An article in Nature a few months ago documented where professors across all fields got their PhDs; the study found:
Overall, 80% of all domestically trained faculty in our data were trained at just 20.4% of universities. Moreover, the five most common doctoral training universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford—account for just over one in eight domestically trained faculty (13.8%; Fig. 2a and Extended Data Table 3). Even when disaggregated into domains of study, 80% of faculty were trained at only 19–28% of universities (Fig. 2b).
A couple of observations. The fields studied were the humanities, social sciences, applied sciences, natural sciences, mathematics & computing, medicine & health, engineering, and education. While the "big five" producers (above) are all excellent research universities they are also distinguished by being comprehensive in a way that, e.g., Princeton or MIT are not (the latter, for example, do not offer PhDs in education, or medicine; and MIT does not offer PhDs in all the social sciences and humanities).
The authors of the study have also not thought carefully about their results. They declare that, "Our analyses show universal inequalities in which a small minority of universities supply a large majority of faculty across fields, exacerbated by patterns of attrition and reflecting steep hierarchies of prestige." If they are using "inequality" purely descriptively, then I guess that is true, but the whole tenor of the piece is that there is something wrong with this pattern. But where is the evidence that this "inequality" is in any way pernicious or damaging to the academy? The "big five" are, as just noted, not only leading research universities but deep and broad in the PhD fields they cover. Is that not exactly where one would hope the next generation of academic researchers and teachers are trained? (Of course, similar patterns obtain in philosophy, except because of the PGR, the "top producers" of faculty are not quite the same as in the above study across all fields.)
Thoughts from readers on the Nature study?
