Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities • Hacker News Board

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#11

Post by synergy20 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:12 PM UTC

asperous wrote: post #2

I 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.

watched a documentary about blind-interview band players as people accused the selection committee is race-biased.

after a true blind interview is done, the result is way more biased than before, so they cancelled that immediately, and replaced it with a process called 'holistic review'.

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#12

Post by oneplane » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

melonrusk wrote: post #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.

You'd hope that quality requirements could be used to make a bar that is high enough so any accredited institution would be delivering highly educated and developed people. Anything beyond that would be nice to have, but not enough to be a deciding factor when judging merit.

When you think about it, what is it that we want? Someone with fancy labels who went to places that also had fancy labels, or someone who can do the thing we need?

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#13

Post by mrkeen » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

psKama wrote: post #7

Not 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 uni…

> 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.

    When it comes to admissions to elite schools, money can all but guarantee access to those who can afford it

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/13/rich-kids-top-college-admissions

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#14

Post by pessimizer » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

setgree wrote: post #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 ensl…

The research question isn't about whether "prestige is a good measure of excellence." That's the question that you ask after you discover that people are being hired based on prestige, if you don't automatically assume that's either a bad or a good thing.

If prestige is definitely driven by quality, it's not bad that professors are being hired because of the prestige of the schools they attended. But accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we're not looking into the history of how things became prestigious.

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#15

Post by Ancalagon » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

This is pretty much why I left physics, any worthwhile research career was over before it even started since I went to a lower-tier state university. Not saying that's indicative of all fields considering the difficulty of physics and few number of faculty and lab positions available for such skillsets, but that was my experience.

I looked around at my professors in undergrad and virtually all had come from Ivies or other institutions of similar caliber.

At least software pays well.

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#16

Post by ejb999 » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:16 PM UTC

synergy20 wrote: post #11

asperous wrote: post #2

I 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.

watched a documentary about blind-interview band players as people accused the selection committee is race-biased. after a true blind interview is done, the result is way more biased than before, so they cancelled that immediately, and replaced it with a process called 'holistic review'.

>>after a true blind interview is done, the result is way more biased than before,

How is a 'true blind interview' more biased? or do you really mean, they didn't get the outcome they wanted?

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#17

Post by setgree » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:18 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #14

setgree wrote: post #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 ensl…

The research question isn't about whether "prestige is a good measure of excellence." That's the question that you ask after you discover that people are being hired based on prestige, if you don't automatically assume that's either a bad or a good thing. If prestige is definitely driven by quality, it's not bad that professors are being hired because of the prestige of the schools they attended. But accepting that p…

Sure, I think it’s good to both first get the data on which scholars come from which schools, and I also think unpacking the social and political construction of prestige is a great research agenda.

But to assess whether prestige is a source of bias in the hiring process, you have to separate prestige from other markers of quality. Otherwise, you have a big confounding variable problem. This author, and also the quoted professor of education, don’t seem to engage with that, and in fact seem to beg the question by assuming that prestige is an independent force in hiring decisions, which, I thought, was the thing the article was trying to demonstrate.

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#18

Post by mrkeen » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #6

This 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?

Which came first, the professor or the degree?

When schools open new programs, they need people to teach the degree when it didn't previously exist.

Simon Peyton Jones skipped the PhD but later became a lecturer and professor and a whole lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones#Education

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#19

Post by thfuran » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

setgree wrote: post #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 ensl…

>These are non-sequiturs.

And also probably little more than proxies for the age of the institution.

Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

#20

Post by setgree » Thu, Sep 22, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #9

lordnacho wrote: post #4

The 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.

You might be surprised by what faculty at the professional schools (and their near-equivalents, like Econ departments) make — think starting salaries in the 180-250k range at high-ranking R1 schools.