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Choosing a School for PhD
This post is inspired in large part by discussion over at Cosmic Variance about the importance of choice of particular graduate school and pedigree effect. Two extreme points of view are: a) pedigree matters a great deal, having a top school name on your resume will enhance your chances of getting a job and b) pedigree effect is non-existent, and if you are smart and do good science, it doesn’t matter where your degree is from. Additional discussion centered on issue of difficulty of “upward” mobility – which means that most people tend to get positions down the ranking ladder from their PhD institutions, not up.
It’s of course difficult to do proper “controlled” measure of pedigree effect – maybe students selected by top program would do just as well in lower ranked programs, who knows.
So let’s ask a different question – how many of the academic jobs in top research universities go to PhDs from the top programs? Ideally one would want to focus on recent hires only, looking at entire faculty makeup means integrating over the past50 or 60 years, with a big hiring spike in sputnik/cold war years. One way to address this issue is to look only at associate and assistant professors, which typically represent recent hires. Another, possibly better, way is to limit by the years of PhD (say count only PhDs obtained past 1995), but it involves more work. I spent about 4 hours compiling the data, and not sure I want to spend much more on this, even though it is a lot of fun and I am a sucker for playing with numbers.
So here’s the statistics, and I will criticize methods later – AIP graduate program listings, which I believe are compiled in 2005-2006 list 636 professors in the top 50 institutions (I used NRC’95 rankings) in associate or assistant rank. Typically their PhD years span about 12-15 year period from about 1990 till ~2003-2004. 162 of them have foreign PhDs (more on that later) and 472 held PhDs from US. More than half of those hires have PhDs from just 8 institutions: Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford, Caltech and Cornell. The effect is larger than I expected, but perhaps not completely unexpected.
Below are the institutions that have 3 or more PhD graduates among 636 assistant/associate rank professors in the top 50 physics programs:
| Harvard University
Princeton University MIT Univ. of California-Berkeley University of Chicago Stanford University CALTECH Cornell University University of Michigan Columbia University University of Minnesota Univ of California-San Diego Univ of CA-Santa Barbara Univ of Il Urbana-Champaign University of Washington Yale University SUNY-Stony Brook University of Texas at Austin Univ of Wisconsin-Madison Johns Hopkins University University of Pennsylvania University of Rochester Univ of California-Los Angeles Univ of Maryland College Park Northwestern University Rice University University of Colorado Boston University Indiana University Rutgers -New Brunswick Brandeis University Duke University Purdue University |
42
39 34 32 29 28 26 22 14 13 11 9 9 9 9 9 8 8 8 7 7 7 6 6 5 5 5 4 4 4 3 3 3 |
Foreign degrees are more scattered all over the world, but here’s some strong contributors:
| MoscowCambridgeOxford
Munich Toronto Vienna Warsaw |
15128
8 8 3 3 |
Top 10 universities contribute 59% of US PhD hires, those ranked 11-20 provide another 18%, the next ten ranked 21-30 provide 10%, and ALL of the remaining US universities contribute remaining 12% or so.
More charts like:
Percentage of PhDs that goes on to become faculty at top 50 universities.
Comparison ranking in terms of total PhD hires and ranking of USNews and NRC.
and the complete article is available at Incoherently Scattered Ponderings
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