Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks

By Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, Daniel B. Larremore. Science Advances, 2015

565 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An analysis of networks of graduate-to-faculty hires reveals systematic hiring biases and patterns. 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.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6db769b3cbb3d7237a45561c818b4c0cc1d9b4e3

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Citations in the corpus

Unpacking the inequality paradox: The psychological roots of inequality and social class. (2018, background): “…of academic productivity also reveals the advantages conferred by valued educational networks: Higher status degrees confer additional advantages on people who attain doctoral degrees, positively impacting a number of career outcomes, including promotion and tenure decisions (Clauset et al., 2015).”
The Impact of Publishing During PhD Studies on Career Research Publication, Visibility, and Collaborations (2016, background): “Clauset et al. (2015) found that 71–86 % of all tenuretrack academics based in the United States and Canada in the fields of business, computer science and history received their PhDs from of all universities.”
Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review (2018, background): “For example, women are underrepresented in prestigious educational institutions [36–38], which conflates gender and prestige biases.”
The natural selection of bad science (2016, background): “magnitude higher than an otherwise respectable publication record (Clauset et al., 2015; Ioannidis et al., 2014; Frank, 2011).”
The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, background): “ranked universities based on the hiring relations between them [239].”
The Diversity–Innovation Paradox in Science (2019, background): “If gender and racially un-derrepresented scholars are likely to innovate and innovation supposedly leads to successful academic careers, then how do we explain persistent inequalities in scientific careers between minority and majority groups (8 – 13)?”