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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

#161

Post by visarga »

ninjin wrote: post #158
visarga wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 no…

Use blind reading, remove the author name and institution from the papers.

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

#162

Post by ninjin »

visarga wrote: post #161
ninjin wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

Use blind reading, remove the author name and institution from the papers.

Okay, let my try to put this gently, go back and read my original post again and then respond here as to why your reply here is obviously nonsensical. Sorry, I am losing my patience here as you do not even seem to understand the basics of the ongoing discussion and what it is that is problematic.

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

#163

Post by bigbacaloa »

HWR_14 wrote: post #149
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.

> Harvard is really good at finding the "Harvard quality" people among applicants. How hard is that sifting process? How good is Harvard at doing that? How was it tested? I certainly think Harvard could have made an incoming class out of rejected students and they would all be the same caliber.

This study is talking about doctoral training not undergraduate. Selection is very different.

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

#164

Post by lordnacho »

nickysielicki wrote: post #33
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.

It’s Harvard, Stanford, UCBerkeley, UMich, and UWMadison. Which ones surprised you? UMich and UW-Madison are mid tier?

Well I don't know what to call them but in the public mind I would guess they are not as high prestige as the others.

Of course I have no actual idea of what quality the institutions actually are, I'm just polling my perception of the public perception.

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

#165

Post by sdenton4 »

woooooo wrote: post #159
nextos wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pretty easy to ignore the publication journal of you download all your papers from the arxiv...

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

fny wrote: post #129
gammarator wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jared Kushner would like a word: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-ku...

Having a lot of money is Harvard quality. Remember these institutions survive because the rich donate. This is also how brilliant minds come in contact with capital, and how we fund people studying knots and english literature all day long. It's a form of patronage. In turn, no one would ever give Jared Kusher a professorship unless he bought it.

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by gnicholas »

> One in eight US-trained tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

It's worth noting that 3 of these 5 are public — only 2 are private. I was expecting to see a list of Ivies, but there's only one on the list. Things are much more skewed among law professors, who are mostly from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, and Michigan.

> This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour, 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 a silly comparison. University faculty are not selected from "the general population" — only people with PhDs (or JDs/MBAs/MDs, in certain fields) can get these positions. The relevant baseline percentage is: what percent of people seeking faculty positions (i.e., people with the requisite terminal degree) have a parent with a PhD?

Otherwise you're comparing (1) people who successfully got a job with tons of requirements with (2) Americans, generally. If you're going to do that, why not use the average rate worldwide, which would undoubtedly be even lower? Plenty of professors were born outside the US, after all!

A faulty comparison like this calls into question the seriousness of the article.

EDIT: another commenter linked to a list of the schools with the largest number of PhD graduates. [1] It turns out that all but one of the 5 schools listed here is on the top 10 list for volume of graduates. So the conclusion is: the schools with the most PhD graduates...produce a large chunk of professors? Not a huge surprise.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32945639

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

#168

Post by whatiskolnprob »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#169

Post by gnicholas »

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…

The list you cite undermines the article's claim about elitism because it looks like 4 out of the 5 schools that it lists are also on your list. So the conclusion is that the 5 schools that produce the most professors...include 4 of the top 10 schools in terms of PhD graduates. Not much of a surprise there!

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

#170

Post by DoingIsLearning »

ryan93 wrote: post #98
epolanski wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think their point is that the best and brightest have a normal distribution across the world. Irrespective of how bright you are it is an incredibly unlikely event that _all_ these people will be able to have access or funds to start their university at 'elite' universities. Information and monetary assymetry is a thing.

To your point at least in the UK there is a sea of Italian academics from Bologna/Milan/Padua/Torino pursuing further studies or research positions in Oxbridge and other 'Golden Triangle' universities.

Having experienced average universities in my undergrad studies and 'elite' universities as a postgrad I have to seriously agree with GP:

> most great professors in important universities excel at funding, not teaching

The differentiating factor is that elite universities have a halo effect that makes it far more likely to secure funding. This allows for more ambitious projects and equally enables them to attract top talent.

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