
Academia's 1% - eli_gottlieb
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/929-academia-s-1-percent
======
lordnacho
There is a signalling/game mechanic that explains this sort of thing:

1) You have some rare ability that is distributed unevenly (Research skill,
football skill) 2) There's certain brands that are imperfectly connected to
the distribution of ability (Harvard, Man Utd) 3) You can hire a guy who looks
to have the ability minus the brand, and he'll be cheap (Easier to lure, lower
weekly salary). Once in a while, someone does this for a brand and the guy is
"in". 4) Hire the wrong guy without the brand and your head is on the block.
Gotta publish/win championships. 5) Hire the wrong guy with the brand, and you
can point at many other coaches who did the same.

So what's going to happen? Anyone who is obviously good will get in no matter
what, but the bar is extra high. And a fair number of obviously good people
will also get the brand name. Everyone who is good but not great needs the
brand.

Just looking at the numbers in the academia game, it looks very hard.
Committees need to justify their choices, and they are choosing a very small
subset of the applicants. Getting a dud on a team of say 7 researchers could
be costly. You'll get some anyway (there's a HN article today about how hard
it is to interview people) but you can at least pretend you did the
conservative thing. Also, with a very small size the top spaces are reserved
for special talents (Terence Tao article today as well). If you're on a
shortlist with TT, you're not getting that job.

~~~
egocodedinsol
I'm not sure, but I'd bet that the best institutions actually don't care where
their applicants come from. They can afford to just choose the best. It's the
so-so places that have to signal their quality by 'hiring the best'. I've seen
this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks often stand a
better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one.

~~~
ibrahima
> I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks
> often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one.

Well, that's probably deceptive, as those guys are probably exceptional in
other ways (publications as an undergrad, other research, etc) which takes
away from their grades, or they only cared about certain classes which were
important to their field.

~~~
jroesch
As a current graduate school applicant with a couple of admits to top 10
programs I can confirm this.

My GPA looks "low" around a 3.3 cumulative (I have lots of C's in things I
deemed unimportant) but I have a relatively high CS GPA (3.8-3.9), took many
graduate classes during undergrad, worked at startups, consulted, did multiple
years of research resulting in two publications with 2-3 more in the pipeline,
worked on open source, gave talks at workshops and software engineering
conferences, TAed, constructed two student led courses, etc.

It seems the most important thing is to demonstrate your ability to work as a
researcher (your primary role as a CS graduate student) trumps all in graduate
admissions, but that is just my 2 cents.

~~~
hga
That's what I've heard, and it makes sense. Most specifically, to get into
grad school X, you need to have one or more of the facility members in your
school who are known by one or more in X recommend you with the message that
you can do research.

------
rdtsc
I applied for a PhD at an average school, passed the qualifying exam. But
after a couple years found a full time programming job and didn't finish.
Looking back family and friends were upset at me for not finishing, but I
think it was a bullet I dodged. Having to look for research position at a
company or getting stuck fighting for tenure position at some even less than
average school in the middle of nowhere would not have worked out as well.

And funny enough, I looked at the list of faculty at the university I was at,
to see where they came from. All from high end school Harvard, Purdue, Cornell
etc, just like the article mentions.

The policy it seems is hire up, graduate down. Unless of course they are in
the top university then they hire from peers.

~~~
beambot
> Having to look for research position at a company or getting stuck fighting
> for tenure position

That's something of a false dichotomy. I know lots of PhDs that aren't doing
research or faculty jobs.

