
A Tiny Minority of Elite Grad Schools Produce Most Tenured Academics - ritchiea
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/02/university_hiring_if_you_didn_t_get_your_ph_d_at_an_elite_university_good.single.html
======
tsotha
The tenure system really needs to go. The idea was to set up a system where it
would be difficult to stifle dissent.

But the _structure_ of the system guarantees over time there won't be any
dissent to stifle, because tenure committees don't allow anyone who isn't like
everyone else into the clubhouse.

~~~
twblalock
When I was in graduate school, I was somewhat involved in the process of
hiring a few professors. Whoever we would have hired was probably going to get
tenure and remain in the department for decades. Intangible personal and
interpersonal aspects of the candidates were therefore about as important as
the quality of their research, because nobody wants to be stuck working for 20
years with someone they don't feel comfortable with. Naturally, this has a
tendency to perpetuate the gender and race imbalances in academia.

~~~
tsotha
Gender and race imbalances are much less important to me than ideological
imbalances. What's the point of having different sexes and skin colors if
they're all part of an echo chamber?

~~~
daughart
What fields do you find having an academic "echo chamber"?

~~~
carlob
I've seen it in theoretical physics as well. There are 'schools of thought',
for example at my alma mater most of the professors doing theoretical particle
physics are phenomenologists and tend to regard people doing say string theory
as cranks.

This means it's very hard for those people to get hired, and there is also the
effect of them not wanting to apply to a university that doesn't have a strong
tradition or a strong group in their subfield.

------
twblalock
As a former grad student, I am not at all surprised by this. Academia is a
very personality-driven world where prestige, connections, and social capital
matter at least as much as the quality of one's work. The prestige, influence,
and connections of one's department and dissertation advisor make a huge
difference, and the most prestigious advisors tend to work at the most
prestigious universities.

In a job market with so few openings, especially in the humanities, this
clearly has a distorting effect. I suspect that if the job market were not so
bad, the effects described in this study would be reduced.

~~~
lbhnact
Just want to point out that the job market is not neccisarily 'bad'. There was
a huge period of growth in the post WWII era as the university ecosystem
expanded with the economy, continuing along later with the boomers'
expectation that their children do as they did. Now we live in a post-boomer,
globalized economy where the low hanging fruit has all been plucked.

That's not 'bad', more likely just the new normal.

~~~
twblalock
I was referring specifically to the academic job market, which is about as bad
as it has ever been. In humanities disciplines, there are hundreds more
graduates than jobs every year.

~~~
lbhnact
I was referring to academics specifically. While I agree 'bad' isn't an unfair
way to feel about the market, I would say it's because expectations have been
set by boomer mentors (in their 50s and 60s) that graduated into a job market
that was expanding and could absorb them.

Now we have hit equilibrium, and there isn't demand for people who study
Foucault, Jung, or build a career around authors from 1850-1950 anymore. The
gig is up, and graduating from anything other than a the most famous names
just want get you a job anymore.

Not 'good' or 'bad', but certainly 'is', for better or worse.

------
bglazer
I went to a low, low ranked US state school for undergrad and moreover I
graduated with a bad GPA (2.9).

I'm now in industry doing a job that I enjoy, and I'm continuing to take
classes at the local university.

I would like to go to back to school for a Masters and then possibly a PhD
after that.

However, this article fills me with a great deal of despair. I had hoped that
I could "redeem" myself by working exceptionally hard in whatever Masters
program would let me in, and then possibly have a shot at a more prestigious
program.

Now knowing that both Silicon Valley and higher ed will laugh me out of the
room if I don't come from some name brand university is a sad thought.

I think that I care enough about the subject matter itself to try for a
Masters but it's sad nonetheless to know that basically no matter how hard I
work, or how good my work is, that I'm forever locked out of certain circles.

~~~
x0x0
The article only talks about where tenured professors get their phds. If your
goal is a phd, but not a tenured academic position, you may well be fine.

