Eight out of every ten American tenure-track faculty received their PhDs from just 20 percent of the nation’s universities, according to a study published in Nature earlier this week (September 21). Of those same faculty members, over 14 percent received their degrees at just five institutions: The University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stanford University. The striking findings illuminate the “extreme inequality” in academic hiring, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
“The size of the inequality suggests that we are almost surely missing out on many extremely talented people and innovative ideas,” University of Colorado (CU), Boulder computer scientist and coauthor of the study Aaron Clauset tells the Chronicle.
The study examined the education and employment statuses of nearly 300,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty across US doctoral institutions from 2011–2020. According to Inside Higher Ed, differences in the size of the ...