~~~
rdtsc
Maybe, I am in a position to interview a lot of candidates and all the ones
with PhDs applying for general software engineer positions are pretty bad at
software. Some fail the fizzbuzz test even. They have been working on their
research project for 4 years and in that time forgot all most of the things
they learned in undergraduate. Some of the ones that passed the interview were
asking for much higher salaries, which we could not justify.

~~~
potatote
As someone who will be graduating in less than a year of PhD in comp sci., I
would like to encourage you to not give up on all PhDs with such assumption.
Like you, I am not impressed with the prospect of academia and research in
general. But I honestly don't think a majority of CS phd students at decent
(top 50) universities will fail fizzbuzz test as long as they have had
undergraduate CS background. Some of us may fail to implement
BFS/DFS/merge/quicksort during a 45 minute interview, but I think this is due
to the interviewing process for tech jobs being somewhat broken (I saw my
peers studying 3 or more months with interview prep books/sites and thought
it's becoming ridiculous). A much better way to test a candidate would be to
assign him/her a take-home assignment/project and let him/her work on it
independently or along with your team, and judge his/her candidacy based on it
(if your company can afford the extra time/resource for such process). I'm
sure you'll notice those PhD folks from CS would not be as bad as you think
they are.

In any case, I'd (for selfish reason) encourage you to be open-minded and give
applicants with PhD background at least an equal chance. Personally, I never
wanted a PhD, but I went for it because I needed to keep my immigrant status
legal, and I couldn't pay for a master's degree out of pocket (if I enroll for
a PhD program, I get a master's degree for free on the way). The downside of
being a PhD student is that it is significantly more difficult for me to find
my way back into software positions, which is something I wanted to do
eventually; the HR usually throws away my resume with the assumption(s) that I
am either only interested in research or am "overqualified" (or that I'd ask
for more money), all of which are incorrect for a lot of PhD students, like
me, stuck in academia for now. For all HR or recruiters reading this, I'd
encourage you all to give PhD students a fair shot for the programming
positions at your firms. You might find that these PhD students are more
motivated or have more persistence/endurance (as most who survive the PhD
experience usually have) or if you're lucky, are better prepared and
thoughtful programmers.

~~~
rifung
Why is failing to implement BFS/DFS/quicksort in a 45 minute interview the
fault of the interviewing process being broken?

The idea that someone has to study 3 months for an interview is ridiculous. I
suppose for a PhD student I can understand as they probably need to refresh
their memory, but if that's the case then you could argue they shouldn't be
passing the interviews without refreshing their memory if we are talking about
normal software development roles.

------
nycticorax
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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>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.

Then, I think we have to continue reasoning, why do those grad-students grow
up and find they can only acquire tenure-track jobs by jumping to lower-tier
institutions, where their own academic "children" will be considered inferior?

~~~
qmalxp
Because grad schools produce more (graduating students) than they consume
(hiring faculty).

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Yes, that much is obvious. But you would think that if a department is staffed
by, say, MIT graduates, that they can do MIT-quality research, thanks to their
MIT training, _without being in the geographical vicinity of downtown
Cambridge_. Despite this, academic status-signaling seems to assume that the
geographical vicinity is of profound importance.

~~~
chaoxu
Not everyone mit graduate is MIT professor good.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
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](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003)

~~~
hga
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.

------
dpweb
This was the best article, not just regarding academia, but describing the
issue of privilege and its destructive effect on the "american dream" \- that
I think I have seen since the 2009 crash.

We have a controversy about wealth inequality and it seems that would be a
natural result of a cycle of power simply being passed down generation by
generation.

I think the opposite of that, a meritocracy, is what we want - but maybe what
we have is inevitable in a money and status obsessed culture. I don't know if
the culture is a cause or result of the systems we have that tilt the scales
so far in favor of the elite over the non-elite, but one or the other would
have to be addressed in some way.

~~~
Dewie
People will wax poetically about meritocracy and fairness. Then they will get
children of their own and think to themselves that giving them all the
advantages that they can get is their newest and most moral goal.

~~~
analog31
Guilty as charged.

But realistically, I know of no society where parents don't favor the
interests of their own children, resulting in a trend towards increasing
disparity.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is to remember that perfect meritocracy is
utopian, and can't be reconciled with fairness, so long as individuals can
choose to whom they share their advantages -- indeed when we can't even all
agree on what those advantages are. So we look for second best, for instance,
endorsing social and economic measures that counteract that disparity.

~~~
Dewie
> But realistically, I know of no society where parents don't favor the
> interests of their own children,

"But realistically, everyone else is doing it..."

Yes. I didn't have any particular society in mind. Just our own nature.

------
impendia
I am a mathematics professor at an R1 university who has been directly
involved in faculty searches for four years in a row.

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.

~~~
east2west
I know many biomedical faculty members in Stanfod pay their postdocs below NIH
suggested levels, just because they can.

I would caution people of survivor's bias. Only saints promote people with
strong different options and who act on their options. Academia is full of
strong egos.

