Small, elite network heavily represented in academia, study finds

The Boston Globe reports:

A study of nearly 19,000 faculty in computer science, business, and history departments in the United States and Canada finds that top universities like the ones that help give Massachusetts its international renown form a kind of insular academic club, hiring most of their faculty from others in a small, elite network.

Just a quarter of the 461 academic departments studied produce the majority -- somewhere between 71 to 86 percent -- of all tenure-track faculty, the researchers found. The pattern was not simply explained by differences in merit, and the researchers argue that it may have “profound implications for the free exchange of ideas” in their study published this week in Science Advances.

The pattern could shape what type of research is done, what collaborations occur, and which ideas catch on easily.

The work by a trio that included a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health provides a detailed quantitative look at the role prestige and hierarchy play in academia. Half of the faculty in each discipline studied are trained at a small number of institutions. In computer science, 18 institutions produce half the faculty; in history, 8 schools account for half the professors; and in business, 16 institutions produce half.

In the rankings, which are based on where doctoral students end up landing faculty jobs, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were both ranked in the top-10 in business and computer science, and Harvard was ranked first in history, Brandeis University was eighth.

“People have beliefs about how they think the system works,” said Daniel Larremore, a postdoc at Harvard who specializes in studying networks and devotes most of his attention these days to studying the spread of the malaria parasite. “Our study provides hard data to substantiate and then unpack the nuances of this market.”

Another good reason to get rid of tenure.