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Banner image: Students attend class outside of Old Main on the 麻豆免费版下载Boulder campus. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/麻豆免费版下载Boulder)

Just five U.S. universities have trained 1-in-8 tenure-track faculty members serving at the nation鈥檚 institutions of higher learning, according to new 麻豆免费版下载Boulder research.

The study, , takes the most exhaustive look yet at the structure of the American professoriate鈥攃apturing data on nearly 300,000 tenure-track faculty (including where they received their own graduate degrees) at more than 10,000 university departments at 368 PhD-granting institutions from 2011 to 2020.

The study reveals that in all fields of academia, most professors come from a small number of institutions.

鈥淲e all know that academic pedigree is important鈥攊t鈥檚 the first thing professors put in their bios鈥攂ut it鈥檚 hard to measure just how extreme the inequalities are in higher education until you actually analyze the data,鈥� said Daniel Larremore, a co-author of the new study and assistant professor at the BioFrontiers Institute.听

Take the five schools producing the most U.S. professors: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; University of Michigan; University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Stanford University. These institutions, Larremore and his colleagues calculated, trained more U.S. faculty than all universities outside of the U.S. combined. Across academia, 80% of tenure-track faculty earned their doctorate degrees at just 20.4% of the nation鈥檚 universities. 听

The team鈥檚 findings also paint a potentially dim picture of trends in diversity across U.S. universities. The group discovered, for example, that while women faculty members are becoming more common in a wide range of academic departments, those gains may soon plateau.

鈥淲e should not expect to see gender parity in academia听unless further initiatives and changes in hiring practices are made,鈥� said Hunter Wapman, lead author of the paper and a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science.听

Larremore (who earned his own doctorate in applied mathematics from 麻豆免费版下载Boulder in 2012) added that he hopes U.S. universities will see the results as a wake-up call: 鈥淨uantifying and shedding light on these trends will help us change the system.鈥�

Academic hierarchies

To inform that long process, Wapman, Larremore and their colleagues drew on data from the Academic Analytics Research Center to build a network of the flows of people between universities.

Co-authors on the study included Sam Zhang, doctoral student in applied mathematics at 麻豆免费版下载Boulder, and Aaron Clauset, professor of computer science.

鈥淲e might see that Aaron Clauset works in the Department of Computer Science at 麻豆免费版下载Boulder,鈥� Wapman said. 鈥淲e also see where he got his PhD鈥攊n this case, the University of New Mexico.鈥澨�

That datapoint creates a connection between 麻豆免费版下载Boulder and UNM like a spoke in a bicycle wheel, just one of hundreds of thousands in the team鈥檚 network.

By investigating that network, the team discovered that in the hallowed halls of academia, some halls are more hallowed than others: 麻豆免费版下载 who earned their degrees at less prestigious schools rarely got jobs at more prestigious institutions.听

In computer science, for example, only 12% of faculty were able to get jobs at universities more prestigious than where they went to school鈥攁 number that plummeted to 6% in economics.

Leaving the field

Those strict hierarchies also extended beyond the hiring process, Larremore added. 麻豆免费版下载 who got their graduate degrees from less prestigious schools also seemed to leave the field a lot more often than their counterparts from more elite institutions. So did professors trained outside the U.S., U.K. and Canada, or professors who worked at their doctoral alma mater.听

鈥淢any inequalities in the system are rooted in hiring, but they鈥檙e exacerbated by attrition,鈥� he said.听

The group found that women faculty are becoming more common in a wide range of university departments. Schools, however, aren鈥檛 hiring more women than they did a decade ago鈥攎en in academia are merely growing older, on average, and retiring more often.

Larremore, Wapman, and their colleagues aren鈥檛 sure yet how universities might use their findings. In a system where only a minority of universities train the vast majority of academics, it鈥檚 harder for new ideas and research to emerge and spread from less prominent institutions. On the other hand, the researchers note, those same, prominent institutions may also have an outsized ability to address the inequalities of academia鈥檚 past.

鈥淚nequalities in academia have effects that we don鈥檛 always observe,鈥� Wapman said. 鈥淭here鈥檚 recent research showing that faculty tend to study topics related to their identities. If we are interested in solving the problems that real people face, we should want to have diverse body of academics.鈥