[HN Gopher] Most US professors are trained at same few elite uni...
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Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities
Author : pseudolus
Score : 81 points
Date : 2022-09-22 18:38 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| melonrusk wrote:
| > 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied
| 80% of tenure-track faculty members
|
| 80:20
|
| The Pareto Principle at work. All these figures show is that
| universities have the usual distribution of quality.
| oneplane wrote:
| You'd hope that quality requirements could be used to make a
| bar that is high enough so any accredited institution would be
| delivering highly educated and developed people. Anything
| beyond that would be nice to have, but not enough to be a
| deciding factor when judging merit.
|
| When you think about it, what is it that we want? Someone with
| fancy labels who went to places that also had fancy labels, or
| someone who can do the thing we need?
| bergenty wrote:
| What's the point here? I want my professors to be educated at the
| best universities.
| mncharity wrote:
| Years back, there was talk of trying to leverage this
| concentration, to improve national science education.
| Professorial educational skills are often less than wonderful.
| Eg, physics education research's "if you think your lectures are
| working, your assessment also isn't". And creating change by
| improving current professors is hard, expensive, and failure
| prone. So the idea was, to lavishly fund education research,
| training, and education minors, at these few institutions through
| which pass, most graduate students who will eventually become
| professors. Make their instructional training really excellent,
| and then wait for it to propagate nationally. One obvious
| downside being reinforcing the concentration.
| bo1024 wrote:
| I would just recommend everyone read the actually research
| instead of the journalism.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| There are currently 449 PhD granting institutions in the United
| States. This means that 90 universities are responsible for 80%
| of tenured professors. There are not 90 elite universities in the
| United States, and 90 is not "few."
| cletus wrote:
| You cannot overstate the importance of "social proof" in terms of
| your access to education, work opportunities and even social
| status in American life.
|
| This is really why you go to elite universities: to open doors.
| It's not just the people you meet and build relationships with
| while at those august institutions, it's the preferential
| treatment you'll get from former alumni as well as the perception
| of you being more capable by just having that name on your CV.
| You've gotten admitted to such an institution and graduated.
|
| The tech world prides itself on being a meritocracy but "social
| proof" is just as prevalent. Going to an elite school will get
| you better access to internships, which will get you better
| access to jobs and so on.
|
| Academia is just a more extreme version of this. A friend (who
| did manage to secure a tenure track position in the humanities
| against all odds as a non-Harvard graduate) once told me "you'll
| never be without a job with Harvard on your CV". Academic
| departments view prestige by how many Harvard graduates you have
| on staff.
|
| The scandals in academic publishing are just symptomatic of this:
| trading on prestige, trading on connections, not wanting to rock
| the boat, etc.
|
| It would be nice if this was because a few elite universities are
| so good at training academics but I think we all know that isn't
| entirely the case.
| riskneutral wrote:
| The most desirable jobs in the private sector are also filled by
| graduates of the same few elite universities, and this elitism is
| perpetuated by all of academia (not just the top few
| universities). The elite class has constructed this system to
| perpetuate itself. Academia (the core pillar of elitism) is the
| last place where this hiring inequality will be addressed (if it
| ever is addressed, which is highly doubtful).
| Ancalagon wrote:
| 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 other institutions of similar caliber.
|
| At least software pays well.
| mmmmpancakes wrote:
| 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 CoL cities
| not keeping up well enough with inflation over the last 10
| years. Those salaries look much worse now than they did when I
| entered grad school. For the level of education it is underpay
| for overwork.
|
| Doing science in industry pays substantially better, has better
| WL balance (really anything will compared to academia), has
| more job openings in more cities, and there are plenty of
| challenging problems to work on. Moreover, research skills that
| STEM phds and academics have are highly valued, at least by
| some companies.
|
| In the end things seem to have worked out for me. I was warned
| about all this back when I entered grad school but didn't
| listen because I really wanted to do math. Following that
| passion was a good instinct after all even if I wasn't able to
| achieve the original goals exactly as I planned. I'd 100% do it
| again.
| asperous wrote:
| I would be interested to see what would happen if they blinded
| professor interviews to alma mater. Because that might help
| determine how much of it is bias-- 100%?
