A Tiny Minority of Elite Grad Schools Produce Most Tenured Academics | Hacker News Reader

A Tiny Minority of Elite Grad Schools Produce Most Tenured Academics

slate.com

47 pointsritchiea49 comments

The tenure system really needs to go. The idea was to set up a system where it would be difficult to stifle dissent.

But the structure of the system guarantees over time there won't be any dissent to stifle, because tenure committees don't allow anyone who isn't like everyone else into the clubhouse.

When I was in graduate school, I was somewhat involved in the process of hiring a few professors. Whoever we would have hired was probably going to get tenure and remain in the department for decades. Intangible personal and interpersonal aspects of the candidates were therefore about as important as the quality of their research, because nobody wants to be stuck working for 20 years with someone they don't feel comfortable with. Naturally, this has a tendency to perpetuate the gender and race imbalances in academia.

Gender and race imbalances are much less important to me than ideological imbalances. What's the point of having different sexes and skin colors if they're all part of an echo chamber?

What fields do you find having an academic "echo chamber"?

Nearly all the soft sciences, including economics.

I've seen it in theoretical physics as well. There are 'schools of thought', for example at my alma mater most of the professors doing theoretical particle physics are phenomenologists and tend to regard people doing say string theory as cranks.

This means it's very hard for those people to get hired, and there is also the effect of them not wanting to apply to a university that doesn't have a strong tradition or a strong group in their subfield.

I'm surprised that tenure has survived as long as it has. Certainly professors with tenure want to maintain the status quo, but it seems like the supplicants are still willing to drink the Kool-Aid.

A recent article titled

   Stripping a Professor of Tenure
   Over a Blog Post

didn't get any discussion on HN. The professor seemingly was stripped of tenure on the whims of his dean. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9024754

OTOH a clown like Ward Churchill probably deserved to be fired. There's a place for legitimate "dissent" but IMO Churchill didn't deserve that protection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill

As a former grad student, I am not at all surprised by this. Academia is a very personality-driven world where prestige, connections, and social capital matter at least as much as the quality of one's work. The prestige, influence, and connections of one's department and dissertation advisor make a huge difference, and the most prestigious advisors tend to work at the most prestigious universities.

In a job market with so few openings, especially in the humanities, this clearly has a distorting effect. I suspect that if the job market were not so bad, the effects described in this study would be reduced.

Just want to point out that the job market is not neccisarily 'bad'. There was a huge period of growth in the post WWII era as the university ecosystem expanded with the economy, continuing along later with the boomers' expectation that their children do as they did. Now we live in a post-boomer, globalized economy where the low hanging fruit has all been plucked.

That's not 'bad', more likely just the new normal.

I was referring specifically to the academic job market, which is about as bad as it has ever been. In humanities disciplines, there are hundreds more graduates than jobs every year.

I was referring to academics specifically. While I agree 'bad' isn't an unfair way to feel about the market, I would say it's because expectations have been set by boomer mentors (in their 50s and 60s) that graduated into a job market that was expanding and could absorb them.

Now we have hit equilibrium, and there isn't demand for people who study Foucault, Jung, or build a career around authors from 1850-1950 anymore. The gig is up, and graduating from anything other than a the most famous names just want get you a job anymore.

Not 'good' or 'bad', but certainly 'is', for better or worse.

I went to a low, low ranked US state school for undergrad and moreover I graduated with a bad GPA (2.9).

I'm now in industry doing a job that I enjoy, and I'm continuing to take classes at the local university.

I would like to go to back to school for a Masters and then possibly a PhD after that.

However, this article fills me with a great deal of despair. I had hoped that I could "redeem" myself by working exceptionally hard in whatever Masters program would let me in, and then possibly have a shot at a more prestigious program.

Now knowing that both Silicon Valley and higher ed will laugh me out of the room if I don't come from some name brand university is a sad thought.

I think that I care enough about the subject matter itself to try for a Masters but it's sad nonetheless to know that basically no matter how hard I work, or how good my work is, that I'm forever locked out of certain circles.

The article only talks about where tenured professors get their phds. If your goal is a phd, but not a tenured academic position, you may well be fine.

That said... my experience is the coursework at top universities is significantly harder than at poorer universities. When I look at what math is required for eg an MS at various okay universities such as SJSU or SFSU, it seems to be about equivalent to the undergrad at my top 15 university.

Interviewing lots of engineers and ML people has also turned me into much more of a school snob than I used to be. My experience has been that graduates of top10 ML schools know the material cold, but graduates of, say, a school ranked 50-30th can produce PhDs in stats that struggle to explain a linear regression. Which should be very easy.

Having watched MIT and Stanford lectures online, I was quite taken by the level of depth that is expected, so I understand your comment regarding that.

That's the beauty of those online courses, I suppose. I now know exactly what is required at Stanford and MIT.