That said... my experience is the coursework at top universities is
significantly harder than at poorer universities. When I look at what math is
required for eg an MS at various okay universities such as SJSU or SFSU, it
seems to be about equivalent to the undergrad at my top 15 university.

Interviewing lots of engineers and ML people has also turned me into much more
of a school snob than I used to be. My experience has been that graduates of
top10 ML schools know the material cold, but graduates of, say, a school
ranked 50-30th can produce PhDs in stats that struggle to explain a linear
regression. Which should be very easy.

~~~
bglazer
Having watched MIT and Stanford lectures online, I was quite taken by the
level of depth that is expected, so I understand your comment regarding that.

That's the beauty of those online courses, I suppose. I now know exactly what
is required at Stanford and MIT.

------
sadfaceunread
This really isn't that surprising. It could also be explained largely by self
selection. If one believes that top schools by prestige also attract the top
students, and that these schools are reasonable efficient at selecting among
these applicants we'd expect a strongly one sided distribution of talent.

If the top 10 institutions have the vast majority of the top 1% of grad
students, I'd expect they produce the vast majority of professors.

~~~
qiqing
There's also something else at play that isn't just "cream rises."

If you're a top student who chose a slightly suboptimal grad school for
personal reasons (to be near a significant other, taking care of a family
member, already have a house somewhere, etc.), you may not realize that the
game became cripplingly hard for you until you're near the end of your
program.

The top universities often: (1) send grad students to conferences (including
travel costs) whether or not they have results to present that year, (2) hire
lab techs and admins, which allows grad students more time to do actual
research, and (3) make it more likely that the student gets a grant proposal
accepted by the NIH/NSF/other agency.

And you know, maybe you hold out hope because your advisor let you and your
lab mates volunteer stuffing all the swag bags the night before a conference
that happens to be in your city that year so you can go talk to all the other
folks at the top of your field. Maybe you actually get a grant funded, unlike
your classmates. Maybe you put in that many more hours so you can handle your
share of the grunt work on top of research you'll actually get published. No
weekends for five years. Do you do it? Maybe.

~~~
tsotha
You might do it if you were sure you'd actually land on the tenure track and
get tenure. That's far from assured, though. Seems like most people reach 35
or 40 before they're officially denied tenure, meaning you've wasted your most
productive years chasing a career that's not going to happen.

------
kelukelugames
My professor told me there is a bus that goes from the Bay Area to Boston and
back. It doesn't stop anywhere else.

~~~
afarrell
Roadway bus or network bus? The former would be rather surprising considering
the existence of both stomachs and airplanes.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's a metaphor.

------
swatow
The author states "...the data suggest that faculty hiring isn’t a simple
meritocracy. The top schools generate far more professors than even just
slightly less prestigious schools. For example, in history, the top 10 schools
produce three times as many future professors as those ranked 11 through 20."

I don't think this is adequate evidence, and my own experience is that it's
very hard to compare, after all most people only went to one grad school. I
know that my grad school had much better students than my undergraduate
school, but it's almost impossible to quantify how much. Even hard still to
compare the top 10 to 11-20. I do believe that it's possible that the top 10
schools produce 3 times more "professor tier" students. Even though
application to a particular school has a lot of randomness, most students
apply to 10-20 grad schools when they apply, and this removes some of the
randomness.

It's actually very hard to measure the true bias towards top schools, if it
exists. I don't the the "send out resumes and change the school" trick is a
good approach, because most of the signal is going to be in the school. The
question of whether schools adequately update their information once they have
the full picture of the candidate, remains unanswered.