|
| The inverse correlation would be that people who end up being
| professors attended those colleges. Maybe they were more likely
| to get in or are more interested in academia so focused applying
| to those colleges.
| efficax wrote:
| it isn't exactly the fact that you got your phd from harvard
| that makes the harvard degree so valuable, it's that your
| thesis director is a Harvard professor and your letters of
| recommendation are from Harvard professors and other top
| schools, and the labs you worked at were lead by harvard
| professors etc. You could remove the fact that the applicant
| was themselves graduating from Harvard and all of that would
| still give them the repuation by association of a Harvard PhD.
|
| There are just too many additional factors that go into faculty
| hiring that continue to rely on reputation gained from
| association with prestige.
| synergy20 wrote:
| watched a documentary about blind-interview band players as
| people accused the selection committee is race-biased.
|
| after a true blind interview is done, the result is way more
| biased than before, so they cancelled that immediately, and
| replaced it with a process called 'holistic review'.
| muglug wrote:
| Here's an article from 2020 about the New York Philharmonic:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-
| audition...
|
| Blind auditions are probably not going away anytime soon.
|
| The ugly truth about orchestral musicians is that nowadays
| (with the general downturn in ticket sales) it's not much a
| living. There are _far_ fewer professional orchestral
| musicians than there were 50 years ago. Representation on a
| ship that 's slowly sinking is not, IMO, incredibly pressing.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>after a true blind interview is done, the result is way
| more biased than before,
|
| How is a 'true blind interview' more biased? or do you really
| mean, they didn't get the outcome they wanted?
| morelandjs wrote:
| Specifically, the study, published in Nature on 21 September,
| 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 (see
| 'Hiring bias').
|
| Nice pareto principle example
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Love it when academia turns on itself. Interestingly Harvard and
| Stanford have no claim to the hottest idea in science and
| engineering right now (deep learning).
|
| A worse issue is that Harvard and Stanford get all the grant
| money.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Universities are efficient, they create many potential professors
| with a small number of professors. So every class of potential
| professors will have many who can't get jobs where they studied,
| and will apply to less desirable places.
|
| This was very disheartening to realize in college. It was too
| late for me to attempt to become any of the role models
| physically in front of me.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| I personally like it that not anyone can become a professor, it
| should be an elite position imo.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I agree! Just saying it wasn't super fun to realize
| (completely fairly) that I wouldn't be able to become a
| professor.
|
| And I have a lot of sympathy for my classmates who only
| realized that when they graduated and tried to get a job.
| Universities have significant incentives to prevent their
| students from realizing there are a lot of people out there
| smarter (and more privileged) than them and the implications
| that flow from that.
|
| Universities should continue to be selective, but they should
| accurately communicate the implications of that selectivity
| to their students.
| munk-a wrote:
| I feel like this is almost like... an intuitively good thing to
| be observed? I know there are a lot of complications around how
| admittance to such universities can be biased and exclusionary -
| but if we ignore that for a moment the pure fact that most
| university professors come from the highest ranked schools is a
| good thing. It means that the education you'll receive at any
| university (I myself am a UVM grad which is a wonderful but
| definitely not elite school) is likely being taught by adroit
| professors - I'd rather have the most educated graduates all be
| funneled into future teaching jobs than have lower tier
| universities stuck with less well educated teachers causing a
| perpetual cycle of that university being stuck as "low-tier".
|
| Now, in our universe (bringing back all that baggage I initially
| eschewed) university "eliteness" is pretty stupid and meaningless
| - it's used as a status symbol which is irrelevant as soon as you
| have real work experience with the exception of academia which
| _obsesses_ over degrees even into your 60s. I guess Harvard is
| probably going to get you a better education than Mass Bay - but
| a keen student at Mass Bay will get more out of their education
| than a trust fund baby at Harvard.
| lapcat wrote:
| > It means that the education you'll receive at any university
| (I myself am a UVM grad which is a wonderful but definitely not
| elite school) is likely being taught by adroit professors
|
| Except that professors at research universities are hired for
| their research and not for their teaching.
|
| Some are good teachers. Others are... not good. In any case,
| teaching is not what hiring committees value.
| fasthands9 wrote:
| >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
| because presumably there are some universities which give out
| 300+ PhDs per year because they have a ton of
| programs/departments and others that give out 30+ per year
| because they have very limited grad programs.