If you get admitted to an okay masters program and obtain a high GPA (3.8+), and you do some publishable research then you would have a fighting chance to get into a decent PhD program. Keep in mind that getting into top 50 PhD programs in the US is very competitive, but showing that you have the skill to do research by already having a publication or two will dramatically help your chances. Graduate students are the cogs that keep a professor's lab churning out research, and showing that you are capable of that will help tremendously to get into a PhD program.

So, I do think it is possible to "redeem" yourself, and I know several people that have done this. I also went to a low ranked state school for undergrad, went to a higher ranked school for my MS, and then did a PhD at a well ranked university.

>HOWTO: Get into grad school for science, engineering, math and computer science

>Juniors and seniors often ask me how to get into a Ph.D. program. Having looked at applications for three years now, I feel like I can offer some good advice. [This advice applies for masters students too.]

>The one-word version of that advice is: PUBLISH.

>Read below for my full set of recommendations.

http://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-apply-and-get-in-to-gr...

This is an excellent article. Thank you.

No, you wont be laughed out of silicon valley. They actually test for capability in their interviews to an extent. It's partially why the interviews take 4-8 hours per company. Barely anyone cares about your school, or even your GPA to an extent. There are many good engineers who did not go to the ivy league. And they hire people from many schools in many different countries going through a relatively painful H1B process.

I got into a good PhD program through solid GRE subject test scores & okay recommendation letters (one glowing, with a cavaet), despite my 2.83 final GPA from an ok state school (rank maybe ~100?) - my in-major GPA was a little lower, since I had 3 Fs in my majors.

I had to toil in the Masters program first, but after proving myself, I transferred into the PhD program proper. Had I not had an unfortunate issue that arose (non-academic that ended up affecting academic performance), I would have netted a PhD from a top 15 program in mathematics. Instead I ended up leaving graduate school after 4 years.

It ended up being a blessing - it ultimately helped honed my hard work and made me more receptive to adopting new passions.

I'm now in Silicon Valley as a quite successful & very high demand developer after only ~2 years in the field & being self-taught.

*It appears this comment has been duplicated multiple times in this thread. Apologies. I'm unsure how that happened.

This really isn't that surprising. It could also be explained largely by self selection. If one believes that top schools by prestige also attract the top students, and that these schools are reasonable efficient at selecting among these applicants we'd expect a strongly one sided distribution of talent.

If the top 10 institutions have the vast majority of the top 1% of grad students, I'd expect they produce the vast majority of professors.

Agreed, not sure why no one throughout the writing or editing process of this article realized this obvious fact.

Article discusses that argument. ("Meritocracy")

Furthermore, articles would be greatly puffed up if they had to preempt random arguments which uncritically mention notions like "top 1% of grad students". (Kind of depresses me that I'm immersed in such a tech/managerialist culture that this argument popped into my head too while reading the article, requiring me to spend time evaluating it.)

I recently paid a visit to one of Ivies for a postdoc interview and a group of professors there were discussing the study that this article refers to. They all believed that "cream rises to the top" wasn't sufficient to explain the studies findings, and acknowledged that there are biases built into the academic job search that go beyond selecting for raw talent. Completely anecdotal of course, but it was still striking to me to see how dissatisfied they seemed with the selection process that they (as tenured professors at one of Iviest of Ivies) were the gatekeepers of.

There's also something else at play that isn't just "cream rises."

If you're a top student who chose a slightly suboptimal grad school for personal reasons (to be near a significant other, taking care of a family member, already have a house somewhere, etc.), you may not realize that the game became cripplingly hard for you until you're near the end of your program.

The top universities often: (1) send grad students to conferences (including travel costs) whether or not they have results to present that year, (2) hire lab techs and admins, which allows grad students more time to do actual research, and (3) make it more likely that the student gets a grant proposal accepted by the NIH/NSF/other agency.

And you know, maybe you hold out hope because your advisor let you and your lab mates volunteer stuffing all the swag bags the night before a conference that happens to be in your city that year so you can go talk to all the other folks at the top of your field. Maybe you actually get a grant funded, unlike your classmates. Maybe you put in that many more hours so you can handle your share of the grunt work on top of research you'll actually get published. No weekends for five years. Do you do it? Maybe.

You might do it if you were sure you'd actually land on the tenure track and get tenure. That's far from assured, though. Seems like most people reach 35 or 40 before they're officially denied tenure, meaning you've wasted your most productive years chasing a career that's not going to happen.

My professor told me there is a bus that goes from the Bay Area to Boston and back. It doesn't stop anywhere else.

Roadway bus or network bus? The former would be rather surprising considering the existence of both stomachs and airplanes.

It's a metaphor.

