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Academia's 1%

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Re: Academia's 1%

#71

Post by skosuri »

hga wrote: post #53
skosuri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, that is surprising, because it is disallowed. Stanford, like all UC's where I am at, have salary minimums. Stanford's minimum is higher than the NIH levels [1]. It would be hard to pay someone under the table, so I don't see how this is really occurring. [1] http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html

Hmmm. Unless Stanford and the NIH turn a blind eye to it---this is trivial to audit---this could not be happening without the faculty getting kickbacks.

It's not happening as far as I know (I'm faculty at UCLA and employ several postdocs).

Re: Academia's 1%

#72

Post by gaius »

microcolonel wrote: post #60
projectileboy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you've said, but there's a tone here and in Hacker News in general that bothers me - a fierce meritocracy that doesn't seem to have a scrap of empathy for anyone who doesn't fit into the top 1%. So if the rest of us lazy slobs in the 99% are unworthy to get into the best grad schools or Y Combinator, I'm to assume we should just find ourselves a quiet spot in the midwest in…

The fact that your first alternative to succeeding is giving up entirely, I don't see how you could make it to the midwest with enough money to buy the gun you'll kill yourself with. Resources; time, energy, attention; are limited. If you allocate resources to less-than-best people, you get less-than-best results, most of the time. If these people are the kind of weak, selfish pricks who think that the world owes the…

This is funny because, it wasn't that long ago in history, that the characteristics that made a person successful were how all about how well they could hunt. How many of the new geek kings of the startup scene, would be kings in that world? You might be successful in your niche, but never forget the sheer good luck that had you born near (spatially and temporally) a local maxima.

Re: Academia's 1%

#73

Post by swatow »

Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors... What that means is something every Ph.D. from a less-prestigious institution knows all too well: No amount of publishing, teaching excellence, or grants can compensate for an affiliation that is less than favorable in the eyes of a search committee.

This is just wrong. It is possible that publishing and grants are correlated with institution rank (and teaching excellence is usually a relative measure so hard to compare across schools anyway).

It seems decades of anti-discrimination indoctrination have resulted in a situation where no argument is to sloppy, and no evidence is to flimsy, when you are arguing that discrimination exists somewhere.

Re: Academia's 1%

#74

Post by 1a2a3a4a »

UmDieWelt wrote: post #13
williamstein wrote: post #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 w…

First-rate people hire people that went to the same group of first-rate schools they did. Also, why wouldn't second-rate people hire second-raters? According to that quote, no one hires second-raters. It really doesn't make much sense.

I would guess this is because the first rate schools produce more PhDs than there are jobs at first rate schools.

Re: Academia's 1%

#75

Post by moyix »

cle wrote: post #26
nycticorax wrote: post #8

The 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.

I was thinking the same thing, and then I read: "With institutional bias in hiring now proven by multiple social scientists..." Is anyone familiar with these studies? This is a crucial piece of information for the article.

If it's the study I'm thinking of [1], they essentially tried to measure how much more actual merit hires would need to have to justify the inequality of hiring decisions:

> Despite the confounded nature of merit and social status within measurable prestige, the observed hierarchies are sufficiently steep that attributing their structure to differences in merit alone seems implausible.

It's not the strongest argument, but I'm having trouble coming up with a way to separate it out. You could try to measure the subsequent productivity of professors once hired, but it's likely that scientific publishing and citation also has a prestige bias, so the confounder is back.

[1] http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005

Re: Academia's 1%

#76

Post by hga »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #69
chaoxu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone mit graduate is MIT professor good.

That's possible, but when we know that many people who are MIT Professor Good could not get into MIT for undergrad[1], it still requires us to believe MIT's admissions and graduation criteria for PhD students are very loose compared to all their other observed standards. [1] -- http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003

That's frankly ridiculous, or at least the CalTech example at the end. For undergraduate study, MIT and CalTech have a strong filtering function in that you must be able to do math and calculus based physics, and, oh yeah, one "humanities" course per term. A student brilliant only at math would likely fail horribly. And so a student who's brilliant at just CS might not make the cut for MIT, since MIT's EECS undergraduate program requires a minimum of both EE and CS (for better or worse, that's their view of what an undergraduate must have).

Change the domain to graduate programs and above and things are different.

While I'm at it, back some years ago last decade before MIT gained a lot of attention approximately 13,000 students applied a year for the undergraduate program. 3,000 were judged to "be able to do the work", and only from them was a class of 1,100 students constructed.

Re: Academia's 1%

#77

Post by rflrob »

hga wrote: post #61
themoonbus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, to put it another way, there are far more paths to success in the private sector than in academia. People change careers, move upwards, downwards, sideways, etc. Academia is much less forgiving.

In STEM, I have the very strong impression that there are many paths that will take you off the academic track, and essentially none that will get you back on it. E.g. you have to keep up with the current literature to some degree.

There are rare instances of people coming back to academia after being very successful in industry. It's hard to say whether the rate is low because there's a bias against it from the hiring committees, or if people are actually generally happy in industry and uninterested in going back, or likely some combination of both.

Re: Academia's 1%

#78

Post by egocodedinsol »

The actual paper is pretty interesting, even aside from the more political implications[0]. For faculty placement, their measure of network prestige outpredicts other network measures and other ranking systems like USNews (but still only performs modestly well).

They also released the data in the supplementals. This is a magnificent hand-curated dataset, especially because it's complete, for each discipline, and it's relatively large. Network measures suffer from sampling issues, so a complete dataset like this is awesome.

[0]http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.

Re: Academia's 1%

#79

Post by hga »

rflrob wrote: post #77
hga wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In STEM, I have the very strong impression that there are many paths that will take you off the academic track, and essentially none that will get you back on it. E.g. you have to keep up with the current literature to some degree.

There are rare instances of people coming back to academia after being very successful in industry. It's hard to say whether the rate is low because there's a bias against it from the hiring committees, or if people are actually generally happy in industry and uninterested in going back, or likely some combination of both.

"after being very successful in industry"

I've heard of one example of that in the MIT AI Lab in the '60-70s, although it helped that "very successful" can equal "can pay for his research budget" ^_^. And of course there weren't many real CS graduates to turn into faculty members in the bad old days.

Re: Academia's 1%

#80

Post by dnautics »

east2west wrote: post #65
skosuri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, that is surprising, because it is disallowed. Stanford, like all UC's where I am at, have salary minimums. Stanford's minimum is higher than the NIH levels [1]. It would be hard to pay someone under the table, so I don't see how this is really occurring. [1] http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html

I heard from my postdoc friends at Stanford a couple of years ago about the pay levels. It could have changed now but I doubt it. Do postdocs at Stanford still pay tuitions? My experience is that UCSF > UC Berkeley > Stanford as far as postdocs' compensation is concerned.

according to glassdoor, it's exactly the opposite. Stanford > Cal > UCSF.

And things seem to have changed. I was a postdoc 2 years ago and salaries seem to be higher (although glassdoor typically reports exit salaries).

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