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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

#181

Post by lapcat »

Siddarth1977 wrote: post #155
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…

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 abou…

> 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

Coincidentally, I was accepted to an Ivy League school but had to attend a Midwestern public school instead because my parents couldn't afford to send me to the Ivy League school.

So my pedigree was entirely based on money.

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

#182

Post by master_crab »

Siddarth1977 wrote: post #155
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…

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 abou…

“I'd treat the 3.5 from UCF, Maryland and UNC as roughly the same, but think MIT probably was slightly harder to achieve.”

Are you sure about that? Private, prestigious institutions have a habit of grade inflation beyond those of the nation’s reputable state schools (although all of the schools have inflated grades compared to previous decades)

I would probably view an equal or higher GPA from a top tier state school as a better distinguisher than one from an Ivy.

https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2022/04/brown-grade...

https://www.gradeinflation.com/

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

#183

Post by bigbacaloa »

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…

Those who leave for work condition reasons mostly would not have made good researchers - their priorities aren't conducive to doing good research.

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

#184

Post by BurningFrog »

BurningFrog wrote: post #116
derbOac wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

OP here: Note that I said "some truth".

I'm aware of the imperfections and biases. But I also think there is a baby in that bathwater.

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

#185

Post by mmmmpancakes »

bigbacaloa wrote: post #183
mmmmpancakes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those who leave for work condition reasons mostly would not have made good researchers - their priorities aren't conducive to doing good research.

I think that's a very strange thing to say. I am not sure which priorities you are referring to, but I think I have a good guess, and I think they're ridiculous things to expect that aren't / shouldn't be correlated with research outcomes.

What I have experienced over my time in academia is that priorities change over time.

When I was young and in graduate school I was very happy to live a spartan life and devote the bulk of my time to research. I thought very little about finances.

Now I have a partner and a child. Postdoc salaries are simply not sufficient to support them financially. The need to move every few years for a new position makes it difficult for my partner to have her own steady career.

I'm quite confident I could still make a good researcher. In fact, I'm being paid for precisely that at my new job. I just don't happen to be in academia where the pay and WLB sucks and everyone expects you to sacrifice quality of life on the altar of their virtuous research.

Incentives and priorities in academia (especially pure math) are by now almost totally disconnected with reality. My former colleagues have no idea what I am doing at my current job and don't even know what sort of questions to ask about what I do (beyond idiotic questions like "what math do you use?"). There's no need for them to know because they're coddled in an archaic system that doesn't foster true innovation (it shields them from the market forces that would otherwise compel them to innovate).

Beyond the better living conditions, I am happy I left academia because IMO it is not a good setting to do good research, it is exactly the opposite.

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

#186

Post by mmmmpancakes »

sicp-enjoyer wrote: post #135
mmmmpancakes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It goes without saying that quality of research is very important.

However, getting a TT position is much more about connections and fashion than people think, especially in a field like pure math where it's much more difficult to argue concrete applicability and outcomes of your theoretical work. And this is especially true when there are many people doing top quality research (which there are).

A top advisor will be able to sell you to departments elsewhere for a top postdoc, or straight into TT if you are impressive enough. They will also be able to culture you appropriately so that all your application materials look precisely right.

Finally, a top advisor will have a significant breadth and depth of knowledge across research fields (this is rarer than you might think in pure math) and be able to guide you to work in areas that have better job markets.

The reality now of TT applications at desirable universities is that the pile is hundreds of applications deep. Each application is a hefty bundle (cover letter 1-2 pages, research statement 2-10 pages (probably on the longer side for math), teaching statement 1-2 pages, cv 3-6 pages depending on formatting, 4+ letters of recommendation each several pages, and other documents like EDI statements which can run 1-2 pages). How the hiring committee winnows this list down to a short list of candidates depends on the institution, but you better believe that if famous prof X from Harvard, who was best friends with commmittee member Y in grad school at Harvard, makes a personal recommendation for candidate Z to committee member Y, then candidate Z has a significantly higher chance of making that short list than anyone else in the pile.

Another reason for this is that the work is so esoteric and fields are so siloed now that it's very hard for committee members to make a fair and true evaluation of research quality for themselves. I guarantee you they are not taking time to read and evaluate quality of research in research papers in most cases. The input of their trusted colleagues at other institutions holds weight as does metrics like publication counts and where the papers are accepted. By the way if you have a top advisor it may be much easier for you to figure out how to get your results published in a top journal.

You see?

Also I was in differential geometry.

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

#187

Post by goldenManatee »

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…

This is all based on personal emotions and faux logical assumptions. There’s very little concrete or scientific evidence being presented to back up any of the anecdotes. There’s mention of avoiding mushiness, but ironically that’s precisely what the comforting cognitive miserliness does.

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

#188

Post by motohagiography »

bo1024 wrote: post #32
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…

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).

Imo, this comment is treating these sports as straw man symbols to assert an ideological point. Good horsemanship takes decades and isn't really comparable to intellectualism. We aren't your gods, and using riders as examples for iconoclasm is tedious.

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

#189

Post by mturmon »

lapcat wrote: post #89
mturmon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! Alas, there are a lot of comments nearby (not necessarily children of yours) from people who didn't notice this, and are working out their elitism thing. (Those damn elite professors who went to grad school in Madison!) These are all really big schools (Cal, UMich, UW), so in retrospect, I get it. Classic "how do you normalize" thing ( https://xkcd.com/1138/ ).

> Those damn elite professors who went to grad school in Madison! This is underrating the University of Wisconsin. "Among the 1,070 departments that are ranked top-10 in any field, 248 (23.2%) top-10 slots are occupied by departments at just five universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia; fully 252 universities (64%) have zero top-10 departments." https://www.nature.com…

Sure, both “big” and “top”. Some commenters seem to expect institutions like Caltech (“top” but not “big”) to have a presence in a demographic survey like this.

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

#190

Post by jl2718 »

blagie wrote: post #175
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.

That's true. "Harvard quality" means either: - Very smart - Connections to wealth and power A bit over 2/5s of the white undergrads are admitted for the later. That came up in the Asian law suit. Similar mechanisms apply elsewhere, but we haven't had legal discovery (note: not speculation; insider knowledge).

“White” seems overly broad here. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-myth-of-american...
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