Until you need a tenured job, then your bus heads to bumfuck wherever. That's one point made in the study and one of the major reasons I dropped out of grad school.

The author states "...the data suggest that faculty hiring isn’t a simple meritocracy. The top schools generate far more professors than even just slightly less prestigious schools. For example, in history, the top 10 schools produce three times as many future professors as those ranked 11 through 20."

I don't think this is adequate evidence, and my own experience is that it's very hard to compare, after all most people only went to one grad school. I know that my grad school had much better students than my undergraduate school, but it's almost impossible to quantify how much. Even hard still to compare the top 10 to 11-20. I do believe that it's possible that the top 10 schools produce 3 times more "professor tier" students. Even though application to a particular school has a lot of randomness, most students apply to 10-20 grad schools when they apply, and this removes some of the randomness.

It's actually very hard to measure the true bias towards top schools, if it exists. I don't the the "send out resumes and change the school" trick is a good approach, because most of the signal is going to be in the school. The question of whether schools adequately update their information once they have the full picture of the candidate, remains unanswered.

Also, at least in my field, schools advertise their "placement" of students in academic positions to prospective grad students. So students are well aware of the job prospects when they start grad school.

As someone who has experienced schools in both top 10 and 11-20 range, I can tell you it's a lot like the challenges faced by kids from lower socio-economic circumstances in K-12 schooling, and that the quality of the students alone are not enough to account for the differences.

The top universities often:

1. Send grad students to conferences (including travel costs) whether or not they have results to present that year. (If you're at a slightly suboptimal school, you might only get to go if you have results to present, which you probably don't your first year. My labmates and I would volunteer and spent a day and a half stuffing swag bags and registering attendees/handing out badges for a conference so that we could get access. Students from better schools just had their tickets covered by their schools.)

2. Hire lab techs and admins, giving grad students more time to do actual research or write papers. (Otherwise, you might spend more than 40% of your time doing work that doesn't move the needle for you, professionally. You may be picking up your professor's dry cleaning, or taking care of administrivia around getting them a visa for their next talk in another country, or booking them plane tickets.)

3. The name of the school makes it more likely that the student gets a grant proposal accepted by the NIH/NSF/other agency, even if the quality of the grant proposal itself is the same. Getting a grant/fellowship/award on your CV makes a HUGE difference when applying to post-docs or faculty positions. (You'll also have access to more people who will give you more valuable feedback for how to write a better grant proposal.)

4. Top schools often protect students from bureaucracy and streamline the procedures in place for everything from getting access to a new facility, to what happens when you need to replace your student ID. (See (2) above.)

5. You're more likely to get a smarter or harder working undergraduate student to mentor and help out with your research. This matters more in the life sciences and fields with "benchwork," (e.g., wielding pipettes) but it applies to tasks that involve coding as well. In better schools, a larger percentage of undergraduates opt to get some experience in a research group, and you get both someone to delegate actual research tasks to, and you get to level-up in people-management.

Essentially, if you opted for a school in the 8-15 range for personal reasons (e.g., family, proximity to significant other, other obligations), you've opted into playing on super-hard mode, where you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to get as far as someone who opted for the best school to which they were accepted.

And if you're female, you'll get extra pressure from family, friends, significant other, etc., to choose the school that is close to them. And there are no extra points for playing in hard mode. I definitely don't think I would have appreciated the difference if I hadn't experienced both in such a short time frame.

(Sorry for slight repetition from my comment in a thread lower down. Edited for clarity.)

I got my PhD at a second tier university, 20+ years ago. We had a hallway where there were pictures of the faculty with their names and where they got their degrees.

That was one of maybe two or three data points, that confirmed my decision to pursue an industry job. Another was the average age of post-docs in the department.

Was your degree in CS? Curious how thing turned out for you in industry? Did you ever teach courses on the side? Did you ever consider or dip your foot into entrepreneurship?

My degree was in physics, but my thesis project was a fairly technology intensive experiment, where I was able to develop my chops in electronics, programming, etc. I intensified my focus on those things as it became clear that an academic career was not in my stars. No regrets. I know some of the qualities of successful academics, and I don't possess them. I do enjoy being involved in making things.

And it was 20+ years ago, when there was maybe a bit more migration between physics and engineering, and not so damn many specialized tools to learn.

They say "luck is the residue of design," but I sure owe a lot to pure luck. I was graduating into a rotten job market, but got my first job through a friend-of-a-friend sort of deal. It was a small company where a jack of all trades could be of value, though the pay wasn't great. When things began looking better job-market-wise, my spouse and I moved to a new town.

I actually did teach a couple of courses as an adjunct during a brief period of unemployment. It was hard work because I was doing it for the first time. Now I'm back in industry, doing a sort of systems architect thing for a company that makes measurement equipment.

