Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Aaron Clauset (Colorado), Samuel Arbesman (Colorado) & Daniel B. Larremore (Harvard), Systematic Inequality and Hierarchy in Faculty Hiring Networks:

The faculty job market plays a fundamental role in shaping research priorities, educational outcomes, and career trajectories among scientists and institutions. However, a quantitative understanding of faculty hiring as a system is lacking. Using a simple technique to extract the institutional prestige ranking that best explains an observed faculty hiring network—who hires whose graduates as faculty—we present and analyze comprehensive placement data on nearly 19,000 regular faculty in three disparate disciplines. Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality. Furthermore, doctoral prestige alone better predicts ultimate placement than a U.S. News & World Report rank, women generally place worse than men, and increased institutional prestige leads to increased faculty production, better faculty placement, and a more influential position within the discipline. These results advance our ability to quantify the influence of prestige in academia and shed new light on the academic system.

Inside Higher Ed, Study Suggests Insular Faculty Hiring Practices in Elite Departments:

By now, the secret is out in some disciplines: if you want to land a tenure-line faculty job, you’d better attend a highly ranked graduate program -- not necessarily because they’re better but because the market favors prestige. But a new study suggests that “social inequality” might be worse than previously thought, across a range of different disciplines.

The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline.

Using the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of social inequality, the authors found there’s extreme elitism even at the top of that quartile. The top 10 programs in each discipline produce 1.6 to 3 times more faculty than even the next 10 programs in the ranking. And the top 11 to 20 programs produce 2.3 to 5.6 times more professors than the next 10 programs.

“For such differences to reflect purely meritocratic outcomes, that is, utilitarian optimality of total scholarship, differences in placement rates must reflect inherent differences in the production of scholarship,” the study says. “Under a meritocracy, the observed placement rates would imply that faculty with doctorates from the top 10 units are inherently 2 to 6 times more productive than faculty with doctorates from the third 10 units.”

The magnitude of such differences make a pure meritocracy “implausible,” the report says, “suggesting the influence of nonmeritocratic factors like social status.”

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/02/systematic-inequality-and-hierarchy-.html