|
| Surely there is a skew but it just seems like a very deceptive
| way to look at it.
|
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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 school.
|
| The rest of the top 10 is 2. Michigan 3. Illinois 4. Berkeley
| 5. Purdue 6. Texas A&M 7. Stanford 8. Texas 9. Wisconsin 10.
| Ohio State.
|
| So there's not a direct correlation between "eliteness" and
| volume of doctorates produced. Some of the elite schools are
| represented in this list, but "non-elite" schools are too.
| mjfl wrote:
| There's many opportunities to go through one of these
| institutions - you could do undergrad there, grad school, or one
| of multiple post docs. There's lots of people that go state
| school -> ivy/prestige -> state school and end up professors. Or
| state school -> state school -> ivy/prestige. Or state school ->
| state school -> state school -> ivy/prestige. If you work really
| hard, chances are you end up somewhere prestigious eventually.
| Probably hard to avoid.
|
| I was also going to say that there are plenty of less prestigious
| schools that graduate a ton of professors, like UC Berkeley, but
| it turns out it's on this list hah.
| plonk wrote:
| > less prestigious schools that graduate a ton of professors,
| like UC Berkeley
|
| How in the world can UC Berkeley be "less prestigious". It
| constantly ranks world top-10 in all rankings.
| willhslade wrote:
| It's also literally the first / biggest university on this
| list in the table at the end of the paper.
| mjfl wrote:
| I was thinking ivy league. smaller, more selective schools.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| From looking on Google, Berkeley has about 45k students.
| Harvard around 22k. Columbia 31k. Penn 24k. Princeton/Brown
| only have 8k, but most ivy league schools seem to have
| around 20k.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Berkley is more prestigious than most ivys imo. Princeton,
| yale, harvard are the only ones more prestigious. Penn and
| colombia are similar.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Professor-level pay is not acceptable for people who attend the
| Ivies and MIT.
| setgree wrote:
| You might be surprised by what faculty at the professional
| schools (and their near-equivalents, like Econ departments)
| make -- think starting salaries in the 180-250k range at
| high-ranking R1 schools.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| That's high but not impressively high. I make that without
| a degree in software.
| setgree wrote:
| The comment I'm responding to said that professor
| salaries are "not acceptable" to ivy league and MIT
| grads. I think that's misinformed, and I provided
| anecdotal evidence to that effect ;)
| cycomanic wrote:
| What do you mean by starting salary? A tenure track
| professor would typically ~35-40 years old, having gone
| through undergrad, masters&phd plus a couple of postdocs.
| They would also not make 250k (at least i don't know anyone
| who made that sort of salary), that's the salary of a full
| professor at a reasonably prestigious uni.
| setgree wrote:
| I'm thinking of friends who graduated from econ PhD
| programs, typically at around 29-30, and made 180-250K,
| depending on where they were hired.
|
| That's obviously not everyone, but the comment I'm
| responding to said that "Professor-level pay is not
| acceptable for people who attend the Ivies and MIT." I
| think that low six figures is "acceptable" for people who
| went to even the fanciest schools :)
| nickysielicki wrote:
| It's Harvard, Stanford, UCBerkeley, UMich, and UWMadison. Which
| ones surprised you? UMich and UW-Madison are mid tier?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Both times I was in college (undergraduate and master's degree),
| it seemed like _at least_ 90% of my professors were immigrants
| from foreign countries. I never really thought to ask, but I
| would have assumed that they attended a foreign university in
| their home country at least for undergraduate... does this mean
| they all went to the same 8 institutions for a U.S.-generated PhD
| before they could move into academia?
