> One in eight US-trained tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
It's worth noting that 3 of these 5 are public — only 2 are private. I was expecting to see a list of Ivies, but there's only one on the list. Things are much more skewed among law professors, who are mostly from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, and Michigan.
> This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).
What a silly comparison. University faculty are not selected from "the general population" — only people with PhDs (or JDs/MBAs/MDs, in certain fields) can get these positions. The relevant baseline percentage is: what percent of people seeking faculty positions (i.e., people with the requisite terminal degree) have a parent with a PhD?
Otherwise you're comparing (1) people who successfully got a job with tons of requirements with (2) Americans, generally. If you're going to do that, why not use the average rate worldwide, which would undoubtedly be even lower? Plenty of professors were born outside the US, after all!
A faulty comparison like this calls into question the seriousness of the article.
EDIT: another commenter linked to a list of the schools with the largest number of PhD graduates. [1] It turns out that all but one of the 5 schools listed here is on the top 10 list for volume of graduates. So the conclusion is: the schools with the most PhD graduates...produce a large chunk of professors? Not a huge surprise.
It's worth noting that 3 of these 5 are public — only 2 are private. I was expecting to see a list of Ivies, but there's only one on the list. Things are much more skewed among law professors, who are mostly from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, and Michigan.
> This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).
What a silly comparison. University faculty are not selected from "the general population" — only people with PhDs (or JDs/MBAs/MDs, in certain fields) can get these positions. The relevant baseline percentage is: what percent of people seeking faculty positions (i.e., people with the requisite terminal degree) have a parent with a PhD?
Otherwise you're comparing (1) people who successfully got a job with tons of requirements with (2) Americans, generally. If you're going to do that, why not use the average rate worldwide, which would undoubtedly be even lower? Plenty of professors were born outside the US, after all!
A faulty comparison like this calls into question the seriousness of the article.
EDIT: another commenter linked to a list of the schools with the largest number of PhD graduates. [1] It turns out that all but one of the 5 schools listed here is on the top 10 list for volume of graduates. So the conclusion is: the schools with the most PhD graduates...produce a large chunk of professors? Not a huge surprise.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32945639