Where professors come from

[BidenPresident]

An article in Nature a few months ago documented where professors across all fields got their PhDs; the study found:

Overall, 80% of all domestically trained faculty in our data were trained at just 20.4% of universities. Moreover, the five most common doctoral training universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford—account for just over one in eight domestically trained faculty.

"Our analyses show universal inequalities in which a small minority of universities supply a large majority of faculty across fields, exacerbated by patterns of attrition and reflecting steep hierarchies of prestige."

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2023/01/where-professors-come-from.html#more


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x#Fig2

 

[BidenPresident]

Prestige plays a central role in structuring the US professoriate. Analyses of faculty hiring networks, which map who hires whose graduates as faculty, show unambiguously in multiple fields that prestigious departments supply an outsized proportion of faculty, regardless of whether prestige is measured by an extrinsic ranking or reputation scheme or derived from the structure of the faculty hiring network itself. Prestigious departments also exhibit 'social closure' by excluding those who lack prestige, facilitated by relatively stable hierarchies over time, both empirically and in mathematical models of self-reinforcing network dynamics.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x#Fig2