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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-elite place has made me feel better about the
| education I received, and was grateful for it! Relatedly, the
| expectations in the elite environments were substantially higher,
| which ended up producing better work from myself because of my
| peers, culture, and pressure than when I was lacking those in
| non-elite environments... despite the fact that I'm the same
| person.
|
| I hate this trend perusing equality by lowering to the common
| denominator. That's how you lose competitive edge in the world
| and end up with a mushy disinterested public. Talent is non-
| uniformly distributed... we should encourage and have ample
| mechanisms for the cream to rise to the top regardless of
| background. Finding ways to identify and prop up talent is what's
| culturally lacking. I've seen it first hand countless times, and
| it's saddened me each time because it's so wasteful for society
| and the individuals. We need access to more elite institutions
| not less!
| epolanski wrote:
| 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 southern
| italy or india.
|
| Your entire argument that follows is delusional.
|
| Nothing about going to Harvard makes you more qualified in
| maths, e.g. than going to any European public university you
| have not heard of. Education depends on the quality of teaching
| and learning, and most great professors in important
| universities excel at funding, not teaching.
|
| Even when it comes to learning, especially in stem, you will
| likely learn more on books and internet and your course mates
| than your lectures. Hell, internet is filled with all the
| lectures you want from Harvard, MIT and more elite
| universities. As for any university in the world there are good
| and bad courses.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I can only speak to my experience, and experienced just about
| every major kind of environment (private elite small, public
| large, community college, regional state schools, elite
| universities). I've met great people everywhere, but in
| heavily uneven distribution. And in the less great
| environments, having a culture of either apathy, non-
| excellence, or simply not having so many great peers does
| little to motivate oneself, where as having the opposite is
| like a rocket ship. Videos on the internet are not a
| replacement for who is around you everyday. Your peers are a
| well establish major factor in determining your trajectory in
| life.
|
| The uneven distribution will mean that MIT will put out a lot
| of great candidates, where as a state school will put out few
| great candidates. The people who went to MIT were in a
| culture that pushed them the entire time, so they'll have
| maximized their talent, where as the state school lacking
| this culture will reward the same potential talent for less
| accomplishment. Thus you see this 80/20 rule manifest.
|
| Btw the study was about American universities. I'm not sure
| why you're being so defensive about Europe. It's irrelevant
| to the point at hand. You could do the same study in France
| or China and I'm sure you'll see a similar domestic result.
| baggygenes wrote:
| Yes, but let's also not conflate the idea of "brightness" and
| the qualities of a productive university professor.After all,
| it's much harder to get into Stanford as an undergrad than it
| is to get in as a post-doc. What makes someone excel in
| academia is a genuine passion for knew knowledge, creative
| problem solving / experimental design, and (yes) the ability
| to drum up finding to make those discoveries. Rarely is the
| "smartest" person in the room most capable of being a great
| researcher. Curiosity, familiarity with the state-of-the-art,
| and the ability to forge genuine collaborations are far more
| important than one's ability to do the actual work, I'm
| afraid (that is, after all, what graduate students are for :)
| epolanski wrote:
| Being a good researcher does not imply being a good
| professor.
|
| As for science it is more about hard work, and long unpaid
| overwork than being smart.
|
| My previous lab has more than half the staff from asia e.g.
| https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lpi/people/
|
| Academia is a tough pyramid and at the end of the day the
| only thing that matters for a faculty position is politics
| and money not even your publications or ability to teach.
| Those are valued at much less prestigious places (that
| still produce amazing people)
| peteradio wrote:
| > best networked
|
| I think if this part ends up too high of a weight you'll end up
| with a lack of diversity of ideas and ultimately a decay into
| nepotism.
| azinman2 wrote:
| No system is perfect. There will always be certain ideas that
| remain in favor versus others, and a minority of them will be
| misallocated. Time eventually sorts this out. Having the
| opposite approach (aka lowest common denominator) will almost
| certainly be much worse off. We've seen this in places like
| China and Cambodia where cultural revolutions have eliminated
| the smartest people, and society/progress has suffered
| greatly from it.
| peteradio wrote:
| I'm certainly not advocating for lowest common denominator.
| It is problematic though if for instance in a field the
| academic tree flows from only 3 grandfathers.
| setgree wrote:
| > "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 enslaved Black
| people.
|
| These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether
| faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond
| the rate at which they would have been hired based on other
| signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are
| related to what school they go to.
|
| I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with
| marginalized peoples bears on that question.
|
| I believe it was Gary King who said that nepotism and meritocracy
| are very hard to distinguish in academia. You would need a clever
| identification strategy [0] to tease out the effects of prestige
| _on the margin_. I 'm afraid this article doesn't offer much on
| that front.
