What’s the point here? I want my professors to be educated at the best universities.
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
#62> “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…
What’s being implied here is that the endowments of these elite institutions were created through historical crimes, but activists won’t make an issue of that if the universities support diverse hiring initiatives.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#63> “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).
The subtitle of this article is "‘Jarring’ study reveals hiring bias at US institutions."
Trying to ascertain whether prestige leads to "hiring bias" is asking whether it has an independent effect on hiring. If prestige had zero effect -- if the observed correlation was actually measuring markers of researcher quality with which prestige is likely to be correlated -- then there would be zero bias.
The fact that those institutions did many horrible things historically does not provide evidence on that question. That's why I called it a non-sequitur.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#64> “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…
It doesn't follow, it's a non-sequitur.
There's nothing about using prestige as a proxy for excellence that has any bearing on investigating what got them there in the first place.
It's akin to claiming that accepting financial success as a decent proxy for business acumen means no one is interested in knowing how they originally because financially successful. Not only does it not follow, it makes no sense as to why accepting one would even imply someone wasn't interested in the other.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm thinking of friends who graduated from econ PhD programs, typically at around 29-30, and made 180-250K, depending on where they were hired.
That's obviously not everyone, but the comment I'm responding to said that "Professor-level pay is not acceptable for people who attend the Ivies and MIT." I think that low six figures is "acceptable" for people who went to even the fanciest schools :)
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#66> “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…
> I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question.
Though it wasn't one of their examples, alumni preference in admissions means that schools that formerly excluded based on race still have an element of that today.
And it means that older SATs that had stronger cultural bias in the reading comprehension parts etc. are still affecting admissions today, through the chain of alumni preference.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's high but not impressively high. I make that without a degree in software.
The comment I'm responding to said that professor salaries are "not acceptable" to ivy league and MIT grads. I think that's misinformed, and I provided anecdotal evidence to that effect ;)
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#68I 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 have worked as a researcher in one of the most prestigious labs in Switzerland and the world, and I have not seen any correlation at all between how bright are people and where they studied.
We had visiting researchers from anywhere and I failed to see any correlation between the two things in years.
I can tell you none of the brightest came from cambridge uk or harvard us but universities you never heard of in southern italy or india.
Your entire argument that follows is delusional.
Nothing about going to Harvard makes you more qualified in maths, e.g. than going to any European public university you have not heard of. Education depends on the quality of teaching and learning, and most great professors in important universities excel at funding, not teaching.
Even when it comes to learning, especially in stem, you will likely learn more on books and internet and your course mates than your lectures. Hell, internet is filled with all the lectures you want from Harvard, MIT and more elite universities. As for any university in the world there are good and bad courses.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#69You cannot overstate the importance of "social proof" in terms of your access to education, work opportunities and even social status in American life.
This is really why you go to elite universities: to open doors. It's not just the people you meet and build relationships with while at those august institutions, it's the preferential treatment you'll get from former alumni as well as the perception of you being more capable by just having that name on your CV. You've gotten admitted to such an institution and graduated.
The tech world prides itself on being a meritocracy but "social proof" is just as prevalent. Going to an elite school will get you better access to internships, which will get you better access to jobs and so on.
Academia is just a more extreme version of this. A friend (who did manage to secure a tenure track position in the humanities against all odds as a non-Harvard graduate) once told me "you'll never be without a job with Harvard on your CV". Academic departments view prestige by how many Harvard graduates you have on staff.
The scandals in academic publishing are just symptomatic of this: trading on prestige, trading on connections, not wanting to rock the boat, etc.
It would be nice if this was because a few elite universities are so good at training academics but I think we all know that isn't entirely the case.
Re: Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
#70I feel like this is almost like... an intuitively good thing to be observed? I know there are a lot of complications around how admittance to such universities can be biased and exclusionary - but if we ignore that for a moment the pure fact that most university professors come from the highest ranked schools is a good thing. It means that the education you'll receive at any university (I myself am a UVM grad which i…
> It means that the education you'll receive at any university (I myself am a UVM grad which is a wonderful but definitely not elite school) is likely being taught by adroit professors
Except that professors at research universities are hired for their research and not for their teaching.
Some are good teachers. Others are... not good. In any case, teaching is not what hiring committees value.