Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks

Abstract

The faculty job market plays a fundamental role in shaping research priorities, educational outcomes, and career trajectories among scientists and institutions. However, a quantitative understanding of faculty hiring as a system is lacking. Using a simple technique to extract the institutional prestige ranking that best explains an observed faculty hiring network-who hires whose graduates as faculty-we present and analyze comprehensive placement data on nearly 19,000 regular faculty in three disparate disciplines. Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality. Furthermore, doctoral prestige alone better predicts ultimate placement than a U.S. News & World Report rank, women generally place worse than men, and increased institutional prestige leads to increased faculty production, better faculty placement, and a more influential position within the discipline. These results advance our ability to quantify the influence of prestige in academia and shed new light on the academic system.

Keywords: faculty placement; hierarchy; hiring networks; inequality; prestige.

Fig. 1. Prestige hierarchies in faculty hiring networks.

(Top) Placements for 267 computer science faculty among 10 universities, with placements from one particular university highlighted. Each arc (u,v) has a width proportional to the number of current faculty at university v who received their doctorate at university u (≠v). (Bottom) Prestige hierarchy on these institutions that minimizes the total weight of “upward” arcs, that is, arcs where v is more highly ranked than u.

Fig. 2. Inequality in faculty production.

(A) Lorenz curves showing the fraction of all faculty produced as a function of producing institutions. (B and C) Complementary cumulative distributions for institution out-degree (faculty produced) and in-degree (faculty hired). The means of these distributions are 21 for computer science, 70 for business, and 29 for history.

Fig. 3. Faculty placement distributions.

(A) Network visualizations for computer science, business, and history (top to bottom) showing central positions for institutions in the top 15% of prestige ranks (highlighted; vertex size proportional to k_o). (B and C) Estimated probability density functions for relative change in prestige (doctoral to faculty institution) for (B) the top 15% and (C) the remaining institutions, showing a common but right-skewed structure.

Fig. 4. Core-periphery patterns.

(A to C) For several institutions within each disciplinary hiring network, we highlight the tree of shortest paths rooted at each u within this network (black) for (A) computer science, (B) business, and (C) history (vertex size is proportional to out-degree, and lighter colors indicate higher prestige). As prestige increases (left), the paths in these trees contract, reflecting a more central network position, increased faculty production, and better faculty placement.