https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai20-324.pdf

The rate of PhD production at these places is the same.

[Parasaurolophus]

I counted this for my field years ago. At the time, just six departments accounted for 30% of faculty at MA- and PhD-granting institutions in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and NZ. (To be clear, although these six departments have large incoming classes, they contain nowhere near 30% of the field's graduate students.)

IIRC, the top 15 placers accounted for 50%, and then basically everyone else (some 100 departments) trickled in 1-3 placements until you got to 100%.

[Sun_Worshiper]

To do this study right you'd also have to control for various other factors. For example, assuming that the concern is prestige bias, we'd want to account for number of publications in top journals, teaching experience, etc.

(To be fair, maybe the authors of the study did that.)

[jimbogumbo]

For sheer numbers look at Table #3. I'd say Walden is underrepresented in the professoriate:)

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21308/data-tables

[kaysixteen]

Random questions:

1) If so few schools account for such a high percentage of faculty hires in any given discipline, do the new grad students and prospective grad students thinking of enrolling at schools not in the likely to get hired from dept cohort, know about this?  Is anyone telling them?

2)Is it at least occasionally perhaps the fact, or at least perceived to be the fact, that some if not more than some, of newly produced PhDs from lesser ranked programs might, ahem, not be all that stellar academically, up to snuff, etc,?   I could give a legendary example from classics, around 25 years back-- a compass point school in North Carolina needed a new classics generalist, and advertised in the usual sources, ultimately hiring a guy.   They then had him start out teaching basic Greek... and he did not know what he was doing.   He should have known, but did not.   He had to be let go.  School then readvertised the job for the next year, and added a provision in said ad to the effect that all three finalists, in turn, during their day of on-campus interviews, would be given a language qualification exam by the hiring school.   In classicsland, this went over like, well.. although I have been out of the game for quite some time now, it is not my impression that any hiring dept in the US has ever done this again.

[Wahoo Redux]

Random questions:

1) If so few schools account for such a high percentage of faculty hires in any given discipline, do the new grad students and prospective grad students thinking of enrolling at schools not in the likely to get hired from dept cohort, know about this?  Is anyone telling them?

Oh yes.  Yes and yes.  But it is like breaking a cinder block with a banana. 

Once a person falls in love with the concept of graduate school and professor-dreams, that love is in the same league as horny young married couples. English discipline.  Fuggedaboutit.

2)Is it at least occasionally perhaps the fact, or at least perceived to be the fact, that some if not more than some, of newly produced PhDs from lesser ranked programs might, ahem, not be all that stellar academically, up to snuff, etc,?   

Depends, I think.

I dipped my toe in graduate work at a lower ranked but up-and-coming (before 2008 & COVID) MA program in proximity to my employment at that time.  It was an absolute mix of weirdos, people like me who were testing the waters, and some very fine grad students, several of whom went on to prestigious graduate programs such as U of Washington, Berkeley, and Cornell.

I went on to a PhD program at a well ranked public R1, a school you will have heard of, which paid everything plus a stipend, and there I ran into students who, I believe, were as good as anybody, a few exceptions aside.  I have no idea how I got in except that I had a very good interview with some faculty.

The MA program at our current lowly and getting lower public R2 should have been taken out in the fields and shot years ago.  Still, one of the smartest people I've ever met did hu's graduate work in our s***house of a program (why, I am not entirely sure except that hu had a job in the area).  Hu was definitely Ivy material had hu's life-trajectory been different.  Hu went on to a middling PhD program despite my wife's and my attempts to dissuade hu.  Had this person attended, say, a U of California school, a school like U of Wisconsin-Madison, or an Ivy, I have no doubt hu would have been R1 professor material.  And who knows, hu still might.  A few other okay MA students from here have gone on to PhD programs in places where I did not know such programs existed.  I suspect I know how their academic careers will go, but one never knows.

I think the point is that excellent people exist everywhere, but the elite schools probably have  clusters of people who would stand out anywhere else.

It would be interesting if the Ivy Leaguers here would weigh in.  No one will think you are being arrogant in context of this discussion (at least I won't...).

[kaysixteen]

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...

[apl68]

I went on to a PhD program at a well ranked public R1, a school you will have heard of, which paid everything plus a stipend, and there I ran into students who, I believe, were as good as anybody, a few exceptions aside.  I have no idea how I got in except that I had a very good interview with some faculty.

That's my PhD program experience as well, except it was a ranked private R1.  The history department I was in was not particularly well ranked, and didn't seem to place many people post-graduation.  But it wasn't because some of them weren't very good, or because their PhD education was notably inferior.  Seeing colleagues that I knew were better than I was leaving the field and going into a Plan B was a big part of what prompted me to drop out of grad school. 

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.  It must be awfully tough to argue starry-eyed would-be profs out of going to grad school in fields where the professional prospects are exceedingly poor.  And some well-meaning but disastrously out of touch mentors, at least up until a couple of decades ago, have been known to encourage promising students to go on to grad school because they themselves honestly didn't know better.