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Where Do Faculty Receive Their PhDs?
Is there an academic velvet rope? Here's how the academic labor system preserves institutional hierarchy and status.
By Stephen Wu
Most faculty members in the arts and sciences advise their undergraduate students that attending a highly rated graduate institution is paramount to landing a prestigious academic job upon graduation. The empirical evidence supporting this claim is not extensive, however; relatively little systematic research has analyzed the issue. This article looks at the doctoral origins of faculty members at top research universities and liberal arts colleges for six different disciplines (chemistry, economics, English, history, mathematics, and sociology) to determine differences across fields of study and between the two types of institutions (whose goals and missions may vary).Colleges and universities now customarily provide information on their faculties on their Web sites, including such details as years of hiring, dates and places where degrees were earned, and research specialties. I obtained information for this article mainly from the Web sites of the top twenty-five research universities and liberal arts colleges, as determined by the U.S. News and World Report rankings for 2004. I included in my database only faculty members holding permanent positions at the rank of assistant, associate, or full professor. I excluded individuals holding temporary and adjunct positions, emeriti faculty, and individuals whose doctoral school could not be identified. The resulting data set includes information for slightly over five thousand faculty members in six departments at fifty leading colleges and universities. For ratings of doctoral schools, I used the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings of programs in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. From these overall rankings, I categorize the programs as in the top ten, the top twenty, or outside of the top twenty. There are separate rankings for each of the six disciplines studied. Although I relied on U.S. News and World Report, the correlation between different ranking schemes is high, so my results would probably not differ significantly had I used another ranking. The first table shows the doctoral origins of faculty in six departments at the top twenty-five research universities. Economics is by far the most concentrated of the disciplines. More than 67 percent of economics faculty received their doctorates from a top-ten PhD program, and almost 82 percent earned doctorates from a program in the top twenty. The next most concentrated discipline is history, where the analogous top ten and top twenty percentages are 58.9 and 74.9. Chemistry and mathematics are the least concentrated of the disciplines; in each, about half of faculty doctorates came from a top-ten PhD program. One possible explanation for the lower numbers in the sciences (especially math) is the significant number of faculty at highly rated U.S. institutions who obtained their PhDs overseas. Table 2 shows the same percentages for liberal arts colleges. The order of the degree concentration differs from that at re-search institutions. Among liberal arts colleges, English and history have the highest percentage of professors with PhDs from top-ranked institutions. Economics is the third most concentrated discipline; 45.8 percent of the economics faculty received doctorates from top-ten programs. Sociology has the lowest percentage of faculty earning doctorates from the top PhD programs. Table 3 calculates by discipline the differences between top research universities and top liberal arts colleges in the concentration of doctorates from highly rated schools. The table shows that these differences vary significantly by department. In economics and sociology, elite research universities have a significantly higher concentration of faculty with doctorates from top-twenty schools than do elite liberal arts schools. The percentage differences are 22.0 and 26.7, respectively. Meanwhile, the analogous percentages for history and English are only 3.5 and 2.6, respectively. The sciences fall in the middle, with differentials of 5.9 percent for chemistry and 8.2 percent for mathematics. It is interesting that the two social science disciplines have the largest differences, the two humanities disciplines have the smallest differences, and the two science disciplines fall in the middle.1 The finding that liberal arts colleges have a lower concentration of PhDs from top programs than research universities is not surprising, given that research universities tend to emphasize the value of publishing more than do liberal arts colleges, which place relatively more importance on the quality of teaching. One potential explanation for this difference is that while the concentration of the best scholars in a field may be higher in the top PhD-granting institutions, the best teachers may be more evenly distributed across all tiers of graduate programs. This study shows that graduates from the top-rated PhD programs continue to hold an overwhelming share of faculty positions at leading colleges and universities. Still, there is a fair amount of variation by field as well by institution type. The reasons for these disparities are unclear, but they merit further investigation. A closer look at the academic labor market for different disciplines would be a worthwhile exercise. Note1. Many historians would classify themselves as humanists, but others would consider themselves social scientists. Back to text. Stephen Wu is assistant professor of economics at Hamilton College. He thanks Quang Nguyen for assisting with the research for this article.
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