~~~
skosuri
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](http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html)

~~~
east2west
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.

~~~
skosuri
Stanford has always been pretty good with postdoc pay, and postdocs never paid
tuition. Pretty much all of these schools and mine (UCLA) are on similar
levels. At all UC's postdocs are unionized as well given additional
protections (like 1yr contracts, limits on training time, etc).

~~~
mbreese
The tuition part is wrong. Stanford postdocs do pay tuition, but it isn't out
of pocket. They are legally unmatriculated graduate students, so they pay some
kind of tuition/registration fee for the year/quarter (I can't remember
which).

It isn't something that they are necessarily responsible for, and it is a
small amount. But it is paid in their name.

~~~
skosuri
That's a peculiarity of stanford; but it's like $200/year. At UCLA we have
something similar called an infrastructure fee which is about the same amount
a year. Importantly, this is not something they are responsible for paying
ever.

~~~
mbreese
I think that the point is so that it looks like you are really a student for
tax purposes. It is a small amount that isn't ever directly billed to you -
but it does count as a taxable benefit.

------
rayiner
I don't get the thing about cost of living. New Haven is not expensive,
neither is NJ commutable to Princeton, nor Philadelphia. Chicago's cost of
living is right at the national average. Durham's is probably below. Etc.

~~~
j2kun
I am a mathematics graduate student at an AMS Group 1 public university in
Chicago. The university's estimated cost of living is $16,046, but our wage
minimums were significantly below this number (about $1k less) until two years
ago, which was the result of over a year of contract negotiations during which
we had to bring in an arbiter from the federal government because the
university was not bargaining with our union in good faith. They also
threatened to raise our health-care premiums and increase fees arbitrarily.
The university also bans individual departments from paying their graduate
students much more to compensate.

In short, our university appears to be doing everything they can to extract
money from their graduate students. It is ridiculous and nearsighted.

------
lkrubner
Does anyone else find it ironic that academia is, in some sense, more anti-
intellectual than general manager Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics
baseball team? I'm sure on Hacker News most of your know about MoneyBall:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball)

Consider this paragraph, and ask yourself why the nation's major universities
can not raise themselves to the same level of statistical rigor:

"The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball
insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office)
over the past century is subjective and often flawed. Statistics such as
stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting average, typically used to gauge
players, are relics of a 19th-century view of the game and the statistics
available at that time. The book argues that the Oakland A's' front office
took advantage of more analytical gauges of player performance to field a team
that could better compete against richer competitors in Major League Baseball
(MLB)."

It is in some sense ironic, and in some other sense sickening, that our
nation's universities continue to hang on 19th-century views of status and
credentials, when other professions, even sports, have moved onto more
objective, measurable metrics.

~~~
TimPC
Research isn't a competitive game with clear wins and losses. Moneyball and
finding the under valued players works best in environments where you can
actually prove/demonstrate they wre clearly undervalued. It's very difficult
to show someone who's undervalued is clearly undervalued short of them solving
a major open problem. When there is far less direct competition everything is
more subjective and the prestige factor of top tier applicants shines.

------
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.

------
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](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005).

------
jvehent
The same rule holds true for jobs in the private sector: work for a high
profile company (Google, Apple, Facebook, ...) and you will find doors open
everywhere. Getting there in the first place is the real challenge.

~~~
PaulHoule
One difference is that the private sector gives second chances and academia
doesn't.

~~~
themoonbus
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.

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
rflrob
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.

~~~
hga
" _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.

~~~
PaulHoule
Back in the glory days of the 1960's you'd often see a scientist who'd made
big money for a company get an endowed chair somewhere.

------
hga
This is one of the reasons you want to avoid getting a "subprime" Ph.D.

~~~
skj
Only if you care about going into academia. It's possible to want to get a PhD
just to grow in your field.

I acquired my PhD a few years ago, and while I admit that it's hard to compare
that to the experience I could have had in industry, I feel like I grew quite
a lot and that it helps me in my current position in many many ways, only one
of which is pure CS ability.

------
williamstein
[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](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 with
full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without
incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less."

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 __.

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. There may be some truth to this for undergraduates, but for
graduate students---who spend between 4 and 10 years busting their ass full-
time on their research area---the situation is completely different.

