51–60 of 207 posts
Nice pareto principle example
> “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 jou…
> “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 jou…
Now, in our universe (bringing back all that baggage I initially eschewed) university "eliteness" is pretty stupid and meaningless - it's used as a status symbol which is irrelevant as soon as you have real work experience with the exception of academia which obsesses over degrees even into your 60s. I guess Harvard is probably going to get you a better education than Mass Bay - but a keen student at Mass Bay will get more out of their education than a trust fund baby at Harvard.
I feel like this is not the best representation here as they sorta switched what they are measuring. Imagine if every single PhD from every single university became a tenured professor at the exact same rate. We'd still see a pretty big imbalance because presumably there are some universities which give out 300+ PhDs per year because they have a ton of programs/departments and others that give out 30+ per year because they have very limited grad programs.
Surely there is a skew but it just seems like a very deceptive way to look at it.
Would be like saying that 50% of all Americans who become teachers come from just 20% of the states - but not adjusting for the fact that 50% of the population lives in the top 10 largest states.
I don’t know why this is a problem or even surprising. There are few academic positions. Getting in and making it through the top schools is competitive and difficult. So why wouldn’t the best and brightest and most motivated and best networked beat everyone else out? I’ve been to every kind of level of school (public, private, non-elite, elite). Whenever I’ve had someone from an elite background teaching at a non-el…
I think if this part ends up too high of a weight you'll end up with a lack of diversity of ideas and ultimately a decay into nepotism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 jou…
This is why it has become normal to do 3-7 years of postdoc research positions before being considered for a tenure-track faculty position, even for those from elite universities.
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.
I don’t know why this is a problem or even surprising. There are few academic positions. Getting in and making it through the top schools is competitive and difficult. So why wouldn’t the best and brightest and most motivated and best networked beat everyone else out? I’ve been to every kind of level of school (public, private, non-elite, elite). Whenever I’ve had someone from an elite background teaching at a non-el…
> best networked I think if this part ends up too high of a weight you'll end up with a lack of diversity of ideas and ultimately a decay into nepotism.
If something other than the 80/20 rule was found, that might be cause for alarm or further exploration