In our September “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:
I’d like to know the extent to which the prestige of one’s PhD-granting institution (or even master’s or undergrad) affects hiring in the very top UK and US universities. I struggle to find examples of people graduating from less prestigious universities getting postdocs or jobs at these more prestigious universities. This is unfortunate in the UK in particular, as even if you get accepted into a more prestigious university, funding is rare and some cannot self-fund. Would people who have sat on hiring committees have any insights or impressions on this matter?
The late Helen De Cruz (R.I.P.) published some good work on this in 2018. As discussed here in 2020, there do seem to be pretty serious prestige effects across the academy:
- Eric Schwitzgebel found in 2019 that elite philosophy PhD programs mostly admit students from elite undergrad institutions, and that only 11% of students in the elite PhD programs he studied were from institutions not nationally ranked in US News & World Report.
- Helen De Cruz found in 2018 that philosophy PhDs from low-ranked departments rarely secure employment in high-ranked departments.
- This 2015 study found steeply hierarchical inequality in faculty hiring across three disciplines, with just a quarter of all universities accounting for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada. The study also found that “18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors.”
That said, I am sure there are exceptions. Are any search committee members able to weigh in to share helpful insights?
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