Ph.D.'s From Top Political-Science Programs Dominate Hiring, Research Finds. Departments at 11 elite universities provide half of the field's tenured and tenure-track professors.

Flashback 2012. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

For Ph.D. students in political science who have complained that graduates of top-ranked programs get all the job offers, new research on hiring practices in the field won't make them feel any better.

That's because an analysis of more than 3,000 professors at more than 100 institutions shows that there is a direct link between graduating from a prestigious political-science program and getting a coveted tenure-track position at a research-intensive university.

"When you're talking about hiring someone who is a Ph.D. or with a professional degree, you should be trying to find someone who is an expert in their field—no matter what program they're in," said Robert Oprisko, a visiting assistant professor in international studies at Butler University, who studies how individuals benefit from membership in certain groups and how those groups benefit from excellence in such groups. "But you will find this is absolutely not the case."

Mr. Oprisko's research, recently previewed in an article he wrote in The Georgetown Public Policy Review, showed that four institutions—Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford Universities and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor—saw a total of 616 of their political-science graduates hired into what amounts to 20 percent of tenure-track positions available in the discipline at research-intensive institutions.

No egalitarianism for you!