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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

#131

Post by koolba »

There should be a mandatory SAT style test that you take after graduation. With nothing on the line for the individual, but everything on the line for the school to prove they actually taught you something.

It would obviously need to be catered to each major. And it won’t exactly align with any one school’s curriculum, but it’d be great to see actual stats of who knows what after graduation across thousands of students.

Thinking about this a bit more, this is something the government could definitely do. Have schools submit students to these tests as a condition of receiving federal funding. Any student that graduates that doesn’t take the test counts as a zero for the schools numerator but still a one for the denominator.

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

#132

Post by SantalBlush »

fny wrote: post #128
derbOac wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe? I think that's where this gets murky. What are you basing that trust on?

The individual has been "vetted" in a more rigorous setting. For example, is someone who graduates with a 3.5GPA Math BA from the University of Central Florida trained as well as someone who graduates with 3.5 from the University of Maryland? What about UNC? What about MIT? If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used. Mind you, I've seen this used against people as well. For example... "The last few MIT gra…

>If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used.

The notion of good pedigree benefits anyone who might fit in that category, so they're incentivized to convince people that this matters. For example, if someone on a hiring committee sees an applicant coming from their alma mater, they can call that a "good pedigree" and reinforce the value of their own background.

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

#133

Post by ckemere »

thfuran wrote: post #19
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…

>These are non-sequiturs. And also probably little more than proxies for the age of the institution.

Stanford was essentially founded in the 20th century - much more recently than many east coast universities.

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

#134

Post by raincom »

That's due to how faculty is recruited. Ph.D's from tier-1 schools end up professors at tier-2 and tier-3; tier-2 Ph.D's end up being at tier-3 and tier-4. Professors at Tier-1 have better networks in terms of editorship at top journals, top conferences, members of NSF committees. So, their students have better chance of success.

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

#135

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

mmmmpancakes wrote: post #37
Ancalagon wrote: post #15

This is pretty much why I left physics, any worthwhile research career was over before it even started since I went to a lower-tier state university. Not saying that's indicative of all fields considering the difficulty of physics and few number of faculty and lab positions available for such skillsets, but that was my experience. I looked around at my professors in undergrad and virtually all had come from Ivies or…

Same here but for math. I did a survey of who was getting the TT jobs I wanted in the cities I wanted to live in and the trend was that they all went to Harvard / Princeton with a few exceptions. Seeing how strongly those profile elements, which I don't have, correlated with success getting into TT, and how few positions there are, it was easy to decide to leave. Other factors include pay for TT professors in high Co…

In most academic areas my experience is you can get high quality education just about anywhere with serious study, but I have heard some math professors express that getting with a top advisor is super important to help bring you to to the frontier of research. Do you have any insight into whether this is true? Also just curious what your field of math is.

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

#136

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #81

Fortunately the prestige and social currency among Ivies and "elite" universities is rapidly turning to a stigma among a large portion of the population.

Where/when have you experienced that? My experience is that people will express that sentiment, but still be impressed when they encounter someone with such a status symbol.

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

#137

Post by dmicah »

lapcat wrote: post #108
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.

And two went to the same high school.

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

#138

Post by bo1024 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #113
bo1024 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> There is an important and different question of how diverse and accessible academia is. What I find troubling is the baggage of background assumptions that makes this sort of value judgement possible. You have three professors, two white, one black. The two white professors, A and B, have diverging yet compelling views. The black professor C agrees with A. Which is better? Hiring A and B, or A and C? According to p…

One interesting aspect of this article is a framing of diversity of people by where they were educated.

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

#139

Post by derbOac »

fny wrote: post #128
derbOac wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe? I think that's where this gets murky. What are you basing that trust on?

The individual has been "vetted" in a more rigorous setting. For example, is someone who graduates with a 3.5GPA Math BA from the University of Central Florida trained as well as someone who graduates with 3.5 from the University of Maryland? What about UNC? What about MIT? If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used. Mind you, I've seen this used against people as well. For example... "The last few MIT gra…

But I guess the argument is is that vetting equally available? And is the rigor in the vetting or in the self selection?

To me it seems self-reinforcing.

Lots of things in history have been used as signals.

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

#140

Post by bo1024 »

setgree wrote: post #63
bo1024 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The word "bias" doesn't appear in the actual research study, nor "discrimination". I don't see that it addresses anything of the sort.
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