Also, at least in my field, schools advertise their "placement" of students in
academic positions to prospective grad students. So students are well aware of
the job prospects when they start grad school.

~~~
qiqing
As someone who has experienced schools in both top 10 and 11-20 range, I can
tell you it's a lot like the challenges faced by kids from lower socio-
economic circumstances in K-12 schooling, and that the quality of the students
alone are not enough to account for the differences.

The top universities often:

1\. Send grad students to conferences (including travel costs) whether or not
they have results to present that year. (If you're at a slightly suboptimal
school, you might only get to go if you have results to present, which you
probably don't your first year. My labmates and I would volunteer and spent a
day and a half stuffing swag bags and registering attendees/handing out badges
for a conference so that we could get access. Students from better schools
just had their tickets covered by their schools.)

2\. Hire lab techs and admins, giving grad students more time to do actual
research or write papers. (Otherwise, you might spend more than 40% of your
time doing work that doesn't move the needle for you, professionally. You may
be picking up your professor's dry cleaning, or taking care of administrivia
around getting them a visa for their next talk in another country, or booking
them plane tickets.)

3\. The name of the school makes it more likely that the student gets a grant
proposal accepted by the NIH/NSF/other agency, even if the quality of the
grant proposal itself is the same. Getting a grant/fellowship/award on your CV
makes a HUGE difference when applying to post-docs or faculty positions.
(You'll also have access to more people who will give you more valuable
feedback for how to write a better grant proposal.)

4\. Top schools often protect students from bureaucracy and streamline the
procedures in place for everything from getting access to a new facility, to
what happens when you need to replace your student ID. (See (2) above.)

5\. You're more likely to get a smarter or harder working undergraduate
student to mentor and help out with your research. This matters more in the
life sciences and fields with "benchwork," (e.g., wielding pipettes) but it
applies to tasks that involve coding as well. In better schools, a larger
percentage of undergraduates opt to get some experience in a research group,
and you get both someone to delegate actual research tasks to, and you get to
level-up in people-management.

Essentially, if you opted for a school in the 8-15 range for personal reasons
(e.g., family, proximity to significant other, other obligations), you've
opted into playing on super-hard mode, where you have to work twice as hard
and be twice as good to get as far as someone who opted for the best school to
which they were accepted.

And if you're female, you'll get extra pressure from family, friends,
significant other, etc., to choose the school that is close to them. And there
are no extra points for playing in hard mode. I definitely don't think I would
have appreciated the difference if I hadn't experienced both in such a short
time frame.

(Sorry for slight repetition from my comment in a thread lower down. Edited
for clarity.)

------
analog31
I got my PhD at a second tier university, 20+ years ago. We had a hallway
where there were pictures of the faculty with their names and where they got
their degrees.

That was one of maybe two or three data points, that confirmed my decision to
pursue an industry job. Another was the average age of post-docs in the
department.

~~~
go1979
Was your degree in CS? Curious how thing turned out for you in industry? Did
you ever teach courses on the side? Did you ever consider or dip your foot
into entrepreneurship?

~~~
analog31
My degree was in physics, but my thesis project was a fairly technology
intensive experiment, where I was able to develop my chops in electronics,
programming, etc. I intensified my focus on those things as it became clear
that an academic career was not in my stars. No regrets. I know some of the
qualities of successful academics, and I don't possess them. I do enjoy being
involved in making things.

And it was 20+ years ago, when there was maybe a bit more migration between
physics and engineering, and not so damn many specialized tools to learn.

They say "luck is the residue of design," but I sure owe a lot to pure luck. I
was graduating into a rotten job market, but got my first job through a
friend-of-a-friend sort of deal. It was a small company where a jack of all
trades could be of value, though the pay wasn't great. When things began
looking better job-market-wise, my spouse and I moved to a new town.

I actually did teach a couple of courses as an adjunct during a brief period
of unemployment. It was hard work because I was doing it for the first time.
Now I'm back in industry, doing a sort of systems architect thing for a
company that makes measurement equipment.

As for entrepreneurship, yes, I have a very small side-business making an
electronic gadget, but it is for a very specialized and mature market, so it's
not start-up material. The good thing is that I've actually learned a lot
about running a small business.

The biggest, and perhaps only, barrier to me starting a start-up is that I
don't have a good idea. I've racked my brain, read all of PG's essays, and so
forth, and a compelling idea just hasn't assembled itself in my brain yet.

------
xxcode
I was surprised when I found out that there were faculty candidates from
University of Washington at both Berkeley and Stanford.

This is amazing, and shows that Tier 2 schools can send students to become
profs at the 'top 4'