As for entrepreneurship, yes, I have a very small side-business making an electronic gadget, but it is for a very specialized and mature market, so it's not start-up material. The good thing is that I've actually learned a lot about running a small business.

The biggest, and perhaps only, barrier to me starting a start-up is that I don't have a good idea. I've racked my brain, read all of PG's essays, and so forth, and a compelling idea just hasn't assembled itself in my brain yet.

I was surprised when I found out that there were faculty candidates from University of Washington at both Berkeley and Stanford.

This is amazing, and shows that Tier 2 schools can send students to become profs at the 'top 4'

In computer science, UW is pretty good. (In other fields, not so much.)

UW is also considered one of the best medical schools (when I was applying, their matriculant MCAT score was a standard deviation above the national matriculant average. Even Harvard couldn't make that claim).

UW also has one of the best schools of public health in the country.

If what surprised you was Figure 1 in the paper [1], note that it depicts only CS departments. The CS department at UW is widely considered among the best in the United States. Not that this is definitive, but it's ranked 6 in the US News and World report [2].

[1] http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005 [2] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

Which really proves nothing since the US News rankings are heavily biased toward perceived excellence, other non-objective measures, and objective measures that have no bearing on how well students are actually being educated. Is there really something so special about UWs curriculum that sets them apart from #20 or #100 or do they just have fancier gymnasiums and dorms and more donations from alums?

The main correlate is the impact of faculty output. This also is not necessarily correlated with the quality of the education students receive. But then, department rankings shouldn't necessarily reflect the quality of the education either.

This could be a place for students to apply social pressure on the university they are attending. How can the university program claim to be good if they don't hire their own?

The fact that this looks at grad schools rather than undergraduate schools weakens its argument substantially. Students of all capability levels end up in all sorts of undergraduate institutions -- some community college students are brilliant, but didn't have the resources to go to fancy private colleges, while some students at Ivy League colleges struggle to keep up.

The PhD programs, however, eliminate quite a bit of this variation in their own admissions. The student I know who got into Harvard but took the full ride to UCLA excelled at UCLA and had PhD programs actively recruiting her -- she had her pick of the "tiny minority" listed in this article. City College of New York has more undergraduate alumni who have won Nobel Prizes than almost any other university in the world. And since PhD programs are generally funded through fellowships, students don't have to come from wealthy families or take on large loans to attend.

My pet theory is that the top PhD programs basically execute the main selection force -- identifying the students most likely to be tenured academics from hundreds of public and private colleges nationwide -- and thus it's no surprise that there appears to be a direct pipeline between them and university faculties.

I wrote this elsewhere, but there's actually a lot else at play. And if you're female, you'll get extra pressure from family, friends, significant other, etc., to choose the school that is close to them. Essentially, if you opted for a school in the 10-20 range for personal reasons (e.g., family, proximity to significant other, other obligations), you've opted into playing on super-hard mode, where you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to get as far as someone who opted for the best school to which they were accepted.

I definitely don't think I would have appreciated the difference if I hadn't experienced both in such a short time frame.

The top universities often:

There's a lot more, but you get the idea, I think.

> you've opted into playing on super-hard mode, where you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to get as far as someone who opted for the best school to which they were accepted.

Does this matter very much if the PhD student is not looking for a job in academia?

Most of my classmates were, in fact, looking for jobs in academia. And there is the commonly held fear (due to lack of role models) that if you leave academia, you may as well be eaten by wolves.

FWIW, I'm glad I left academia.

Hm? You seem to be saying "If you go to a top PhD school, you'll have the best faculty opportunities." I agree with you there.

What I'm saying is that "If you perform extremely well in your undergraduate degree, you have a high probability of being accepted to a top PhD program."

If you get into a top PhD program and choose to attend a non-top PhD program, for whatever reason, I agree with you, you're electing to play on super-hard mode compared to someone who opted for the best school to which they were accepted. However, just like the arcade games, you shouldn't be surprised to win more often on easy mode than on hard mode.

Let's not exaggerate the meritocratic nature of PhD programs. Brand names definitely still matter.

I did my undergrad at a state school and my masters at an Ivy League school. During grad school, I recall speaking to my advisor (a professor who had only went to Ivy League schools) about my chances at getting into a PhD program at the university. He said my chances were very slim because I didn't graduate from a brand-name school. A couple other friends were told the same thing by their advisors.

Maybe he's not a representative sample of Ivy League professors, but he was very much a prestige whore. I was in the meeting with another fellow student with a physics degree from a decent state school, and the professor basically just shat on our schools. Told us we might be able to get into PhD programs at inferior universities like our alma maters, where afterwards we might be able to get professorships at even more inferior schools or community colleges.

Maybe that's the reality of it, but it was clear this guy was the type who placed a huge amount of value on brand names. Like the stereotypical Harvard grad who thinks everyone else is inferior.

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