|
| [0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.15.4.69
| mrxd wrote:
| What's being implied here is that the endowments of these elite
| institutions were created through historical crimes, but
| activists won't make an issue of that if the universities
| support diverse hiring initiatives.
| cma wrote:
| > I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with
| marginalized peoples bears on that question.
|
| Though it wasn't one of their examples, alumni preference in
| admissions means that schools that formerly excluded based on
| race still have an element of that today.
|
| And it means that older SATs that had stronger cultural bias in
| the reading comprehension parts etc. are still affecting
| admissions today, through the chain of alumni preference.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It is a nice catch. I read and re-read the quote and the
| argument is oddly worded. If I were to try to make sense of it
| and try to defend it, I think I would say that the author is
| trying to say that how you got where you are matters. It is
| still a bad and poorly worded argument. Than again, 'everything
| is racism' clearly sells clicks today so even non-sequitur
| works.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The research question isn't about whether "prestige is a good
| measure of excellence." That's the question that you ask
| _after_ you discover that people are being hired based on
| prestige, if you don 't automatically assume that's either a
| bad or a good thing.
|
| If prestige is definitely driven by quality, it's not bad that
| professors are being hired because of the prestige of the
| schools they attended. But accepting that prestige is a good
| measure of excellence means that we're not looking into the
| history of how things became prestigious.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| It doesn't follow, it's a non-sequitur.
|
| There's nothing about using prestige as a proxy for
| excellence that has any bearing on investigating what got
| them there in the first place.
|
| It's akin to claiming that accepting financial success as a
| decent proxy for business acumen means no one is interested
| in knowing how they originally because financially
| successful. Not only does it not follow, it makes no sense as
| to why accepting one would even imply someone wasn't
| interested in the other.
| setgree wrote:
| Sure, I think it's good to both first get the data on which
| scholars come from which schools, and I also think unpacking
| the social and political construction of prestige is a great
| research agenda.
|
| But to assess whether prestige is a source of _bias_ in the
| hiring process, you have to separate prestige from other
| markers of quality. Otherwise, you have a big confounding
| variable problem. This author, and also the quoted professor
| of education, don't seem to engage with that, and in fact
| seem to beg the question by assuming that prestige is an
| independent force in hiring decisions, which, I thought, was
| the thing the article was trying to demonstrate.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Have you been on a university hiring committee? My
| anecdotal evidence is that yes prestige very strongly
| matters and coming from a very prestigious university often
| outweights other factors such as publication record.
|
| I haven't read the original article yet but one can easily
| test if e.g. the publication record of a graduate student
| from a non-and prestigious uni differ to the extend that is
| indicated by the hiring.
| setgree wrote:
| I have not been on a hiring committee -- I actually
| failed my comprehensive exams partway through grad school
| which is how I ended up in tech :) -- but your hypothesis
| sounds very reasonable to me. I'm just saying that we
| need a more careful causal identification strategy than
| that provided herein to say whether prestige has a
| meaningful effect on hiring, on average.
| thfuran wrote:
| >These are non-sequiturs.
|
| And also probably little more than proxies for the age of the
| institution.
| setgree wrote:
| At the very least, highly correlated :)
| bo1024 wrote:
| 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).
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| It is certainly a non-sequitur: can we simultaneously accept,
| or reject, the idea that prestige is a good measure of
| excellence while looking at (or not looking at) the history
| of how things become prestigious? Yes, we can. The one has
| nothing to do with the other.
| setgree wrote:
| The subtitle of this article is "'Jarring' study reveals
| hiring bias at US institutions."
|
| Trying to ascertain whether prestige leads to "hiring bias"
| is asking whether it has an independent effect on hiring. If
| prestige had zero effect -- if the observed correlation was
| actually measuring markers of researcher quality with which
| prestige is likely to be correlated -- then there would be
| zero bias.
|
| The fact that those institutions did many horrible things
| historically does not provide evidence on that question.
| That's why I called it a non-sequitur.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to
| thrive due to the lack of controls. Prestige is an unrelated
| red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for
| social gravity in many walks of life. This is commonly referred
| to as _implicit bias_ and is generally the most common cause of
| various forms of selection bias, including racial
| discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > non-sequiturs
|
| if prestige is a good measure -> how did it get
| that way? -> exclusion -> examples
| of exclusion
|
| You might claim the point is not germane for other reasons but
| clearly this shows a clear sequence of thought so the claim
| "non-sequitur" doesn't hold. "It's too hard to measure" also
| doesn't mean "not germane," though.
