Study: Most Professors Considered for Tenure Come from Handful of “Elite Institutions,” Highlighting Biased Hiring Process

I’m sure at this point, there are some people who visit this site that are growing tired of my college/education commentary.

But… it bothers the hell outta me, so the articles are gonna keep coming as long as there’s something to gripe about.

This won’t come as a huge surprise to anyone, but the professors that are chosen for tenured positions tend to come from the same handful of universities.

From The Blaze:

A new study in the journal Nature has found that U.S. universities hire most of their tenure-track faculty members from the same handful of elite institutions. The finding suggests that academic researchers have “little opportunity to obtain jobs at institutions considered more elite than the ones at which they were trained,” a summary of the study states.

To gather their data, researchers looked into the academic backgrounds of 295,089 faculty members at more than 350 institutions. They found that 80% of all U.S.-trained faculty received their doctorate at just 20.4% of universities. The five most popular universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stanford—accounted for one in eight faculty members.

The analysis also showed that, depending on the academic field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution deemed more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD.

“It’s not surprising, but it is jarring” to see the data, said Leslie Gonzales, a social scientist who studies higher education at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “There’s so much brilliant work and training of brilliant scholars that’s happening outside of this tiny sliver” of institutions, and it’s being overlooked, Gonzales added.

Most prestigious academic programs admit students based on a combination of standardized test scores, letters of recommendation, and the prestige of their undergraduate degree. Some experts argue that these factors unfairly limit who can be accepted into such programs and ultimately restricts the scope of scientific research.

On the surface level, it makes sense. Colleges want to pick the most “qualified” candidates for positions of tenure. It’s a pretty sweet gig after all…

But who’s saying that these schools in particular produce the best candidates? Oh yeah… the same universities that have a biased faculty and are running America’s higher education system into the ground…

They don’t want us lowly rubes on staff because they’re afraid we might red pill somebody. This fear takes us out of the running even if we’re far more qualified for the job. After all… diversity only really matters if there’s too many white, cisgender males in the room.

Ivy league degrees don’t make you smart. You can graduate from Harvard and still be a complete idiot… Common sense plays a major role in what people consider “smart.” Ironically, people that attend these “superior” institutions seem to be lacking in that department.

In the article from The Blaze that I referenced above, there’s one quote in particular that I love. Aaron Clauset, a computer scientist at CU Boulder, says this:

“By not being as diverse as we could be, as inclusive as we could be, we are losing smart people who could change the world for the better.”

By filtering candidates for tenure by only selecting from a handful of universities that have been deemed “superior,” we ruin our chances of really solving problems. If professors come from the same institutions, they all think the same way, talk the same way, and teach the same way. It’s not really their fault, it’s just what happens when they’re all educated at the same freaking place…

This filtering also means that young people that go to college will all begin to think and talk the same way too. But that’s what the goal is, isn’t it? To produce a nation full of yes-men? Good citizens that follow directions, no questions asked?

No thanks… I’ll gladly go to, and later work at, a smaller school if it means I get to keep my own mind. Seems like a small price to pay…