Academia's 1%

This article is quite mistaken, at least from the perspective of an academic mathematician. (Maybe it is more accurate in the humanities.)

(1) This year, two of the three candidates whom we interviewed got their Ph.D.'s at non-top-20 universities. We made offers to both of them. One of them turned us down, in favor of a better offer from another R1 university.

The third got his Ph.D. at a top-20, but not top-10 university.

The last person we hired, in a previous year's search, also got his Ph.D. at a non-top-20 university.

(2) My own university is not in the top 50. Most of our own Ph.D. graduates, if I limit to the strongest and hardworking ones, have been successful in getting either academic jobs at good universities, or very appealing non-academic jobs.

(3) In mathematics at least, the top universities offer a much better graduate education than non-top universities. For one, the absolute leading researchers are at the top universities, and there is a big gap between these people and merely very good researchers. (I say that, counting myself in the latter category.)

But still more important than that is the quality of the peer group. In grad school (at least in math) you learn much more from your peers than from your professors, and Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. attract the most talented, ambitious, and hard-working students. That is why these places are so good.

(4) "Why don’t prospective graduate students simply limit their applications to favored elite institutions? The answer is often financial, and, again, speaks to privilege and discrimination endemic to academic culture. 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."

Well, for one, these places all pay higher stipends. I don't know of any grad students in math at any of these places who have had difficulties paying their living expenses, except for those who were simultaneously trying to raise families.

Ambitious students who can get into elite universities, usually should. And exceptions are typically in the case of elite research groups in otherwise non-elite universities.

I am not saying that there is no privilege and discrimination in mathematics departments (the gender ratio is notoriously bad), but I find the author's criticisms off-base.

>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.

By the CPI Inflation Calculator, that's roughly equivalent to $20k in today's money[1]. The average rent for a 1-bedroom place in Berkeley today is ~$3000/month[2], and a quick glance at Craigslist[3] shows the average rent for a room in a shared apartment to be around ~$1000/month. This does in fact mean a graduate student on the equivalent of your stipend today is spending 60% of their gross income on rent, or finding some mysterious way to live not only far away from work, but in fact in a mysterious, magical part of the Bay Area that has low rents.

Actually, to my knowledge, what actually happens is that elite schools in high cost-of-living locations just give larger stipends these days. I've heard from MIT grad-students that they certainly get higher stipends than I've seen elsewhere, as a result of which, indeed, they just have to live with roommates.

But God help them if their institution doesn't pay a higher stipend!

>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.

That assumption does not seem to have been made. The correct view is that there is a continuous slope from the top handful of departments to the top 20/30/50 (where you draw the line depends on what field you're in) to the top 100, to everyone else.

But unless the data supports calling it less of a continuous slope downwards from the top than a discrete, discontinuous jump where researchers outside the top 20 institutions are nigh-incapable of doing good research, I would certainly say the datum that the top 20 universities' PhD graduates get 50% of all new tenure-track jobs, including those in much lower-tier institutions, supports a view that there exists a prestige problem or an extreme glut of PhDs[4], or both. Personally, I lean towards the issue mostly actually being the latter: there is simply a glut of PhDs, and so otherwise irrelevant factors like prestige get seized-upon as providing the very tiniest edge once the competition has already gotten tough enough that almost nobody actually has an advantage on merit alone anymore.

(I've seen people from mere top-25 institutions chairing first-tier conferences, which seems to me to militate against the idea that the "top-10" occupying a qualitatively separate tier.)

> 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.

Excuse me, but in my experience, and that of most other graduate students, we don't learn from the masters, because advisors' minds are largely impenetrable!

(In fact, if I may gossip publicly, I think it's not too much to say that my current advisor in particular has implied that he prefers to spend far more time worrying about the finery of how he presents our work in papers than the rigor or methodology with which we did it!

Whereas I've developed into something of a methods geek, but also realized that nobody actually cares about your methods in the "real world" of top-tier conferences anyway ;-).)

>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."

I think we ought to reevaluate whether this law really applies in difficult labor markets. To me, it looks like when there's a glut of candidates and a shortage of positions, we routinely see good people shunted down to lower-tier institutions at every level, even as prestige becomes a form of "privilege" (in the sociological sense), even as actual differences of merit shrink.

Personal confession: I attended a top-20 institution for undergrad, and am finishing my research MSc at a top-tier institution. When I have self-studied and made software contributions to prepare myself, I would like to apply to a couple of MIT's PhD programs. But I also think the job market for academics is fucking terrible, and that my situation does reflect a form of inherited privilege. For one thing, my stepfather is a tenured professor of EE at a second-tier institution, and had friends in the department I attended for undergrad (whose classes I avoided because I like PL and they did networking :-p, but still) -- I literally grew up with an academic pedigree!

[1] -- http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=13000&year1=199... [2] -- https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-berkeley-rent-tre... [3] -- http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/roo?query=berkeley [4] -- http://infoproc.blogspot.co.il/2008/05/dont-become-scientist...

Winners take that praise

Losers seldom take that blame

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This can be used to point at both victim-of-circumstance "losers" and it-was-all-me "winners", depending on your viewpoint.