[‘Jarring’ study reveals hiring bias at US institutions.]
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MOST US PROFESSORS ARE TRAINED AT SAME FEW ELITE UNIVERSITIES  
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Anna Nowogrodzki
September 21, 2022
Nature [[link removed]]

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_ ‘Jarring’ study reveals hiring bias at US institutions. _

One in eight tenure-track professors at US institutions got their
PhDs from just five elite US universities, according to a study., Paul
Marotta/Getty

 

US universities hire most of their tenure-track faculty members from
the same handful of elite institutions, according to a study1
[[link removed]]. The
finding suggests that prestige is overvalued in hiring decisions and
that academic researchers have little opportunity to obtain jobs at
institutions considered more elite than the ones at which they were
trained.

Specifically, the study, published in _Nature_ on 21 September,
shows that just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States
supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across
the country between 2011 and 2020 (see ‘Hiring bias’). No
historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or
Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) were among that 20%, says Hunter
Wapman, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU
Boulder) and a co-author of the paper. One in eight US-trained
tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite
universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of
Wisconsin–Madison.

“It’s not surprising, but it is jarring” to see these data, says
Leslie Gonzales, a social scientist who studies higher education at
Michigan State University in East Lansing. “There’s so much
brilliant work and training of brilliant scholars that’s happening
outside of this tiny sliver” of institutions, including at HBCUs and
HSIs — and it’s being overlooked, she says.

Source: Ref 1.

This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month
in _Nature Human Behaviour_2
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that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least
one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of
people have a parent with a PhD). That’s significant because parents
with advanced degrees tend to have higher socio-economic status than
do those without such education, so upper-class families are
contributing heavily to the PhD pipeline, says Aaron Clauset, a
computer scientist at CU Boulder and co-author of both papers.

Together, the studies portray an academic system in which most faculty
members are trained at a few universities, and academic researchers
generally come from families with similar backgrounds, setting up a
cycle of sameness. “Is the system a meritocracy?” asks Daniel
Larremore, a computational scientist at CU Boulder who is a co-author
of both papers. “In peer review, no; in the spread of ideas, no; and
in faculty hiring, surely no.”

Measuring excellence

The _Nature_ paper’s data set included tenured and tenure-track
faculty members who worked at PhD-granting institutions in the United
States between 2011 and 2020, for a total of 295,089 people at more
than 350 institutions. The data came from the Academic Analytics
Research Center based in Charlotte, North Carolina, which offered
Larremore and the team access to the information. Larremore, Wapman
and their colleagues sorted faculty members from the data set into 107
fields, such as ecology and chemistry.

Related: Revealed: the pay bump for being a straight, white man in US
science [[link removed]]

Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an
institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their
PhD, according to the analysis. Fields with the least ‘upward
mobility’ included classics and economics, whereas those with the
most included animal science and pharmacology.

Hiring committees seem to be using prestige as a proxy for excellence
on the job, says Kimberly Griffin, dean of the College of Education at
the University of Maryland in College Park. But ‘prestige’ does
not necessarily indicate ‘better-qualified’, and prestigious
graduate programmes often admit students on the basis of standardized
test scores, letters of recommendation and the renown of their
undergraduate degree. All of these, research shows, can disadvantage
students of colour, says Griffin, who is also editor of the _Journal
of Diversity in Higher Education_.

“Accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that
we’re not looking into the history of how things became
prestigious,” Gonzales says. The founding of elite US universities
is “intertwined with exclusion”, she adds. For instance, many
institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups, or
originally derived their wealth from or supported their infrastructure
with the labour of enslaved Black people.

Learning from the data

The _Nature_ paper found that the proportion of new recruits who are
women has remained flat since 2011 in 100 of the 107 fields analysed
— and actually decreased in the remaining 7. The overall percentage
of women did increase in three-quarters of the fields, but the authors
attribute this to a high proportion of men among faculty members who
reached retirement age. These trends indicate that efforts to hire
more women in academia have not been fruitful, at least since 2011,
Larremore says.

Related: Women less likely to win major research awards
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He does note two limitations of the gender data set: the team mostly
used name–gender cultural associations to categorize faculty members
as men or women, which is not necessarily reliable; and there was no
non-binary gender category.

The _Nature Human Behaviour_ study used an online survey to gather
data from 7,024 tenure-track faculty members in the United States.
Clauset has been surprised by how many people have contacted the team
about the paper since its publication. “I don’t think we realized
how much it would resonate with people in their lived experiences,”
he says. Many people who are ‘first generation’ graduate students
from families without advanced degrees have said that they feel set
apart from their peers who have had more of an advantage, he adds.

There are ways in which academia could de-emphasize prestige and
reduce inequalities. The first, basic step is questioning prestige and
where it comes from, Gonzales says. She advises hiring committees to
list all the places they plan to advertise a position, including their
personal connections; examine the institutional diversity of the list;
and add HBCUs, HSIs and regional institutions if they are not already
included.

Unequal access to faculty jobs across gender, race and socio-economic
background has consequences. “There is a huge amount of literature
that says who is in the scientific community affects what research
questions are asked,” Clauset says. “By not being as diverse as we
could be, as inclusive as we could be, we are losing smart people who
could change the world for the better.”

_doi: [link removed]

References

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Wapman, K. H., Zhang, S., Clauset, A. & Larremore, D.
B. _Nature_ [link removed] (2022).

Article [[link removed]] Google Scholar
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Morgan, A. C. _et al._ _Nature Hum. Behav_.
[link removed] (2022).

PubMed
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[[link removed]] Google Scholar
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Download references
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ANNA NOWOGRODZKI is a freelance science journalist and former plant
biologist. Her writing can be found in National Geographic, New
Scientist, and Nature, among others, and she can be found in the
Boston area on her bicycle.

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* hiring
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