Insular Faculty Hiring

Colleen Flaherty:

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.