[HN Gopher] Most US professors are trained at same few elite uni... ___________________________________________________________________ Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities Author : pseudolus Score : 81 points Date : 2022-09-22 18:38 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nature.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com) | melonrusk wrote: | > 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied | 80% of tenure-track faculty members | | 80:20 | | The Pareto Principle at work. All these figures show is that | universities have the usual distribution of quality. | oneplane wrote: | You'd hope that quality requirements could be used to make a | bar that is high enough so any accredited institution would be | delivering highly educated and developed people. Anything | beyond that would be nice to have, but not enough to be a | deciding factor when judging merit. | | When you think about it, what is it that we want? Someone with | fancy labels who went to places that also had fancy labels, or | someone who can do the thing we need? | bergenty wrote: | What's the point here? I want my professors to be educated at the | best universities. | mncharity wrote: | Years back, there was talk of trying to leverage this | concentration, to improve national science education. | Professorial educational skills are often less than wonderful. | Eg, physics education research's "if you think your lectures are | working, your assessment also isn't". And creating change by | improving current professors is hard, expensive, and failure | prone. So the idea was, to lavishly fund education research, | training, and education minors, at these few institutions through | which pass, most graduate students who will eventually become | professors. Make their instructional training really excellent, | and then wait for it to propagate nationally. One obvious | downside being reinforcing the concentration. | bo1024 wrote: | I would just recommend everyone read the actually research | instead of the journalism. | MisterBastahrd wrote: | There are currently 449 PhD granting institutions in the United | States. This means that 90 universities are responsible for 80% | of tenured professors. There are not 90 elite universities in the | United States, and 90 is not "few." | cletus wrote: | You cannot overstate the importance of "social proof" in terms of | your access to education, work opportunities and even social | status in American life. | | This is really why you go to elite universities: to open doors. | It's not just the people you meet and build relationships with | while at those august institutions, it's the preferential | treatment you'll get from former alumni as well as the perception | of you being more capable by just having that name on your CV. | You've gotten admitted to such an institution and graduated. | | The tech world prides itself on being a meritocracy but "social | proof" is just as prevalent. Going to an elite school will get | you better access to internships, which will get you better | access to jobs and so on. | | Academia is just a more extreme version of this. A friend (who | did manage to secure a tenure track position in the humanities | against all odds as a non-Harvard graduate) once told me "you'll | never be without a job with Harvard on your CV". Academic | departments view prestige by how many Harvard graduates you have | on staff. | | The scandals in academic publishing are just symptomatic of this: | trading on prestige, trading on connections, not wanting to rock | the boat, etc. | | It would be nice if this was because a few elite universities are | so good at training academics but I think we all know that isn't | entirely the case. | riskneutral wrote: | The most desirable jobs in the private sector are also filled by | graduates of the same few elite universities, and this elitism is | perpetuated by all of academia (not just the top few | universities). The elite class has constructed this system to | perpetuate itself. Academia (the core pillar of elitism) is the | last place where this hiring inequality will be addressed (if it | ever is addressed, which is highly doubtful). | Ancalagon wrote: | This is pretty much why I left physics, any worthwhile research | career was over before it even started since I went to a lower- | tier state university. Not saying that's indicative of all fields | considering the difficulty of physics and few number of faculty | and lab positions available for such skillsets, but that was my | experience. | | I looked around at my professors in undergrad and virtually all | had come from Ivies or other institutions of similar caliber. | | At least software pays well. | mmmmpancakes wrote: | Same here but for math. I did a survey of who was getting the | TT jobs I wanted in the cities I wanted to live in and the | trend was that they all went to Harvard / Princeton with a few | exceptions. Seeing how strongly those profile elements, which I | don't have, correlated with success getting into TT, and how | few positions there are, it was easy to decide to leave. | | Other factors include pay for TT professors in high CoL cities | not keeping up well enough with inflation over the last 10 | years. Those salaries look much worse now than they did when I | entered grad school. For the level of education it is underpay | for overwork. | | Doing science in industry pays substantially better, has better | WL balance (really anything will compared to academia), has | more job openings in more cities, and there are plenty of | challenging problems to work on. Moreover, research skills that | STEM phds and academics have are highly valued, at least by | some companies. | | In the end things seem to have worked out for me. I was warned | about all this back when I entered grad