Has the college academic job market always been highly competitive and elitist?

[MWolf]

@roethlisburger

So is, in fact, tenure. First, because most of the quantitative measures are not quantitative. Publications and conference presentations are not all created equal, and different sub-fields have different funding rates and different funding amounts. That is only 1/3-45% of the tenure portfolio. The rest is “student evaluations” for which the only known ways of trying to quantify this are known to be biased against women, minorities, is also strongly related to physical appearances. The last third or so is “collegiality” which doesn’t even pretend to be quantitative.

This is less true in the engineering departments I’m familiar with. Research dollars, publications, and student evaluations determine tenure in that order.

In general, you are right, and engineering is a lot less prestige-ridden overall. Or, more correctly, prestige is generally earned by the more recent accomplishments of a program, rather than by a history of rich and powerful people having attended the program. That is also how engineers are - they like seeing proof. The reputation of MIT among engineers is high because of its actual accomplishments.

The flip side is that engineers tend to be conservative, and for many, departments which have innovative ways of education or of developing new ways of looking at engineering solutions can lower the prestige of a program in the eyes of many of the older, more established engineering faculty.

That being said, even in engineering departments, there is no set formula for tenure - there are general expectations which are flexible. So they may look mostly at grants, publications and student reviews, but the T&P committee and the voting faculty may decide that what is “enough” for one tenure candidate is not enough for another.

There is also a wide streak of misogyny in many engineering departments, and there have been a number of cases in which what was considered “enough” for men was often not considered “enough” for women.

@ucbalumnus

@bristlecone

HYPMS grad will go further than a state school grad on average.

This is not true for most STEM faculty posts at state schools, though it may be true at medical schools.

The way I have always heard of how college prestige matters in faculty hiring is that the prestige of one’s PhD department (rather than the college overall) and one’s PhD supervisor is the prestige factor that matters.

That depends on who is doing the hiring and the field. larger universities, in which the departments cover many subfields, and the subfields do the hiring generally follow that rule. So at a university with an ecology & evolution department, that department will hire faculty based on the program. However, if there is just a medium size biology department, which has a search committee made up of people who are not in ecology, will hire based on the general prestige of the biological sciences or the university itself.

LACs in general hire based on the prestige of the university from which they are hiring, rather than the program or the adviser. That is because a large part of their advertising includes the universities from which their faculty received their PhDs. The vast majority of parents have no knowledge of the nuances of program-level reputation, and only really are impressed by the “prestige” of the universities from which the faculty received their PhDs.