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Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

nature.com

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

#41

Post by setgree »

cycomanic wrote: post #34
setgree wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quot…

Have you been on a university hiring committee? My anecdotal evidence is that yes prestige very strongly matters and coming from a very prestigious university often outweights other factors such as publication record. I haven't read the original article yet but one can easily test if e.g. the publication record of a graduate student from a non-and prestigious uni differ to the extend that is indicated by the hiring.

I have not been on a hiring committee — I actually failed my comprehensive exams partway through grad school which is how I ended up in tech :) — but your hypothesis sounds very reasonable to me. I’m just saying that we need a more careful causal identification strategy than that provided herein to say whether prestige has a meaningful effect on hiring, on average.

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

#42

Post by lapcat »

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 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

It's interesting that you use the word "potential". Tenure-track positions are very hard to get, and most newly minded PhDs have very little track record. If they're lucky, they have a publication or two in a journal, but many will have only their dissertation. So I think the question is whether PhDs coming from prestigious schools are judged to have more "research potential" based on where they come from rather than their limited record.

The "potential" problem is even worse when it comes to admitting undergraduates into graduate programs.

If you don't get a tenure-track position right out of grad school, it can be difficult to ever work your way up to one, because you'll probably have to take a job at a school with a greater teaching load than a typical research university, which leaves little time for you to do your research and prove yourself. In a sense, the "potential" becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

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

#43

Post by cycomanic »

setgree wrote: post #20
pessimizer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by starting salary? A tenure track professor would typically ~35-40 years old, having gone through undergrad, masters&phd plus a couple of postdocs. They would also not make 250k (at least i don't know anyone who made that sort of salary), that's the salary of a full professor at a reasonably prestigious uni.

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

#45

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

bo1024 wrote: post #32
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…

They’re definitely sequiturs, maybe not to the issues you want to discuss. You seem focused on how much academia is a meritocracy. There is an important and different question of how diverse and accessible academia is. For example certain Olympic sports like dressage (horse jumping) are meritocracies, but very exclusionary (or at least non diverse, non accessible).

It is certainly a non-sequitur: can we simultaneously accept, or reject, the idea that prestige is a good measure of excellence while looking at (or not looking at) the history of how things become prestigious? Yes, we can. The one has nothing to do with the other.

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

#46

Post by plonk »

mjfl wrote: post #22

There's many opportunities to go through one of these institutions - you could do undergrad there, grad school, or one of multiple post docs. There's lots of people that go state school -> ivy/prestige -> state school and end up professors. Or state school -> state school -> ivy/prestige. Or state school -> state school -> state school -> ivy/prestige. If you work really hard, chances are you end up somewhere prestig…

> less prestigious schools that graduate a ton of professors, like UC Berkeley

How in the world can UC Berkeley be "less prestigious". It constantly ranks world top-10 in all rankings.

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

#47

Post by mncharity »

Years back, there was talk of trying to leverage this concentration, to improve national science education. Professorial educational skills are often less than wonderful. Eg, physics education research's "if you think your lectures are working, your assessment also isn't". And creating change by improving current professors is hard, expensive, and failure prone. So the idea was, to lavishly fund education research, training, and education minors, at these few institutions through which pass, most graduate students who will eventually become professors. Make their instructional training really excellent, and then wait for it to propagate nationally. One obvious downside being reinforcing the concentration.

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

#48

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

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…

Virtually no-one at a top school is spending a penny to get their PhD. Most of them are getting paid to do so.

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

#49

Post by riskneutral »

The most desirable jobs in the private sector are also filled by graduates of the same few elite universities, and this elitism is perpetuated by all of academia (not just the top few universities). The elite class has constructed this system to perpetuate itself. Academia (the core pillar of elitism) is the last place where this hiring inequality will be addressed (if it ever is addressed, which is highly doubtful).

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

#50

Post by muglug »

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'.

Here's an article from 2020 about the New York Philharmonic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

Blind auditions are probably not going away anytime soon.

The ugly truth about orchestral musicians is that nowadays (with the general downturn in ticket sales) it's not much a living. There are far fewer professional orchestral musicians than there were 50 years ago. Representation on a ship that's slowly sinking is not, IMO, incredibly pressing.

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