school but didn't | listen because I really wanted to do math. Following that | passion was a good instinct after all even if I wasn't able to | achieve the original goals exactly as I planned. I'd 100% do it | again. | asperous wrote: | I would be interested to see what would happen if they blinded | professor interviews to alma mater. Because that might help | determine how much of it is bias-- 100%? | | The inverse correlation would be that people who end up being | professors attended those colleges. Maybe they were more likely | to get in or are more interested in academia so focused applying | to those colleges. | efficax wrote: | it isn't exactly the fact that you got your phd from harvard | that makes the harvard degree so valuable, it's that your | thesis director is a Harvard professor and your letters of | recommendation are from Harvard professors and other top | schools, and the labs you worked at were lead by harvard | professors etc. You could remove the fact that the applicant | was themselves graduating from Harvard and all of that would | still give them the repuation by association of a Harvard PhD. | | There are just too many additional factors that go into faculty | hiring that continue to rely on reputation gained from | association with prestige. | synergy20 wrote: | watched a documentary about blind-interview band players as | people accused the selection committee is race-biased. | | after a true blind interview is done, the result is way more | biased than before, so they cancelled that immediately, and | replaced it with a process called 'holistic review'. | muglug wrote: | Here's an article from 2020 about the New York Philharmonic: | https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind- | audition... | | Blind auditions are probably not going away anytime soon. | | The ugly truth about orchestral musicians is that nowadays | (with the general downturn in ticket sales) it's not much a | living. There are _far_ fewer professional orchestral | musicians than there were 50 years ago. Representation on a | ship that 's slowly sinking is not, IMO, incredibly pressing. | ejb999 wrote: | >>after a true blind interview is done, the result is way | more biased than before, | | How is a 'true blind interview' more biased? or do you really | mean, they didn't get the outcome they wanted? | morelandjs wrote: | 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'). | | Nice pareto principle example | theGnuMe wrote: | Love it when academia turns on itself. Interestingly Harvard and | Stanford have no claim to the hottest idea in science and | engineering right now (deep learning). | | A worse issue is that Harvard and Stanford get all the grant | money. | iudqnolq wrote: | Universities are efficient, they create many potential professors | with a small number of professors. So every class of potential | professors will have many who can't get jobs where they studied, | and will apply to less desirable places. | | This was very disheartening to realize in college. It was too | late for me to attempt to become any of the role models | physically in front of me. | Nimitz14 wrote: | I personally like it that not anyone can become a professor, it | should be an elite position imo. | iudqnolq wrote: | I agree! Just saying it wasn't super fun to realize | (completely fairly) that I wouldn't be able to become a | professor. | | And I have a lot of sympathy for my classmates who only | realized that when they graduated and tried to get a job. | Universities have significant incentives to prevent their | students from realizing there are a lot of people out there | smarter (and more privileged) than them and the implications | that flow from that. | | Universities should continue to be selective, but they should | accurately communicate the implications of that selectivity | to their students. | munk-a wrote: | I feel like this is almost like... an intuitively good thing to | be observed? I know there are a lot of complications around how | admittance to such universities can be biased and exclusionary - | but if we ignore that for a moment the pure fact that most | university professors come from the highest ranked schools is a | good thing. It means that the education you'll receive at any | university (I myself am a UVM grad which is a wonderful but | definitely not elite school) is likely being taught by adroit | professors - I'd rather have the most educated graduates all be | funneled into future teaching jobs than have lower tier | universities stuck with less well educated teachers causing a | perpetual cycle of that university being stuck as "low-tier". | | Now, in our universe (bringing back all that baggage I initially | eschewed) university "eliteness" is pretty stupid and meaningless | - it's used as a status symbol which is irrelevant as soon as you | have real work experience with the exception of academia which | _obsesses_ over degrees even into your 60s. I guess Harvard is | probably going to get you a better education than Mass Bay - but | a keen student at Mass Bay will get more out of their education | than a trust fund baby at Harvard. | lapcat wrote: | > It means that the education you'll receive at any university | (I myself am a UVM grad which is a wonderful but definitely not | elite school) is likely being taught by adroit professors | | Except that professors at research universities are hired for | their research and not for their teaching. | | Some are good teachers. Others are... not good. In any case, | teaching is not what hiring committees value. | fasthands9 wrote: | >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 | | I feel like this is not the best representation here as they | sorta switched what they are measuring. Imagine if every single | PhD from every single university became a tenured professor at | the exact same rate. We'd still see a pretty big imbalance | because presumably there are some universities which give out | 300+ PhDs per year because they have a ton of | programs/departments and others that give out 30+ per year | because they have very limited grad programs. | | Surely there is a skew but it just seems like a very deceptive | way to look at it. | | Would be like saying that 50% of all Americans who become | teachers come from just 20% of the states - but not adjusting for | the fact that 50% of the population lives in the top 10 largest | states. | lapcat wrote: | > Would be like saying that 50% of all Americans who become | teachers come from just 20% of the states - but not adjusting | for the fact that 50% of the population lives in the top 10 | largest states. | | There's data here for number of doctorates awarded by school in | 2020: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22300/data-tables | | #1 was... Walden University. Which I'd never actually heard of | before. It's a private for-profit online school. | | The rest of the top 10 is 2. Michigan 3. Illinois 4. Berkeley | 5. Purdue 6. Texas A&M 7. Stanford 8. Texas 9. Wisconsin 10. | Ohio State. | | So there's not a direct correlation between "eliteness" and | volume of doctorates produced. Some of the elite schools are | represented in this list, but "non-elite" schools are too. | mjfl wrote: | There's many opportunities to go through one of these | institutions - you could do undergrad there, grad school, or one | of multiple post docs. There's lots of people that go state | school -> ivy/prestige -> state school and end up professors. Or | state school -> state school -> ivy/prestige. Or state school -> | state school -> state school -> ivy/prestige. If you work really | hard, chances are you end up somewhere prestigious eventually. | Probably hard to avoid. | | I was also going to say that there are plenty of less prestigious | schools that graduate a ton of professors, like UC Berkeley, but | it turns out it's on this list hah. | plonk wrote: | > less prestigious schools that graduate a ton of professors, | like UC Berkeley | | How in the world can UC Berkeley be "less prestigious". It | constantly ranks world top-10 in all rankings. | willhslade wrote: | It's also literally the first / biggest university on this | list in the table at the end of the paper. | mjfl wrote: | I was thinking ivy league. smaller, more selective schools. | bcrosby95 wrote: | From looking on Google, Berkeley has about 45k students. | Harvard around 22k. Columbia 31k. Penn 24k. Princeton/Brown | only have 8k, but most ivy league schools seem to have | around 20k. | colinmhayes wrote: | Berkley is more prestigious than most ivys imo. Princeton, | yale, harvard are the only ones more prestigious. Penn and | colombia are similar. | lordnacho wrote: | The headline didn't surprise me, but the five universities named | actually did. I'd expected Harvard to be there but there's a few | mid prestige schools in the list. I'd have thought the list would | be dominated by the same old famous institutions such as Ivies | and MIT rather than large state universities. | pessimizer wrote: | Professor-level pay is not acceptable for people who attend the | Ivies and MIT. | setgree wrote: | You might be surprised by what faculty at the professional | schools (and their near-equivalents, like Econ departments) | make -- think starting salaries in the 180-250k range at | high-ranking R1 schools. | yCombLinks wrote: | That's high but not impressively high. I make that without | a degree in software. | setgree wrote: | The comment I'm responding to said that professor | salaries are "not acceptable" to ivy league and MIT | grads. I think that's misinformed, and I provided | anecdotal evidence to that effect ;) | cycomanic wrote: | What do you mean by starting salary? A tenure track | professor would typically ~35-40 years old, having gone | through undergrad, masters&phd plus a couple of postdocs. | They would also not make 250k (at least i don't know anyone | who made that sort of salary), that's the salary of a full | professor at a reasonably prestigious uni. | setgree wrote: | I'm thinking of friends who graduated from econ PhD | programs, typically at around 29-30, and made 180-250K, | depending on where they were hired. | | That's obviously not everyone, but the comment I'm | responding to said that "Professor-level pay is not | acceptable for people who attend the Ivies and MIT." I | think that low six figures is "acceptable" for people who | went to even the fanciest schools :) | nickysielicki wrote: | It's Harvard, Stanford, UCBerkeley, UMich, and UWMadison. Which | ones surprised you? UMich and UW-Madison are mid tier? | commandlinefan wrote: | Both times I was in college (undergraduate and master's degree), | it seemed like _at least_ 90% of my professors were immigrants | from foreign countries. I never really thought to ask, but I | would have assumed that they attended a foreign university in | their home country at least for undergraduate... does this mean | they all went to the same 8 institutions for a U.S.