Assistant professors at higher ranked vs lower ranked universities

boneh3ad
Thu, 29 Aug 2013 08:57:07 +0000

ClassicRockerDad:

I’d be surprised if this were true. If received your PhD from a mid-tier, and you just had to have a faculty position, the only positions that would be open to you would be from lower tiers. If you received your PhD from a top-tier, and just had to have a faculty job, you’d have the whole spectrum available to you, but going from the rich intellectual environment of the top tier to a low tier school would be hard to enjoy both intellectually and financially compared to working in industry. Therefore, it’s more likely that the lowest tiered schools would have a larger fraction of faculty from mid and lower tier schools than the top tier, whose professors generally speaking always come from the top tier.



I’d argue that if you received your PhD from a mid-tier program, chances are you aren’t going to find a faculty position at all, and if you do it will be at a lower-tier program. As you and I have already alluded to, there just aren’t many faculty positions available. PhD graduates from top-tier schools looking for faculty positions (generally) take them at the top-tier schools and at the middle-tier schools, taking up slots that might have been filled by middle-tier graduates. These are then relegated to look even lower down the totem pole of there are even any jobs still available.

I think the fundamental flaw in the logic here is that your conclusion depends on the assertion that the PhD graduates in question will only accept a job at an upper-tier university or else they would rather go into industry. Most people who are vying for faculty jobs seem to be quite gung ho about staying on the academic path and are generally willing to work at, say, at least one tier lower than the university they attended just to get that first faculty job. Prospective faculty generally realize that they can take a job even at a lower tier than their PhD and still do what they want, that is set up a research program investigating problems that interest them the most as long as they can convince someone to pay for it.

For that reason, the percentage of faculty from top programs in a field is not nearly as variable across the tiers as 93tiger16 seems to imply, though I doubt it is constant as implied by DoubleD. The top tiers certainly don’t have enough openings to accommodate all of their own graduates, but the top tier combined with the lower tiers certainly have more openings than the top tier graduates can fill, so the rate likely isn’t quite the same. It isn’t like night and day though as some would apply. You still see lots of professors from the top schools even at the lower tier schools.