~~~
pavpanchekha
In computer science, UW is pretty good. (In other fields, not so much.)

~~~
niels_olson
UW is also considered one of the best medical schools (when I was applying,
their matriculant MCAT score was a standard deviation above the national
matriculant average. Even Harvard couldn't make that claim).

------
bruceb
This could be a place for students to apply social pressure on the university
they are attending. How can the university program claim to be good if they
don't hire their own?

------
qq66
The fact that this looks at grad schools rather than undergraduate schools
weakens its argument substantially. Students of all capability levels end up
in all sorts of undergraduate institutions -- some community college students
are brilliant, but didn't have the resources to go to fancy private colleges,
while some students at Ivy League colleges struggle to keep up.

The PhD programs, however, eliminate quite a bit of this variation in their
own admissions. The student I know who got into Harvard but took the full ride
to UCLA excelled at UCLA and had PhD programs actively recruiting her -- she
had her pick of the "tiny minority" listed in this article. City College of
New York has more undergraduate alumni who have won Nobel Prizes than almost
any other university in the world. And since PhD programs are generally funded
through fellowships, students don't have to come from wealthy families or take
on large loans to attend.

My pet theory is that the top PhD programs basically execute the main
selection force -- identifying the students most likely to be tenured
academics from hundreds of public and private colleges nationwide -- and thus
it's no surprise that there appears to be a direct pipeline between them and
university faculties.

~~~
qiqing
I wrote this elsewhere, but there's actually a lot else at play. And if you're
female, you'll get extra pressure from family, friends, significant other,
etc., to choose the school that is close to them. Essentially, if you opted
for a school in the 10-20 range for personal reasons (e.g., family, proximity
to significant other, other obligations), you've opted into playing on super-
hard mode, where you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to get as
far as someone who opted for the best school to which they were accepted.

I definitely don't think I would have appreciated the difference if I hadn't
experienced both in such a short time frame.

The top universities often:

1\. Send grad students to conferences (including travel costs) whether or not
they have results to present that year. (If you're at a slightly suboptimal
school, you might only get to go if you have results to present, which you
probably don't your first year. My labmates and I would volunteer and spent a
day and a half stuffing swag bags and registering attendees/handing out badges
for a conference so that we could get access. Students from better schools
just had their tickets covered by their schools.)

2\. Hire lab techs and admins, giving grad students more time to do actual
research or write papers. (Otherwise, you might spend more than 40% of your
time doing work that doesn't move the needle for you, professionally. You may
be picking up your professor's dry cleaning, or taking care of administrivia
around getting them a visa for their next talk in another country, or booking
them plane tickets.)

3\. The name of the school makes it more likely that the student gets a grant
proposal accepted by the NIH/NSF/other agency, even if the quality of the
grant proposal itself is the same. Getting a grant/fellowship/award on your CV
makes a HUGE difference when applying to post-docs or faculty positions.
(You'll also have access to more people who will give you more valuable
feedback for how to write a better grant proposal.)

4\. Top schools often protect students from bureaucracy and streamline the
procedures in place for everything from getting access to a new facility, to
what happens when you need to replace your student ID. (See (2) above.)

5\. You're more likely to get a smarter or harder working undergraduate
student to mentor and help out with your research. This matters more in the
life sciences and fields with "benchwork," (e.g., wielding pipettes) but it
applies to tasks that involve coding as well. In better schools, a larger
percentage of undergraduates opt to get some experience in a research group,
and you get both someone to delegate actual research tasks to, and you get to
level-up in people-management.

There's a lot more, but you get the idea, I think.

~~~
cli
> you've opted into playing on super-hard mode, where you have to work twice
> as hard and be twice as good to get as far as someone who opted for the best
> school to which they were accepted.

Does this matter very much if the PhD student is not looking for a job in
academia?

~~~
qiqing
Most of my classmates were, in fact, looking for jobs in academia. And there
is the commonly held fear (due to lack of role models) that if you leave
academia, you may as well be eaten by wolves.

FWIW, I'm glad I left academia.

