A very interesting article imo.
This is not exactly a secret, and the numbers game of each faculty member supervising far more PhD students to graduation than needed to replace him/her means that most PhD graduates will not find tenure track university faculty jobs.
It’s about as much a secret as water being wet. If you’re aiming for academia, you should think carefully before devoting years to a PhD program with a poor placement record.
While it is not breaking news that a PhD from Yale might get more notice than one from Dayton, this study doesn’t tell us much, and may be skewing toward the authors’ presuppositions. I tried to follow the links to learn about the methodology, but no luck. They limit the study to 3 disciplines: Business, History, Comp Sci. Why those three? They also limit their study to 242 schools. But which ones? And how were they chosen? Would studying different disciplines at different schools give different results? What if all were studied?
I just picked a random school where a friend’s daughter attends (Hope College) and looked up seven professors at random from the faculty directory. Here is where they got their PhDs:
Case Western Reserve
Purdue
U of Guelph
U of Iowa
Columbia
U of Virginia
U of Miami
The message of the study and article seems to be that that one must go to an elite school to become a professor, but I know from colleagues and friends that this is not the case.This subject deserves more careful analysis than has been presented in this study.
Uh, no it does no such thing. It clearly says that “half” attend elite schools. (Generally, that means that “half” do not.)
^^^ True, though the article’s subtitle screams
which I guess may be technically what their numbers show, though it sounds more alarming… Without knowing more about which schools were studied, the stats don’t mean much. I can’t believe that half of the profs at directionals and small LACs are from elite schools.
I was told when I started looking at PhD programs that you had a 5% chance of getting a job at a “better” department (or a better job), 15% chance of getting a job at the same level, 30% chance of getting a job the level below, and a 50% chance of getting a job 2 levels below. Don’t ask me what a “level” is in this case, it was a while ago and I think I got the percentages right.
So if you get your PhD from MIT in EE (top 1-2), maybe 5% you get a primo offer at a top 5-6 department, 15% you get a regular offer from a top 5-6 department, 30% you get an offer from a 7-15 department, 50% you get an offer from a 16-30 department. Something like that.
Conversely, if you get your PhD from PSU in EE (25th or so), maybe 5% you get an offer from a 7-15 department, 15% you get an offer from a 16-30 department, 30% you get an offer from a 31-75 department, and 50% you get an offer from a 76- program.
One of the main points was that if you want academia you should aim high because you don’t have to sink too far in the rankings to find yourself most likely to be teaching at some place like South Central Louisiana State (GO MUDDOGS!!). Conversely, if you come from one of the elite schools you’ll get an offer somewhere if only so that they can say they have Harvard/Stanford/MIT grads in the department.
I heard this as well concerning Humanities PhDs in the 90s, that you could only hope to find a position at or below the level of your department or university. The “levels” were not spelled out to me either, but it was clear that a PhD from Kent State would not be hired at Duke.
The original article this Slate article refers to is an [article in Science Advances](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.full), an open-access scientific journal. The authors selected business, computer science, and history because they are three disparate fields; they figured that if they found a unifying thread across these three fields that it’s probably something that held true for academia more generally. They actually looked at 19,000 tenure-track or tenured faculty members across 461 North American departmental or school-level academic units.The [url=<a href=“http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/suppl/2015/02/11/1.1.e1400005.DC1/1400005_SM.pdf%5Dsupplemental”>http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/suppl/2015/02/11/1.1.e1400005.DC1/1400005_SM.pdf]supplemental materials/url give more insight into how the universities were selected; they chose schools with PhD programs that are ranked by U.S. News & World Report, so they were deliberately choosing doctoral-granting universities. (I’ll come back to this in a minute.)
Clauset, who is the first author of the science article and an author on the Slate article, is an expert in network science and data mining - his specialty is actually looking at large-scale patterns that emerge from large messy datasets. THe analysis method they used is sound (academics have actually been discussion this article for several months - it came out in February.)
