The Closed Network of Faculty Hiring

Colleen Flaherty reports on a study of academic hiring.

The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline.

My guess is that if you were to study the economics field, the concentration would be even higher.

You can think of this as a very natural equilibrium. A few graduate schools get good reputations. They then get a huge share of the best students. With the best students, they place students well. This reinforces their ability to attract the best students. etc.

The actual quality of teaching does not matter in this equilibrium. In fact, MIT, where I went, had a reputation of caring more about teaching than other top departments. In hindsight, the few classmates with whom I keep in touch think that the classroom instruction was really poor. Some of the courses in the required sequences were a complete waste of time (Ray Fair, I’m looking at you.) Tom Rothenberg, who visited for a semester from Berkeley (and then quickly fled the Boston weather), was by far the best teacher we had. In fact, the core was taught much more by visiting professors (Fair, Dixit, Begg, Rothenberg) than by permanent faculty, which tells you how much the permanent faculty really cared about teaching.

I don’t have a problem with an equilibrium in which the best students are attracted to a few departments. But when only a few dissertation advisers control entire sub-fields, you get a dreadful monoculture. I have said many times that I think that macro suffered from this. The field became completely dominated by students of Thomas Sargent at Minnesota and Stan Fischer and Rudi Dornbusch at MIT. Together, they produced nothing but a giant garbage factory.

8 thoughts on “The Closed Network of Faculty Hiring

  1. This outcome is entirely normal if (A) departments produce more PhDs each year than they hire, (B) non-academic jobs are not a big part of the demand for PhDs , and (C) there is a ranking or hierarchy of departments. No surprise.

    In contrast, academic Finance satisfies (C) but not A or B. As a result, I believe there is much less concentration than in Economics, or most other fields.

    Dr. Kling points out the bigger danger: *within* departments, some professors advise vastly more PhDs than do others. So you have a second level of concentration and indeed one professor can end up being intellectual father or grandfather to thousands across US universities.

  2. Looks like the 80/20 rule is humming along fine. One of my new standards for education is how well it combats outcomes you would expect from a signaling-only process. We know that really “good” “advisors” (defined as those with lots of students who publish lots of papers) still only have 24 hours in a day. So you aren’t getting much advice. It had better be really good. If it is only above average that doesn’t make up for the fact that you won’t get much of their attention and what your do get will be poorly tailored to your interests (both kinds). I have ‘heard’ even reasonably sized groups advisors giving the same ideas to two advisees and sitting back and waiting to see who brings back positive results.

    • Not sure if this is your question, but I think that it is the case that the research output of faculty out side the top 10 departments can be quite high. It is the quality of grad students that they attract that tends to be very low.

Comments are closed.