Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005
Abstract
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.