This is no secret, and has long been known among academics. Although it is possible to get a tenure-track position from a less prestigious or lower-ranked university/PhD program, it is much, much easier to get one if you attend a well-reputed program. The better ranked your program is, the better chances you have. There are some lower-tier PhD programs that hardly place any PhD students into tenure-track positions at all. And then there are some top-tier programs (in every field) in which nearly every alumnus gets a tenure-track job or prestigious fellowship. It’s true across most disciplines - some disciplines, like nursing and accounting, feel it less because they have a faculty shortage, but it’s still true that an Emory-trained nursing PhD is more likely to end up at Emory or Penn than a East Carolina-trained nursing PhD.
And no, they didn’t look at smaller regional universities or LACs in the analysis - the study was limited to doctoral-degree granting universities since those are the ones ranked by U.S. News. But if you take a look at the faculty of these universities you’ll see the same patterns. The departments of elite LACs are dominated by PhDs from top programs. Mid-ranked LACs still mostly have faculty who graduated from top programs, with soem faculty from some mid-ranked programs sprinkled in. (@snarlatron actually provided a pretty good example; all 7 of those institutions are top U.S. institutions. I don’t know what field those faculty are in, but in my field 4 out of the 6 U.S. institutions are top 30 and the other 2 are in the top 75-100 of a field that has 250-300 PhD programs. The Canadian university, Guelph, is actually one of the top Canadian research universities).
Even smaller, less well-known LACs have more prestigious faculty than you’d expect. And this is especially if the school is located in a desirable metropolitan area. I checked out one small LAC in Atlanta I know of (Oglethorpe University) and their four-person department is represented by PhDs from Michigan, Georgia State, Emory and UW-Madison. UW and Michigan are both top 5 programs; Emory is around the top 50ish (and again, there are around 250-300 PhD programs in psychology) and Georgia State is top 75ish. I also applied for a public health position at College of Charleston, and was surprised that the faculty all had their PhDs from top public health institutions even though they had what looked like a 3/3 or 3/4 load.
Lol. Academia hires based on prestige, not necessarily what your alumni is. If you graduated from a poorly ranked school but are making breakthroughs in some field, and your name is extremely valuable in the field, they will hire you. It just so happens that a lot of people doing great research graduated from Ivies and other top schools, but this isnt always the case. Faculty alumni is usually a mixed bag.
Where you graduate from (or where you are an alumni of) is part of your prestige. If you are a newly minted PhD you don’t have any breakthroughs in the field. So search committees are looking for assistant professors with the potential to make breakthroughs in the field. And many times they determine that by what school you graduated from and who you worked with.
It doesn’t “just so happen” that people doing great research graduated from top schools (and also work at top schools). Top schools attract a lot of things that make it much more likely that you will make breakthroughs in a field. For example, when you submit a grant to the NSF or NIH, there’s a portion of the grant called “environment.” They rate how well they think you will be able to achieve the goals of the grant given your institution and the support there. Top schools get much better ratings in this area than other schools, which raises the overall ratings of your grant. You also get higher scores if you work with more well-known scholars (who are usually at top schools). And top schools have the grants infrastructure to refine your grant and work out an acceptable budget, subcontract, etc., whatever you need. You need the money to do the work.
That’s one of the reasons top schools attract top professors, the ones making the breakthroughs in the field, who can be your mentors and bring you into big research projects that get you papers. They also are flush with money, so they can poach those professors from other schools.
So no, faculty graduate institutions are not usually a mixed bag. Go to the departmental website of any top department in a field and see where their faculty graduated from; I guarantee it clusters near the top of the rankings, perhaps with the exception of one or two faculty members. I did this exercise for the MIT EE/CS department one time for someone else and found that out of that enormous department, the vast majority of the MIT EE/CS professors graduated from just three departments: MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. There is the occasional appearance from UIUC and a few other scattered top programs.