-generated PhD | before they could move into academia? | azinman2 wrote: | I don't know why this is a problem or even surprising. There are | few academic positions. Getting in and making it through the top | schools is competitive and difficult. So why wouldn't the best | and brightest and most motivated and best networked beat everyone | else out? | | I've been to every kind of level of school (public, private, non- | elite, elite). Whenever I've had someone from an elite background | teaching at a non-elite place has made me feel better about the | education I received, and was grateful for it! Relatedly, the | expectations in the elite environments were substantially higher, | which ended up producing better work from myself because of my | peers, culture, and pressure than when I was lacking those in | non-elite environments... despite the fact that I'm the same | person. | | I hate this trend perusing equality by lowering to the common | denominator. That's how you lose competitive edge in the world | and end up with a mushy disinterested public. Talent is non- | uniformly distributed... we should encourage and have ample | mechanisms for the cream to rise to the top regardless of | background. Finding ways to identify and prop up talent is what's | culturally lacking. I've seen it first hand countless times, and | it's saddened me each time because it's so wasteful for society | and the individuals. We need access to more elite institutions | not less! | epolanski wrote: | I have worked as a researcher in one of the most prestigious | labs in Switzerland and the world, and I have not seen any | correlation at all between how bright are people and where they | studied. | | We had visiting researchers from anywhere and I failed to see | any correlation between the two things in years. | | I can tell you none of the brightest came from cambridge uk or | harvard us but universities you never heard of in southern | italy or india. | | Your entire argument that follows is delusional. | | Nothing about going to Harvard makes you more qualified in | maths, e.g. than going to any European public university you | have not heard of. Education depends on the quality of teaching | and learning, and most great professors in important | universities excel at funding, not teaching. | | Even when it comes to learning, especially in stem, you will | likely learn more on books and internet and your course mates | than your lectures. Hell, internet is filled with all the | lectures you want from Harvard, MIT and more elite | universities. As for any university in the world there are good | and bad courses. | azinman2 wrote: | I can only speak to my experience, and experienced just about | every major kind of environment (private elite small, public | large, community college, regional state schools, elite | universities). I've met great people everywhere, but in | heavily uneven distribution. And in the less great | environments, having a culture of either apathy, non- | excellence, or simply not having so many great peers does | little to motivate oneself, where as having the opposite is | like a rocket ship. Videos on the internet are not a | replacement for who is around you everyday. Your peers are a | well establish major factor in determining your trajectory in | life. | | The uneven distribution will mean that MIT will put out a lot | of great candidates, where as a state school will put out few | great candidates. The people who went to MIT were in a | culture that pushed them the entire time, so they'll have | maximized their talent, where as the state school lacking | this culture will reward the same potential talent for less | accomplishment. Thus you see this 80/20 rule manifest. | | Btw the study was about American universities. I'm not sure | why you're being so defensive about Europe. It's irrelevant | to the point at hand. You could do the same study in France | or China and I'm sure you'll see a similar domestic result. | baggygenes wrote: | Yes, but let's also not conflate the idea of "brightness" and | the qualities of a productive university professor.After all, | it's much harder to get into Stanford as an undergrad than it | is to get in as a post-doc. What makes someone excel in | academia is a genuine passion for knew knowledge, creative | problem solving / experimental design, and (yes) the ability | to drum up finding to make those discoveries. Rarely is the | "smartest" person in the room most capable of being a great | researcher. Curiosity, familiarity with the state-of-the-art, | and the ability to forge genuine collaborations are far more | important than one's ability to do the actual work, I'm | afraid (that is, after all, what graduate students are for :) | epolanski wrote: | Being a good researcher does not imply being a good | professor. | | As for science it is more about hard work, and long unpaid | overwork than being smart. | | My previous lab has more than half the staff from asia e.g. | https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lpi/people/ | | Academia is a tough pyramid and at the end of the day the | only thing that matters for a faculty position is politics | and money not even your publications or ability to teach. | Those are valued at much less prestigious places (that | still produce amazing people) | peteradio wrote: | > best networked | | I think if this part ends up too high of a weight you'll end up | with a lack of diversity of ideas and ultimately a decay into | nepotism. | azinman2 wrote: | No system is perfect. There will always be certain ideas that | remain in favor versus others, and a minority of them will be | misallocated. Time eventually sorts this out. Having the | opposite approach (aka lowest common denominator) will almost | certainly be much worse off. We've seen this in places like | China and Cambodia where cultural revolutions have eliminated | the smartest people, and society/progress has suffered | greatly from it. | peteradio wrote: | I'm certainly not advocating for lowest common denominator. | It is problematic though if for instance in a field the | academic tree flows from only 3 grandfathers. | setgree wrote: | > "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. | | These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether | faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond | the rate at which they would have been hired based on other | signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are | related to what school they go