Assistant professors at higher ranked vs lower ranked universities

93tiger16
Wed, 28 Aug 2013 17:20:48 +0000

There tend to be a great number of faculty at top universities who also went to top, “name-brand” universities for their undergraduate and/or PhD studies (i.e. the Ivies, Duke, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Michigan, etc.). This is not to say that if you go to a top university, you’re golden, but rather that these people also tend to produce higher quality research that is cited more often. There are definitely Ivy League-educated professors at lower tier universities and even several at community colleges, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Additionally, to get on tenure-track, PhDs need to publish and publish often. I suspect that the distinguishing factor between PhD A who gets a tenure-track position at Princeton versus a PhD who gets a tenure-track position at a lower tier school is the quality of their research, measured by which journals they get published in and how many citations they get. It seems that many of my science professors produce a good, solid body of research when they were postdocs and got cited a whole lot of times.