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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

#101

Post by OJFord »

derbOac wrote: post #94
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; the…

But is that entirely wrong?

Isn't 'good pedigree' saying 'we can trust the unknown here more than in other cases'?

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

#103

Post by tacomonstrous »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #100
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:…

Michigan State is lower tier than the likes of Harvard maybe, but it's still a premier research institution by global standards.

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

#104

Post by jltsiren »

setgree wrote: post #17
pessimizer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quot…

I think this study is approaching the limits of what can be determined using quantitative methods. The academia is not single field but a collection of tens of thousands of overlapping niches. If you want to understand the dynamics in a niche, you must spend years studying it, which does not scale.

In the niche I'm most familiar with, where I can often tell the difference between the reputation of a researcher and the quality of their work, prestige does not seem to have a significant role. University of Cambridge is the only institute that stands out, while most top people and most faculty members come from a wide range of reputable but unexceptional research universities.

Prestige seems to have a bigger role in another subfield I work in, but I'm not as confident in evaluating the people in it. The big difference seems to be that this subfield favors building large labs and emphasizes the role of the PI as a manager and a visionary rather than as a researcher. I'm not even sure if the quality of research means the same things in this field as in my home field.

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

#105

Post by PolygonSheep »

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…

> many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups

The institutions themselves did? How many Ivy League founders forcefully dispossessed indigenous groups specifically so they could build a university on their land?

I'm not talking, like, how the land Yale University is on was once owned by the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples and then some white dudes forcibly relocated them and then years later some other white dudes got together and founded a school which became Yale.

If dispossession makes something prestigious then why isn't every college in America prestigious? They were all built on land seized from indigenous groups. Many in the South were built or benefited from the labor of enslaved black people in addition to that. By this logic the most prestigious universities in America really ought to be clustered in the deep South cotton belt. This strangely doesn't seem to be the case.

It seems to me prestige and some form of exclusion have to go hand in hand. This might be in terms of cost to attend, or coming from the "right" ethnicity, or coming from the "right" family from within the "right" ethnicity, or having the highest SAT score, or some mix of these.

If the Ivy League was open to any and all comers it would no more prestigious than any community college because anyone who wanted to could attend. I don't see why Yale couldn't build bigger buildings and open a bunch of satellite campuses in all 50 states if they wanted to. But if they did that it would be like Gucci selling $15 shirts at Walmart. It would utterly destroy the brand even if the quality remained the same.

> This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).

What would the numbers look like if you did the math for plumbers, programmers, farmers, or any other trade? Suppose your dad was a welder and he taught you about it from a young age, gave you skills, put in a good word for you with his boss, which gave you a leg up on the people trying to get into the trade from nothing. It doesn't seem much different from me to the PhD thing. This is not even getting into whether (or to what extent) intelligence/personality is heritable. PhDs will spend a lot of time with each other, and mate with each other, and their kids will be PhDs because they were raised in a PhD environment by PhD parents and the cycle will repeat again. I could have told you that without a study.

> Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis.

Well yeah. If they had enough prestige to go to a prestigious university they would have done so before earning their PhD. Either the most elite universities in the US are leaving a ton of $100 bills on the sidewalk by ignoring non-prestigious PhDs, or it's not a meritocracy and never was.

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

#106

Post by scarmig »

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.

Many (most?) professors also do consulting gigs on the side that can be very lucrative.

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

#108

Post by lapcat »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #107

What about Congress? And the POTUS / WH? And W DC in general? Higher edu has far less power and hands on direct impact than Uncle Sam.

Well, I know that 8 of 9 current Supreme Court justices got a J.D. from either Harvard or Yale.

Amy Coney Barrett is the only exception, Notre Dame.

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

#109

Post by throwaway0asd »

Maursault wrote: post #80
throwaway0asd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to thrive due to the lack of controls. Prestige is an unrelated red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for social gravity in many walks of life. This is commonly referred to as implicit bias and is generally the most common cause of various forms of selection bias, including racial discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike.

> The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to thrive due to the lack of controls. This statement is wonderfully self-contradictory. The study overwhelmingly proves the first part wrong. The presence of bias is numerical, certainly, but it is not purely numerical and must actually exist, which is acknowledged after the "and," in contradiction. > Prestige is an unrelated red herring masking the very huma…

No, the study proves that bias, in this one case, demonstrates the Pareto Principle which is a purely numerical thing.

Alignment to bias is essential to mobility anywhere that bias prevails irrespective of prestige. Prestige is the effect not the cause. The rest of your comment is built upon that cause/effect confusion.

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

#110

Post by throwawaymaths »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #103
throwawaymaths wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Michigan State is lower tier than the likes of Harvard maybe, but it's still a premier research institution by global standards.

I did not mean this as a dig against Michigan state by any means.
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