Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by melonrusk » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:10 AM UTC

derbOac wrote: post #92

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-...

Garbage model, garbage methodology.

Their model has a set of agents with a 'talent' normally distributed between 0 and 1 (mean 0.6, SD 0.1). Each agent gets a random series of doubling and halving events. The doubling is applied with probability = 'talent'.

The lengths of the series of events have an exponentially decreasing distribution (four longer is x10 less probable, approximately). The application of these series of events to the agent is supposed to simulate a life history of random opportunities, exploited according to talent.

BUT...

Half the events are losses, half the events are possible (Ponly win with luck.

DOI: 10.1142/S0219525918500145

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

#152

Post by synergy20 » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:12 AM UTC

ejb999 wrote: post #16

synergy20 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

watched a documentary about blind-interview band players as people accused the selection committee is race-biased. after a true blind interview is done, the result is way more biased than before, so they cancelled that immediately, and replaced it with a process called 'holistic review'.

>>after a true blind interview is done, the result is way more biased than before, How is a 'true blind interview' more biased? or do you really mean, they didn't get the outcome they wanted?

correct,they did not get what they wanted

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

#153

Post by pc86 » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:13 AM UTC

SantalBlush wrote: post #132

fny wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, only if it actually is a good pedigree. I used to work at a company where one of the HR directors went to Harvard for undergrad. He could say that and people probably would have nodded their heads in agreement. You can't say that if you went to Ohio State. Nothing against the Buckeyes but it's just not in the same tier, to the point where that "pedigree" -- I can't even imagine anyone referring to their Ohio State education as a "pedigree" in any serious sense -- isn't any better or worse than any of the other ~60 half-way decent "$STATE State" or "$STATE University" schools.

There's also a lot of discussion here around the people who get excluded because they lack that pedigree. I don't think anyone is saying that you can't find brilliant folks who went to a small school you've never heard of. They're saying that you're hiring for one professorship, there are a lot of unknowns, and you're trying to eliminate false positives to avoid a bad hire. Seeing that between two otherwise-identical candidates, one of whom has a BA from Harvard and one of whom has a BA from West Virginia State, you're well within your duty as a member of the hiring committee to assume that the person from Harvard has at least as good a chance of being acceptable as the other one. False negatives are okay (not great), false positives are horrible.

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

#154

Post by pc86 » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:17 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #14

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…

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…

I think we're not looking into it because it doesn't matter in this context. We can look into it, sure. But the question of how Yale University treated certain groups of people or how they got certain plots of land doesn't have the slightest bearing on whether or not Professor Smith got her specific professorship because she went to Yale. They're both good questions but completely unrelated.

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

#155

Post by Siddarth1977 » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

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…

I'd treat the 3.5 from UCF, Maryland and UNC as roughly the same, but think MIT probably was slightly harder to achieve. Maybe UNC I'd view with a bit more suspicion since it's more likely that someone got by there due to one form of privilege or another, whereas the Central Florida student I can feel more confident they probably survived only by merit.

One funny aspect of the very phenomena that this article is about, is that it highlights how little difference where you go to school matters. Whether you go to "super prestigious Ivy league school" or "non-prestigious flyover country state school" you're probably using the exact same textbook, syllabus and have a professors who were classmates and peers at the same "prestigious" university.

Basically, the difference between a student at a midwestern public school and an Ivy league is about 99.999% how privileged they were in terms of either having rich, well-connected parents or matching a diversity criteria the school was seeking and at most, a 0.001% difference in merit.

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

#156

Post by j7ake » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #34

setgree wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you been on a university hiring committee? My anecdotal evidence is that yes prestige very strongly matters and coming from a very prestigious university often outweights other factors such as publication record. I haven't read the original article yet but one can easily test if e.g. the publication record of a graduate student from a non-and prestigious uni differ to the extend that is indicated by the hiring.

All else being equal eg publication record, a candidate A from a less prestigious place is ranked higher than candidate B from a more prestigious place. This is because the candidate A did the same stuff with much less support than B.

The issue is that prestige is highly correlated to research outputs, so it is difficult to disentangle.

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

#157

Post by pyuser583 » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:43 AM UTC

dreeple16 wrote: post #130

pyuser583 wrote: post #102

UW-Madison is on the list, but University of Chicago is not?

UW-Madison is a research powerhouse.

It’s a research powerhouse, but so is University of Chicago. And University of Chicago is more prestigious.

I would assume University of Chicago would produce more faculty.

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

#158

Post by ninjin » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 4:47 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #145

ninjin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been on multiple hiring committees and had insights into plenty of hiring processes at other “top-25” universities. My experience is that it is more complex than simply using prestigious universities, supervisors, and collaborators as markers. In fact, I have so far never heard that kind of argument raised, while I have heard diversity arguments raised more times than I can count. Rather, my experience tells m…

> How can I possibly objectively tell whether individual A that entered a top 5 institution or individual B that entered a top 100 institution is most deserving? I presume you can read their papers.

Of course! If only we and thousands of other hiring committees would have thought of that!

Obviously we read their work, their CVs, their teaching statements, their research proposals, listen to their presentations, have personal meetings, etc. But if you read my original comment again I am sure you will notice that this is not what I am talking about. I state multiple times that these “objective” metrics that you now tout in response to my post are strongly correlated with prestigious institutions and supervisory pedigree. Thus, picking them apart is incredibly challenging.

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

#159

Post by woooooo » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

nextos wrote: post #144

BurningFrog wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some truth to the heuristic that "if you got into Harvard" you have to be pretty good. Because Harvard is really good at finding the "Harvard quality" people among applicants.

The problem is that hiring committees are busy, have imperfect information and therefore rely on easy metrics, i.e. prestige of candidate's university and journals where he has published. Many universities are now signatories of the SF Declaration, where they promise to value research based on ideas, not on prestige of journals: https://sfdora.org I have noted e.g. UMass goes one step further and asks tenure-track ap…

How does that work if anyone actually reads the publications? They'll have the journal name and probably current institution of the authors, right?

Am I being naive with the question? Is reading the publications unusual?

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

#160

Post by tedunangst » Fri, Sep 23, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

pyuser583 wrote: post #157

dreeple16 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UW-Madison is a research powerhouse.

It’s a research powerhouse, but so is University of Chicago. And University of Chicago is more prestigious. I would assume University of Chicago would produce more faculty.

If I found the right data, wisc graduates about twice as many PhDs per year.