| lapcat wrote:
| > The research question here is whether faculty are hired from
| those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which
| they would have been hired based on other signals of their
| potential as researchers
|
| It's interesting that you use the word "potential". Tenure-
| track positions are very hard to get, and most newly minded
| PhDs have very little track record. If they're lucky, they have
| a publication or two in a journal, but many will have only
| their dissertation. So I think the question is whether PhDs
| coming from prestigious schools are judged to have more
| "research potential" based on where they come from rather than
| their limited record.
|
| The "potential" problem is even worse when it comes to
| admitting undergraduates into graduate programs.
|
| If you don't get a tenure-track position right out of grad
| school, it can be difficult to ever work your way up to one,
| because you'll probably have to take a job at a school with a
| greater teaching load than a typical research university, which
| leaves little time for you to do your research and prove
| yourself. In a sense, the "potential" becomes a self-fulfilling
| prophesy.
| peteradio wrote:
| Many fields you'd have many more papers than just your
| dissertation (not that I did, looks at ground).
| humanistbot wrote:
| This is why it has become normal to do 3-7 years of postdoc
| research positions before being considered for a tenure-track
| faculty position, even for those from elite universities.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Only in fields where there's no demand for their skills
| outside academia, like English literature or History, or
| vastly more supply than demand, like most of the sciences.
| Fields like Economics or Computer Science have post docs
| but they're not normative. Most people who end up with
| tenure track jobs never do one.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| This is a really ignorant question and I'm pretty sure I already
| know the answer. But say I wanted to become a teacher at some
| school, specifically teaching things like "how to organize and
| execute the operational side of a tech product", or "managing
| Enterprise IT". You have to have a degree (in something) first,
| right? They won't just hire someone with 25 years experience and
| no degree to teach a class?
| bo1024 wrote:
| To teach a class or two on the side, they absolutely would. For
| full time options, there is a title "professor of the practice"
| which might not need a PhD but it's a bit rare.
| mrkeen wrote:
| Which came first, the professor or the degree?
|
| When schools open new programs, they need people to teach the
| degree when it didn't previously exist.
|
| Simon Peyton Jones skipped the PhD but later became a lecturer
| and professor and a whole lot more:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones#Education
| hammock wrote:
| Finding an 80/20 rule (this one literally 80% from 20%) ought to
| be expected, not "jarring." It's natural and not sinister.
|
| If something _other_ than the 80 /20 rule was found, that might
| be cause for alarm or further exploration
| [deleted]
| psKama wrote:
| Not sure in what context the word "elite" is used when it comes
| to claiming there is a hiring bias. It may be thought that those
| schools have very high fees to attend but I would argue/claim
| (with no data in my hand) if it was looked deeper into their
| background, it is very likely that majority of those professors
| attended those schools via a sort of scholarship to start with as
| a result of their success prior to universities they got
| accepted.
|
| Therefore, although "elite" indicates mainly a social class,
| majority of those people are very likely coming from mid-class
| families and they just happen to have a good academic record.
| With that in mind, I wouldn't call this a bias but just a normal
| and beneficial outcome of the academic system.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Virtually no-one at a top school is spending a penny to get
| their PhD. Most of them are getting paid to do so.
| mrkeen wrote:
| > it is very likely that majority of those professors attended
| those schools via a sort of scholarship to start with as a
| result of their success prior to universities they got
| accepted. When it comes to admissions to
| elite schools, money can all but guarantee access to those who
| can afford it https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2019/mar/13/rich-kids-top-college-admissions
| Animats wrote:
| That's what the Ivy League is for. It's difficult to flunk
| out of Harvard. 98% of those admitted graduate.
| msackler1 wrote:
| I see almost every "related" article on Nature is complaining
| about white men but that's not very precise, can we drill
| down into the ethnicity of these CA/MA elites, how many are
| Irish, jewish, etc?
| qualifiedai wrote:
| and if you check where they were before that last Ph.D step from
| elite university it would probably be all over the world,
| especially for STEM.
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