The author thus seems to discount the possibility that the very best students
who go to graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. are often be the best job
candidates. Harvard/Berkeley/etc. gets the best potential grad students in the
first place -- I was on the grad admissions committee in math at Harvard for
years, and we would make offers to the top (or so) American students, and
pretty much get most of them. These were extremely strong enthusiastic
students who had _invested_ often a decade of their lives into mathematics
already; the education these students then got at grad school was by top
researchers. 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.

Also, not everybody gets into graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. via
"inherited wealth". At least I didn't -- I was an undergraduate at Northern
Arizona University, and got into Berkeley entirely by being crazy in love with
doing mathematics and also relatively good at it. The undergrad institution
definitely matters in grad school admissions. However, being sufficiently good
regularly gets around being from a non-top-10 university.

The article reminds me of this quote --
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos](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."

~~~
projectileboy
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 which to shoot ourselves in the face and get of
your way? But then who will be around to pay the tuitions at your overpriced
institutions, or buy your latest social media software?

~~~
microcolonel
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 them a world-class experience just for existing, they'll give up half-way
through the most difficult thing they've ever done(if they ever start), and
your investment in them will be lost forever, without outcomes.

That kind of investment crashes your economy, and in the long run gets your
species killed.

~~~
gaius
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.

~~~
rhizome
A friend of mine once had a conjecture that back in the day, the people who
moved to the cities were the ones who couldn't hack it being self-sufficient
on a farm.

~~~
Pyxl101
That might be true to some extent but I think it ignores all of the other much
more powerful motivations. Wealth is easier to accumulate in a city because
there is far more specialization.

I can't be a first-rate baker and a blacksmith and a shipwright and a miner
and a fisher and a farmer and and and ... the specialists in the city do one
thing excellently: they bring down the cost while also bringing up quality,
raising quality-of-life for people in the city. If I'm an average farmer and
average blacksmith, perhaps I'll produce $10 worth of goods in an hour, $5
worth of crops and $5 worth of tools. As an exceptional farmer, I can produce
$20 worth of crops, trade $10 of them for tools, and end up with $10 each of
crops and tools. It's as simple as that - trading between people with
different specialties / needs leaves both people better off, and you can't do
that subsistence farming.

Public infrastructure in cities has also always been much better, such as
roads, communication systems, police, fire fighting, etc. Trade was much
easier because there were more people to trade with, a larger market for your
goods. On a small subsistence farm, any excess that you cannot save or
reinvest is wasted; in a city, it can be sold or traded to accumulate wealth.

There are certainly people who are attracted to the city because they can't
hack it (beggars, etc.), but they are in the minority. In the modern era,
something like 3% of the population are farmers, and they are so exceptionally
effective (supported by agricultural scientists, robotics engineers who build
automated farming machinery, etc.) that the rest of us have plenty of food,
freeing us up to specialize in other things (like robotics).

I believe this cycle of technological enrichment fundamentally requires
specialization. This is not to say that anyone is wrong for wanting a simpler
or more communal form of living, but I doubt the motivations are anything
economic. The reason that so many people end up working in cities, in
factories (sweatshops) today is simple: they can accumulate more wealth
specializing in even a mundane repetitive task (quickly, cheaply, and with
quality) than they could by subsistence farming.

~~~
Pyxl101
Two other points that might be worth further exploration:

* There was an article on Hacker News recently about the historical cost of clothing, how it used to cost thousands of modern-equivalent dollars for a shirt. Thus why people wore clothing until it was rags. The cost of clothing and all such goods came down dramatically due to peoples' specialization as spinners, weavers, sewers, tailors, etc. Now clothing is cheap and plentiful.

[Update: found it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950)
]

* There was another HN thread discussing the fall of the Roman empire and the "dark ages". A commentator who seemed to be a historian reinforced the idea that yes, there really was a dark ages. The fall of the empire shut down trade, which led to a marked decline in the pottery available in Britain. Previously they had been able to import plentiful, high quality pottery from elsewhere. With the fall of the empire and the collapse of trade, they began to make it themselves, and were terrible at it. Even the kings of the era had worse pottery than the common person centuries earlier. (This is more about trade than about cities, but the effectiveness of trade increases with density.)

