jamn

Sure. You could have a PhD grad from Caltech A and a community college grad B such that B is more skilled for the job than A.

But if you have a very small amount of information and time to make a decision, where would you place a bet? It's certainly very unfair for the many talented graduates from lesser known universities. However, I find the idea of recruiting based partially on these bullet points valid from a expected proficiency optimizing perspective.

The talented guy doing IT at a law firm has some options to signal his talent. For example, he can create or become a top contributor in an open source project. I am sure many talented people who feel unfulfilled in their jobs do this.

The obvious question is whether this is an effective way to encourage professors to be nice or simply a nice way to reward those who would otherwise have been already nice.

In other words, will professors find the possibility of making extra $30k exciting enough to change their attitude? If the answer is no, then perhaps this is not a very good way to bring more niceness to the classroom.