Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 207 posts

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

#91

Post by beambot »

oneplane wrote: post #12
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 minimum bar (accreditation) is very different from top performers.

You may call every person who graduates medical school & passes the boards "doctor", but they're definitely not all created equal either. Same for lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, etc.

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

#92

Post by derbOac »

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.

the Pareto principle doesn't really provide a lot of insight into process:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-...

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

#93

Post by yumraj »

colinmhayes wrote: post #71
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…

Berkley is more prestigious than most ivys imo. Princeton, yale, harvard are the only ones more prestigious. Penn and colombia are similar.

If we use Nobel price as a proxy since we're talking of PhDs here, then only Harvard, amongst Ivys, is higher than UC Berkeley [0]

Harvard : 161, Berkeley: 110, Columbia: 96, Stanford: 84, Princeton: 69, Yale: 65

and so on

[0] https://sawadee.wiki/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_univers...

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

#94

Post by derbOac »

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…

Totally anecdotal, but I've been in a number of tenure-track hiring meetings at multiple universities and someone always brings up the idea of "pedigree". As in, "X has a good pedigree" etc., as if that's an argument for hiring the person above and beyond their track record. So at least in my personal experience, these things do enter into the process.

Of course, the process involves a lot of other variables too; there are plenty who don't talk about pedigree, but there's often someone who will point to it as a rationale.

I hear similar whispers about federal grant receipts, etc., in that people who get stamped with approval in the form of training fellowships, predoctoral NSF awards, etc. are seen as sort of "understanding the system" etc.

As I think of it, I can think of lots of other "in-group signaling" in various domains, so maybe it's not unique to academics. But that cuts both ways when you're talking about exclusivity and "old-boy" networks.

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

#95

Post by lnwlebjel »

What would be more interesting is this: are the researchers in the 80% category as productive as the researchers from the 20% of elite institutions category (on average)? This could be studied and measured, and would go a long way toward dispelling the notion of prestige.

I see what they are getting at - yes there needs to be more diversity in academia and education needs to be more available, and widely distributed, across society. I don't see however, how this is going to motivate hiring committees to take an otherwise promising, and competitive person from a lower prestige institution, who is almost certainly competing with an equally qualified person from an elite institution. Making the case that this person would also be a very good bet might help.

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

#96

Post by hatmatrix »

I was explicitly told by my undergraduate professors that universities like to hire faculty members from universities ranked higher than them so take that into consideration for choosing your graduate school. Apparently universities have been using this hiring strategy for decades so the outcome does not seem all that surprising or jarring...

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

#97

Post by lapcat »

yumraj wrote: post #93
colinmhayes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berkley is more prestigious than most ivys imo. Princeton, yale, harvard are the only ones more prestigious. Penn and colombia are similar.

If we use Nobel price as a proxy since we're talking of PhDs here, then only Harvard, amongst Ivys, is higher than UC Berkeley [0] Harvard : 161, Berkeley: 110, Columbia: 96, Stanford: 84, Princeton: 69, Yale: 65 and so on [0] https://sawadee.wiki/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_univers...

Berkeley is actually higher than Harvard, because Economics doesn't count. ;-)

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

#98

Post by ryan93 »

epolanski wrote: post #68
azinman2 wrote: post #24

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 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 sou…

Why then have harvard and cambridge graduated such a incredibly large fraction of the worlds most productive and famous scientists and mathematicians? Can you please name the italian universities that have produce at the level of cambridge?

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

#99

Post by fasthands9 »

lapcat wrote: post #75
fasthands9 wrote: post #55

>shows that just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across the country between 2011 and 2020 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…

> 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. There's data here for number of doctorates awarded by school in 2020: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22300/data-tables #1 was... Walden University. Which I'd never actually heard of before. It's a private for-profit online…

I think you are mixing up what I am saying - or what that stat was saying.

Firstly, if Walden University produced zero tenured professors it would end up weighting exactly the same in the data as random small private university that produced 10 PhDs that also didn't become professors.

The state does not involve "eliteness". They simply ranked all schools by number of PhDs they produced and took the top 20%.

And fwiw considering this would be about 90 universities Im almost certain every school you listed would make that cut. I guess all I'm saying is that it would be nice to know what percent of total PhDs the same 90 schools are accountable for. My guess is about 50%.

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

#100

Post by throwawaymaths »

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…

I am unsure about training (access to, and performance at prestigious phd programs is easy even if you come from a third-tier undergrad), but I don't believe that professors at lower tier research institutes are necessarily less productive.

Probably the most productive synthetic biologist is one at Michigan state: John Frost... with a lab of about six, he's produced in microorganisms within the span of ten-ish years:

- rocket fuel precursor (butanetriol for BTTN), both stereoisomers

- BPA replacement (phloroglucinol)

- precursor to tamiflu (shikimate)

- nylon-6 precursor (caprolactam)

And probably some others that I don't remember off the top of my head. More famous synthetic biologists have done less with labs of hundreds.

Post reply on HN