to. | | I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with | marginalized peoples bears on that question. | | I believe it was Gary King who said that nepotism and meritocracy | are very hard to distinguish in academia. You would need a clever | identification strategy [0] to tease out the effects of prestige | _on the margin_. I 'm afraid this article doesn't offer much on | that front. | | [0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.15.4.69 | mrxd wrote: | What's being implied here is that the endowments of these elite | institutions were created through historical crimes, but | activists won't make an issue of that if the universities | support diverse hiring initiatives. | cma wrote: | > I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with | marginalized peoples bears on that question. | | Though it wasn't one of their examples, alumni preference in | admissions means that schools that formerly excluded based on | race still have an element of that today. | | And it means that older SATs that had stronger cultural bias in | the reading comprehension parts etc. are still affecting | admissions today, through the chain of alumni preference. | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: | It is a nice catch. I read and re-read the quote and the | argument is oddly worded. If I were to try to make sense of it | and try to defend it, I think I would say that the author is | trying to say that how you got where you are matters. It is | still a bad and poorly worded argument. Than again, 'everything | is racism' clearly sells clicks today so even non-sequitur | works. | pessimizer wrote: | The research question isn't about whether "prestige is a good | measure of excellence." That's the question that you ask | _after_ you discover that people are being hired based on | prestige, if you don 't automatically assume that's either a | bad or a good thing. | | If prestige is definitely driven by quality, it's not bad that | professors are being hired because of the prestige of the | schools they attended. But accepting that prestige is a good | measure of excellence means that we're not looking into the | history of how things became prestigious. | P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: | It doesn't follow, it's a non-sequitur. | | There's nothing about using prestige as a proxy for | excellence that has any bearing on investigating what got | them there in the first place. | | It's akin to claiming that accepting financial success as a | decent proxy for business acumen means no one is interested | in knowing how they originally because financially | successful. Not only does it not follow, it makes no sense as | to why accepting one would even imply someone wasn't | interested in the other. | setgree wrote: | Sure, I think it's good to both first get the data on which | scholars come from which schools, and I also think unpacking | the social and political construction of prestige is a great | research agenda. | | But to assess whether prestige is a source of _bias_ in the | hiring process, you have to separate prestige from other | markers of quality. Otherwise, you have a big confounding | variable problem. This author, and also the quoted professor | of education, don't seem to engage with that, and in fact | seem to beg the question by assuming that prestige is an | independent force in hiring decisions, which, I thought, was | the thing the article was trying to demonstrate. | cycomanic wrote: | Have you been on a university hiring committee? My | anecdotal evidence is that yes prestige very strongly | matters and coming from a very prestigious university often | outweights other factors such as publication record. | | I haven't read the original article yet but one can easily | test if e.g. the publication record of a graduate student | from a non-and prestigious uni differ to the extend that is | indicated by the hiring. | setgree wrote: | I have not been on a hiring committee -- I actually | failed my comprehensive exams partway through grad school | which is how I ended up in tech :) -- but your hypothesis | sounds very reasonable to me. I'm just saying that we | need a more careful causal identification strategy than | that provided herein to say whether prestige has a | meaningful effect on hiring, on average. | thfuran wrote: | >These are non-sequiturs. | | And also probably little more than proxies for the age of the | institution. | setgree wrote: | At the very least, highly correlated :) | bo1024 wrote: | They're definitely sequiturs, maybe not to the issues _you_ | want to discuss. You seem focused on how much academia is a | meritocracy. There is an important and different question of | how diverse and accessible academia is. | | For example certain Olympic sports like dressage (horse | jumping) are meritocracies, but very exclusionary (or at least | non diverse, non accessible). | NovemberWhiskey wrote: | It is certainly a non-sequitur: can we simultaneously accept, | or reject, the idea that prestige is a good measure of | excellence while looking at (or not looking at) the history | of how things become prestigious? Yes, we can. The one has | nothing to do with the other. | setgree wrote: | The subtitle of this article is "'Jarring' study reveals | hiring bias at US institutions." | | Trying to ascertain whether prestige leads to "hiring bias" | is asking whether it has an independent effect on hiring. If | prestige had zero effect -- if the observed correlation was | actually measuring markers of researcher quality with which | prestige is likely to be correlated -- then there would be | zero bias. | | The fact that those institutions did many horrible things | historically does not provide evidence on that question. | That's why I called it a non-sequitur. | throwaway0asd wrote: | The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to | thrive due to the lack of controls. Prestige is an unrelated | red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for | social gravity in many walks of life. This is commonly referred | to as _implicit bias_ and is generally the most common cause of | various forms of selection bias, including racial | discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike. | drewcoo wrote: | > non-sequiturs | | if prestige is a good measure -> how did it get | that way? -> exclusion -> examples | of exclusion | | You might claim the point is not germane for other reasons but | clearly this shows a clear sequence of thought so the claim | "non-sequitur" doesn't hold. "It's too hard to measure" also | doesn't mean "not germane," though. | lapcat wrote: | > The research question here is whether faculty are hired from | those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which | they would have been hired based on other signals of their | potential as researchers | | It's interesting that you use the word "potential". Tenure- | track positions are very hard to get, and most newly minded | PhDs have very little track record. If they're lucky, they have | a publication or two in a journal, but many will have only | their dissertation. So I think the question is whether PhDs | coming from prestigious schools are judged to have more | "research potential" based on where they come from rather than | their limited record. | | The "potential" problem is even worse when it comes to | admitting undergraduates into graduate programs. | | If you don't get a tenure-track position right out of grad | school, it can be difficult to ever work your way up to one, | because you'll probably have to take a job at a school with a | greater teaching load than a typical research university, which | leaves little time for you to do your research and prove | yourself. In a sense, the "potential" becomes a self-fulfilling | prophesy. | peteradio wrote: | Many fields you'd have many more papers than just your | dissertation (not that I did, looks at ground). | humanistbot wrote: | This is why it has become normal to do 3-7 years of postdoc | research positions before being considered for a tenure-track | faculty position, even for those from elite universities. | barry-cotter wrote: | Only in fields where there's no demand for their skills | outside academia, like English literature or History, or | vastly more supply than demand, like most of the sciences. | Fields like Economics or Computer Science have post docs | but they're not normative. Most people who end up with | tenure track jobs never do one. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | This is a really ignorant question and I'm pretty sure I already | know the answer. But say I wanted to become a teacher at some | school, specifically teaching things like "how to organize and | execute the operational side of a tech product", or "managing | Enterprise IT". You have to have a degree (in something) first, | right? They won't just hire someone with 25 years experience and | no degree to teach a class? | bo1024 wrote: | To teach a class or two on the side, they absolutely would. For | full time options, there is a title "professor of the practice" | which might not need a PhD but it's a bit rare. | mrkeen wrote: | Which came first, the professor or the degree? | | When schools open new programs, they need people to teach the | degree when it didn't previously exist. | | Simon Peyton Jones skipped the PhD but later became a lecturer | and professor and a whole lot more: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones#Education | hammock wrote: | Finding an 80/20 rule (this one literally 80% from 20%) ought to | be expected, not "jarring." It's natural and not sinister. | | If something _other_ than the 80 /20 rule was found, that might | be cause for alarm or further exploration | [deleted] | psKama wrote: | Not sure in what context the word "elite" is used when it comes | to claiming there is a hiring bias. It may be thought that those | schools have very high fees to attend but I would argue/claim | (with no data in my hand) if it was looked deeper into their | background, it is very likely that majority of those professors | attended those schools via a sort of scholarship to start with as | a result of their success prior to universities they got | accepted. | | Therefore, although "elite" indicates mainly a social class, | majority of those people are very likely coming from mid-class | families and they just happen to have a good academic record. | With that in mind, I wouldn't call this a bias but just a normal | and beneficial outcome of the academic system. | NovemberWhiskey wrote: | Virtually no-one at a top school is spending a penny to get | their PhD. Most of them are getting paid to do so. | mrkeen wrote: | > it is very likely that majority of those professors attended | those schools via a sort of scholarship to start with as a | result of their success prior to universities they got | accepted. When it comes to admissions to | elite schools, money can all but guarantee access to those who | can afford it https://www.theguardian.com/us- | news/2019/mar/13/rich-kids-top-college-admissions | Animats wrote: | That's what the Ivy League is for. It's difficult to flunk | out of Harvard. 98% of those admitted graduate. | msackler1 wrote: | I see almost every "related" article on Nature is complaining | about white men but that's not very precise, can we drill | down into the ethnicity of these CA/MA elites, how many are | Irish, jewish, etc? | qualifiedai wrote: | and if you check where they were before that last Ph.D step from | elite university it would probably be all over the world, | especially for STEM. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-22 23:00 UTC)