Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
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Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#2I would be interested to see what would happen if they blinded professor interviews to alma mater. Because that might help determine how much of it is bias-- 100%?
The inverse correlation would be that people who end up being professors attended those colleges. Maybe they were more likely to get in or are more interested in academia so focused applying to those colleges.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#3Universities are efficient, they create many potential professors with a small number of professors. So every class of potential professors will have many who can't get jobs where they studied, and will apply to less desirable places.
This was very disheartening to realize in college. It was too late for me to attempt to become any of the role models physically in front of me.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#4The headline didn't surprise me, but the five universities named actually did. I'd expected Harvard to be there but there's a few mid prestige schools in the list. I'd have thought the list would be dominated by the same old famous institutions such as Ivies and MIT rather than large state universities.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#5> “Accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we’re not looking into the history of how things became prestigious,” Gonzales says. The founding of elite US universities is “intertwined with exclusion”, she adds. For instance, many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups, or originally derived their wealth from or supported their infrastructure with the labour of enslaved Black people.
These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to.
I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question.
I believe it was Gary King who said that nepotism and meritocracy are very hard to distinguish in academia. You would need a clever identification strategy [0] to tease out the effects of prestige on the margin. I'm afraid this article doesn't offer much on that front.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#6This is a really ignorant question and I'm pretty sure I already know the answer. But say I wanted to become a teacher at some school, specifically teaching things like "how to organize and execute the operational side of a tech product", or "managing Enterprise IT". You have to have a degree (in something) first, right? They won't just hire someone with 25 years experience and no degree to teach a class?
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#7Not sure in what context the word "elite" is used when it comes to claiming there is a hiring bias. It may be thought that those schools have very high fees to attend but I would argue/claim (with no data in my hand) if it was looked deeper into their background, it is very likely that majority of those professors attended those schools via a sort of scholarship to start with as a result of their success prior to universities they got accepted.
Therefore, although "elite" indicates mainly a social class, majority of those people are very likely coming from mid-class families and they just happen to have a good academic record. With that in mind, I wouldn't call this a bias but just a normal and beneficial outcome of the academic system.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#8> 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members
80:20
The Pareto Principle at work. All these figures show is that universities have the usual distribution of quality.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#9The headline didn't surprise me, but the five universities named actually did. I'd expected Harvard to be there but there's a few mid prestige schools in the list. I'd have thought the list would be dominated by the same old famous institutions such as Ivies and MIT rather than large state universities.
Professor-level pay is not acceptable for people who attend the Ivies and MIT.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#10I would be interested to see what would happen if they blinded professor interviews to alma mater. Because that might help determine how much of it is bias-- 100%? The inverse correlation would be that people who end up being professors attended those colleges. Maybe they were more likely to get in or are more interested in academia so focused applying to those colleges.
it isn't exactly the fact that you got your phd from harvard that makes the harvard degree so valuable, it's that your thesis director is a Harvard professor and your letters of recommendation are from Harvard professors and other top schools, and the labs you worked at were lead by harvard professors etc. You could remove the fact that the applicant was themselves graduating from Harvard and all of that would still give them the repuation by association of a Harvard PhD.
There are just too many additional factors that go into faculty hiring that continue to rely on reputation gained from association with prestige.