@cosmicfish - I was briefly in a PHD program, and your ranking system generally conforms with the market realities at the time, but one item not discussed was the impact of race, gender and nationality on the hiring process. For the graduating class in my first year, those items seemed to be more important than the actual qualifications of the PHD graduates.
There were four people in this class, and the most qualified was a white male who had published two articles in minor journals, and was a co-author of an article in the main journal in his field. Despite this strong publishing history, he ended up teaching at a non-research university a rung or two below the school where he got his PHD.
The second strongest candidate was a white woman who was co-author of an article in a minor journal, and she got a tenure track position at an equivalent level research university.
The third strongest candidate was an African American male with no publishing history who got a plum offer at a research university a tier well above that from which he graduated from.
However, the least successful candidate was a foreign national. His choices after graduation were going back to India, teaching at a community college, or possibly getting hired at a South Central Louisiana State type institution. He was not a happy man, particularly after seeing the results of his classmates job searches.
Publishing history is not the only thing that makes someone “qualified” - there may have been a lot of other factors at play other than their race and their publication record. Did these three even all apply at the same places? Maybe the white man was geographically constrained and the black guy wasn’t. Maybe the black professor’s research was a better fit with what the research university he was employed at was looking for, and could teach the classes they wanted. Maybe the white man bombed the job talk. Or any number of other possible scenarios.
If you look at actual statistical records of hiring and employment in the professoriate, African Americans are employed well beyond their representation in both the general population and in graduate programs - they are actually much less likely to get any tenure-track job (much less a plum position) than white and Asian peers. The same is true for women vs. men.
I’m not saying that some departments aren’t trying to improve their diversity and might like to hire women or African Americans if they can get it, but no top research department is going to take someone they think can’t do research and employ them, potentially for the next 30-40 years, simply because of their race. It damages their reputation and the grant money and prestige that grants and publications bring to the department.
(However, foreign national status can have an impact on hiring - because your department has to sponsor your visa to hire you.)
Another aspect is that not every Ph.D. graduate wants an academic position at a major research university. Some are just not willing to take on the pressure of that kind of job in the current funding climate. I have had both former students and family members make that choice.
@juillet is absolutely right that it is important to make an offer to the candidate whom you think has the best chance of success at your university. Not many universities (with the possible exception of the most selective) are willing to invest a lot of money (particularly with the high cost start up packages in science and engineering) in a faculty member with the expectation that the success rate is below 50% in being tenured eventually. This means that you only have your applicant pool to deal with and if you don’t get underrepresented candidates who are competitive, then there is pretty much nothing to be done despite the desire to broaden the representation in the department.
@juillet - The ranking was not mine, it was that of the department based on publications, academic paper presentations, teaching, etc. The while male was viewed as easily the standout student of the class, and when the job offers came out, people were very surprised, if not shocked that the two less promising students ended up at institutions that were considered as prestigious or more prestigious than the one they earned their PHD from. This was at a time when universities were just starting to seek diversity in hiring professors, particularly in this male centric field, so gender and race were the reasons given their placement.
BTW, I just googled the white male and it turns out he has a very solid career at a major research university with a laundry list of publications, teaching awards, presentations, and editors positions. Like cosmicfish’s tiering system, he is at a school one tier beneath that he earned his PHD at.
According to who? I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that the departments that hired them did not come out and say “we hired these applicants because they are female/black!” That seems to be the conclusion that your home department came to, solely on the basis of face appearances. And quite frankly, it does a disservice to the minority and female candidates coming out of their department - I’d be angry if my department assumed I only got my job because of my gender or race rather than my own skills, potential, and experience.
The home departments conclusion was based on the faculty working with the individuals for five or six years while they took classes and seminars, did research, wrote papers, presented those papers, re-worked papers, wrote the dissertation, defended the dissertation, TA’d classes, taught classes, etc. etc. while training them to become a professor at a research university.