[Update: not the HN comment I was looking for, but similar information about
pottery:
[http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/1391](http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/1391)
]

The power of specialization and trade

------
jrells
There's a lot to take issue with in this article. Graduate institutional
affiliation is huge because more and more research is being done by
undergraduates, so top institutions can more easily pick out the best talent
early. It is still true in academia that research>institution, but the latter
is becoming more and more correlated with the former. Top PhD graduates come
from top schools, with few exceptions (and those exceptions still get jobs).
With undergraduate this correlation is weak.

Yes financial privilege is huge for getting that far, but everyone applying
for an academic PhD program has spent decent time in academia and has chosen
that instead of money. I've never seen or heard of someone turning down an
elite academic PhD program because of a low stipend (students do use stipends
to choose between similar schools). Any academic adviser would tell you you'd
be crazy to do so.

Edit: This might only be true for math. In undergrad I was constantly
surprised to find students from elite vs sub-elite institutions differed
hugely in privilege and less in ability. In my PhD program, there was a huge
difference in ability between our school (arguably #3 in the area) and nearby
Harvard/MIT. While this is all anecdotal, elite academia is a small community
and I've seen a large chunk of math. Ability here in math is easy to measure
(if they can solve my problems and I can't understand theirs). Mathematicians
keep mental rankings of other mathematicians. When you apply for graduate
school and later jobs, lots of other mathematicians have a really good idea
how you compare.

~~~
nuncanada
About being correlated, I guess it is simply not true, just check statistical
models. What happens is that increasingly what is considered good research are
what top schools are researching... Like String theory in Physics...

------
jedberg
I found this the most interesting:

[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/1/1/e1400005...](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/1/1/e1400005/F1.large.jpg)

The top institutions producing CS professors:

MIT

Berkeley

Stanford

Caltech

Harvard

Cornell

CMU

Princeton

Yale

Washington

You have to click through a bunch of links to find the actual study:

[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.figures-...](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.figures-
only)

------
robotresearcher
It is really hard to find excellent PhD students. The supply is very limited.
The top schools snap them up, and there they are at graduation time.

------
MicroBerto
> "..a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-
> track faculty.."

I find it funny when people are continually "surprised" by the appearance of
the Pareto Principle.

It is everywhere (everywhere!), and that is why you should never stop fighting
to become the top 10% of _anything_ you do (that you care about).

~~~
tzs
More generally, if you distribute anything across a population in any manner
other than everyone getting exactly the same amount, then it is mathematically
necessary that the top N% have more than N% of the thing for any N < 100.

Most articles I've seen on any kind of inequity in distribution don't seem to
take this into account, and so don't try to establish what the baseline fair
distribution should be, making most of their subsequent analysis worthless.

------
WalterBright
> the first two years of the “recovery,” the mean net worth of households in
> the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28
> percent,

Stocks had dropped in half the previous couple years. A more reasonable metric
would be a 10 year statistic.

------
crusso
The problem with finding a job when you have a PhD that isn't from one of the
top schools is an individual one.

The problem of the lack of diversity in the educations of the leaders of
academia is a systemic failure that can undermine society.

------
Fando
An interesting article. It certainly seems unfair to have such selection bias.
It may be beneficial to have a standardized country-wide test which could
quantify and compare the quality of PhD grads arising from universities. If an
effective test could be devised, it seems that companies and universities
would pay attention to it. As it stands now, no such testing exists, making
universities rely on qualitative evaluations, such as reputation, prestige,
and price. I think it is true in general that without quantitative ways of
evaluating something, looking at price seems to be the best alternative.

------
Futurebot
Important subject. Related:

Professors and PHDs on food stamps:

[http://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/professors_on_food_stamps_th...](http://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/professors_on_food_stamps_the_shocking_true_story_of_academia_in_2014/)

[http://www.npr.org/2012/05/15/152751116/why-so-many-ph-d-
s-a...](http://www.npr.org/2012/05/15/152751116/why-so-many-ph-d-s-are-on-
food-stamps)

The PHD bust:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-
phd-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust-
americas-awful-market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339/)

[http://www.economist.com/node/17723223](http://www.economist.com/node/17723223)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-
pus...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for-
more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story.html)

The PHD glut:

[http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-
res...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-researchers-
stirs-quiet-crisis-science/HWxyErx9RNIW17khv0MWTN/story.html)

[http://www.nature.com/news/how-not-to-deal-with-the-phd-
glut...](http://www.nature.com/news/how-not-to-deal-with-the-phd-glut-1.16182)

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-us-
produc...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-us-produce-
too-m/)

The plight of part-time professors:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/the-
tall...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/the-tall-task-of-
unifying-part-time-professors/385507/?single_page=true)

Parents, politicians, and teachers have been beating the 'ever more education'
and 'more STEM grads' drums for a while. The past 5-7 years have shown that
these things were not, and are not, the panacea they were promised to be. We
can always pick the individual situations apart and say 'they made the
following 50 mistakes, and that is why they are un- or under-employed', but if
we look at the trends, we can see it's bigger than that. We have overlapping
crises of credentialism; jobs that aren't there - even for many people with
STEM degrees; underpaid and overworked adjuncts that require food stamps to
live; people who go to school until they are in their mid-30s, sometimes
later, and walk out with a pile of degrees and no marketable skills outside of
academia, and cannot get jobs IN academia; skyrocketing tuitions; and an
enormous bubble of debt (now over 1T.) How many brilliant people will never
come anywhere close to fulfilling their potential because of all this? Not a
good situation.

------
michaelochurch
Here's how to understand academia.

When you're 22, almost everything you've done has been measured in relative
terms to your peers (in part, because almost no one at that age has real
accomplishments by adult standards, except in athletics; so it's a favorable
curve). You think that the world is more competitive than it actually is,
because you've been rewarded (or punished) based on individual performance. Of
course, people who are academically strong tend to be socially weak when
younger. Academia appeals because you're not around the "jocks" with superior
social skills. Let's be honest: most people who go into academia do so because
they're afraid that if they go into the big, bad business world, they'll be
out-shouldered by "asshole jocks".

Here's the trap. The real world is a lot more cooperative than competitive. If
you're a social "4", you do better being the weakling in a crowd of 7's
(business)-- you'll rise up to that level, from exposure, in a couple of
years-- than the relative leader in an ivory tower full of 2's. Why? Because
social skills _aren 't about competition_; you want to be around skilled
people who have your back. Those "jocks" don't out-shoulder you, because
adulthood isn't middle school: they teach you how to get what you want. If
anything, the worst bullies in adulthood are the ex-nerds who have something
to prove.

Then there are the tribal effects. Why do bankers and traders earn 3x what
programmers do, and why do we as programmers earn 3x what academics do, at
each level? Because the worst place you want to be in a market is side-by-side
with someone who's similarly competent in the rendered service but has no
organizational or social skill, nor sense of self-worth; he'll sell himself
very short, and drag you down with him by lowering your market value as well.

Academia's appeal is that it's some sort of safe haven for the socially
awkward beings that smart people usually are in their early 20s (and usually
grow out of by age 25-30). However, because it's full of socially inept people
who are terrible at making a case for their own value, the resource pool
declines over time, and we're now at the point where the academic job market
is kaputt. There are a few star professors who manage to work their way out of
the hell that is academia for the bottom 99+ percent, but the irony is that to
do that requires a great deal of social ability anyway.

Academia's promise is that you don't need to be socially skilled and you'll
keep being rewarded for being smart. First, that's a stupid promise in the
first place. Those skills aren't hard to learn (unless you have a hard
neurological deficit, but that covers maybe 1% of the population) and you just
need to grow up. Second, in the cutthroat environment you get amid dwindling
resources and social investment in academia, it turns out that you need those
skills to survive, making a joke of that promise.

~~~
untilHellbanned
Why do you always get downvoted to hell? I thoroughly enjoy your posts.

HN, what is wrong with being provocative? This place has too much buttoned-
down, fear of the downvote (FOD, kinda like FUD but for geeks). Ironically,
the HN crowd would make perfect academics. Such reason, much facts!

 _note:_ i'm an academic deciding on whether to take or bail on a tenure-track
academic job.

~~~
Dewie
I don't know about _provocative_. Everyone knows what O'Church's opinions are
at this point. Can _the same tune_ really be provocative?

~~~
throwawaymaroon
Just because you're tired of it doesn't mean his niche isn't provocatively
positioned.

