Academia's 1%
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Academia's 1%
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Re: Academia's 1%
#2The same rule holds true for jobs in the private sector: work for a high profile company (Google, Apple, Facebook, ...) and you will find doors open everywhere. Getting there in the first place is the real challenge.
Re: Academia's 1%
#3This is one of the reasons you want to avoid getting a "subprime" Ph.D.
Re: Academia's 1%
#4The same rule holds true for jobs in the private sector: work for a high profile company (Google, Apple, Facebook, ...) and you will find doors open everywhere. Getting there in the first place is the real challenge.
One difference is that the private sector gives second chances and academia doesn't.
Re: Academia's 1%
#5[Disclaimer: I'm part of that 1% she is talking about, since I'm tenured faculty in Mathematics at University of Washington, with "Harvard" on my resume due to my first job being there. http://wstein.org]
The author says: "The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even with full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less."
Such entitlement. I got into UC Berkeley (1995-2000) where I received $13K/year to live on from them (for TA'ing), and I made it work by having a roommate, being frugal, and getting some student loans (the minimum I needed), which I paid off within 2 years of graduation. It sucked, but I had to just be lean and deal with it, and reminded myself that I was a student.
Also, there is a naive and incorrect (in math at least) assumption in this article that the only difference between a graduate student from a top-10 university and a top-100 university is the name of the university where they graduated. There may be some truth to this for undergraduates, but for graduate students---who spend between 4 and 10 years busting their ass full-time on their research area---the situation is completely different.
The author thus seems to discount the possibility that the very best students who go to graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. are often be the best job candidates. Harvard/Berkeley/etc. gets the best potential grad students in the first place -- I was on the grad admissions committee in math at Harvard for years, and we would make offers to the top (or so) American students, and pretty much get most of them. These were extremely strong enthusiastic students who had invested often a decade of their lives into mathematics already; the education these students then got at grad school was by top researchers. In research, learning from the masters is often critical to becoming one, since the habits, tricks, ideas, intuitions, etc. are very hard to convey in writing.
Also, not everybody gets into graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. via "inherited wealth". At least I didn't -- I was an undergraduate at Northern Arizona University, and got into Berkeley entirely by being crazy in love with doing mathematics and also relatively good at it. The undergrad institution definitely matters in grad school admissions. However, being sufficiently good regularly gets around being from a non-top-10 university.
The article reminds me of this quote -- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos: "André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters."
Re: Academia's 1%
#6The same rule holds true for jobs in the private sector: work for a high profile company (Google, Apple, Facebook, ...) and you will find doors open everywhere. Getting there in the first place is the real challenge.
I'll wager the majority of Google hires are from the same few CS programmes, Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc.
Re: Academia's 1%
#7[Disclaimer: I'm part of that 1% she is talking about, since I'm tenured faculty in Mathematics at University of Washington, with "Harvard" on my resume due to my first job being there. http://wstein.org ] The author says: "The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even w…
Because, as we all know, politics plays no part in faculty hiring, and who you know, who your advisor was, who your drinking buddies were, have no bearing on those decisions, and it is all dependent solely on the objective merits of your work and expertise.
Re: Academia's 1%
#8The author seems to view the hiring statistics she cites as evidence of "bias", but I didn't see any attempt to control for the actual quality of the applicants. I.e. You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs.
Re: Academia's 1%
#9I don't get the thing about cost of living. New Haven is not expensive, neither is NJ commutable to Princeton, nor Philadelphia. Chicago's cost of living is right at the national average. Durham's is probably below. Etc.
Re: Academia's 1%
#10This was the best article, not just regarding academia, but describing the issue of privilege and its destructive effect on the "american dream" - that I think I have seen since the 2009 crash.
We have a controversy about wealth inequality and it seems that would be a natural result of a cycle of power simply being passed down generation by generation.
I think the opposite of that, a meritocracy, is what we want - but maybe what we have is inevitable in a money and status obsessed culture. I don't know if the culture is a cause or result of the systems we have that tilt the scales so far in favor of the elite over the non-elite, but one or the other would have to be addressed in some way.