As for you impugning the home department, remember that they fully funded these three graduates to start out with, and were proud of their placements.
As for the hiring schools, after Larry Summers, you can bet they will not say “we hired these applicants because they are female/black!”. However, you cannot deny that universities consider race, gender, etc. when making hiring decisions much like they do when they decide which students to admit and who to give financial aid to. See below for Cornell advertising for a generic URM professor.
Also:
To be clear, I never said that any of these candidates were UNqualified. All three made it through a PhD program at a major university, which qualified them for any of the jobs they were offered.
My point is that the opinion of the home department doesn’t matter. It’s the opinion of the hiring department that matters, and who is the most qualified or least qualified can be different from department to department.
The Cornell add was not for “a generic URM professor.” Here is what the actual ad said:
…so there was heightened interest in considering applications from minorities in the fields - OR people who work on topics related to those issues - in an effort to raise the diversity of Cornell’s professoriate and/or the research that they do. That statement isn’t really much different from the boilerplate that many academic ads have (“We are especially interested in applications from women and minorities/diverse candidates/underrepresented minorities/candidates who can teach and mentor a diverse group of students/etc.”) In fact, many non-academic jobs use that language. It doesn’t mean they would absolutely hire one.
The reason why the Cornell faculty (and by extension, others) were upset about the ad wasn’t that line; it was because the Cornell administration mounted a generic search for some generic faculty member in the social sciences or humanities without consulting the faculties of those respective departments right before the holidays. So the faculty members were concerned about whether they would have to review hiring documents during their holidays. They were also upset because Cornell never asked them what they needed or wanted in new faculty - so many feared they would get a tenure line taken away for an 18th century Americanist or a philosopher of gender when what they really needed was someone who specialized in medieval Germanic history or philosophy of science.
@juillet -
If that is true, why do you have an issue with my statement that race and gender were important considerations as to why these candidates were hired? From what you are saying, statements like “We are especially interested in applications from women and minorities/diverse candidates/underrepresented minorities/candidates who can teach and mentor a diverse group of students/etc.” are considered boilerplate in academic advertisements. If so, and universities come out and say that they are “especially interested” in certain classes of people, by definition they are less interested if you are not part of those classes. That fact that these qualified candidates were chosen in part because of their race/gender should come as no surprise to anyone involved in academics.
The point of quoting the Cornell ad was to illustrate that the sentiment that “We are especially interested in applications from women and minorities/diverse candidates/underrepresented minorities/candidates who can teach and mentor a diverse group of students/etc” is common in academic circles. The reason why the Cornell faculty was upset was irrelevant.
I don’t. That’s not what you said in your original comment. Here is what you said:
and then
I don’t dispute that departments take gender, race, and other factors into consideration when they make decisions. In fact, I said it in one of my own posts.
What I take issue with is the idea that departments value the race or gender of minority and female PhD graduates/tenure-track job candidates over their academic and scholarly qualifications. That is, for a white male candidate, their scholarship and academic prowess are what’s most important, but for a female candidate or a candidate of color, their race or gender becomes most important. Number one, because it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny (if that were the case, departments would have no problems in increasing the diversity of their faculty - they could simply select any minimally qualified warm body that met the racial or gender categories they wanted. Obviously, search committees aren’t doing that).
And number two, because frankly, it - particularly the first statement - outright claims that minority and female candidates who are selected for tenure-track academic roles are selected primarily on the basis of their gender or race and not because of their qualifications. That’s insulting, especially when all evidence actually points to the contrary. And yes, I’d be mad if my department looked at my scholarly record and said “well clearly, her race and gender was the reason for that placement.” Doesn’t matter how much shepherding and education they’ve done to date. It erases my academic and scholarly prowess and reduces me down to a couple of categories. I would feel like it shows how my department really feels about 1) me and 2) other female scholars or scholars of color.
Also, people always ignore this part
.