Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities – Nature

Paul Marotta/Getty

US universities hire most of their tenure-track faculty members from the same handful of elite institutions, according to a study. The finding suggests that prestige is overvalued in hiring decisions and that academic researchers have little opportunity to obtain jobs at institutions considered more elite than the ones at which they were trained.

“Is the system a meritocracy?” asks Daniel Larremore, a computational scientist at UC Boulder who is a co-author . “In peer review, no; in the spread of ideas, no; and in faculty hiring, surely no.”

Advertisement