<p>Hello. I am a third year undergraduate computer science student. I am wondering is it possible to obtain a tenure-track position at a highly-ranked university if one obtains his/her PhD from a university that is not ranked as high. Is it possible for one who earned his/her PhD from a top-40 or top-50 school to get a tenure-track position at a top-10 even top-5 university?</p>
<p>it is entirely possible. where you came from does not matter much at all. what's most important is the quality of work you produce and the direction you wish to pursue as a faculty member.</p>
<p>^ I think that's misleading. When reviewing your application, the tenured faculty of your prospective top 5 department will certainly care if you haven't received your PhD from one of the top five programs in your field. Why would they take you over someone who has such disqualifications and is thus probably a much more productive and influential up-and-coming researcher?</p>
<p>I don't know much about computer science and think your best way of finding out good information about this would be to ask your professors. Assuming they are plugged into the national scene, they should know and understand the academic job market in computer science. </p>
<p>For one, they will know about the relative supply and market for computer science PhDs in academia.</p>
<p>That said, in many fields, the first thing search committees look at is the job candidate's PhD institution and advisor, followed by the dissertation topic. People want to know who the job candidate has worked with. A school with a strong PhD program helps open doors, but a slightly less strong one would be fine, too, if one's dissertation advisor is well-respected and one's research program fits their programmatic needs and appears to make a significant contribution to knowledge in the field.</p>
<p>I'm not certain about CS - from what I can gather, that can be a different animal from sciences or humanities. However, from what I have heard and observed, schools generally hire within their tier and above. By tier, I refer to approximate ranking for the field/subfield. General reputation doesn't matter much at all. Of course, this is dependent on how crowded the field is. In a shortage field, this doesn't hold true, obviously.</p>
<p>A good indicator is to see who's working where. For example, looking at Caltech's Computer Science faculty page, I count PhDs from Caltech (3), RPI, MIT (3), Cornell, Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics (Russian program, native Russian professor), Berkeley (2), Grenoble, and Princeton, with 2 unlisted. Looking at MIT's website for Computer Science, I see Berkeley (12), MIT (34), Michigan (2), Stanford (10), Minnesota (in the 70s - name of program mattered far less back then), Columbia, Oxford (with experience at CERN!), Penn, Virginia, Waterloo, Grenoble (2), Washington, Toronto, Vrije Universiteit, Harvard (4), Carnegie Mellon (3), Carleton University (Canada), Genoa, Cornell, and Caltech (2), with 12 unlisted.</p>
<p>I suspect you'll notice as you research that the "better" a school, the more inbred it is. That is because they don't like to hire "below" themselves. Furthermore, most of those untenured professors at the top schools have no hope of getting tenure there.</p>
<p>Of course, there are exceptions. But the rule is pretty evident from faculty bios.</p>
<p>My impression from simply browsing through departmental websites agrees for the most part with the above comments. In History, it is very rare to see a low-tier PhD granting institution like the Morgan State University in a top program. However, I do see a graduate of the St. Louis University among the faculty of the Chicago History department (one of the top in the nation) and a graduate of the Rutgers University (a decent program, but certainly not a top) in the Michigan History department. Moreover, Peter Brown, a leading historians of the Late Antique Europe at Princeton, does not even hold a doctoral degree.</p>
<p>So I would like to add a little qualification to the above comments, which may not generalize in other disciplines. In humanities, the fact that one has received his/her doctoral degree from a top program will normally help him/her get a job at a top-tier program. However, receiving a degree from a non-top-tier program will not completely eliminate your chances. As long as you can prove that you have a legitimate claim to a spot--outstanding publications, strong interviews, etc--I think the doors are to a limited extent open to everyone.</p>
<p>"^ I think that's misleading. When reviewing your application, the tenured faculty of your prospective top 5 department will certainly care if you haven't received your PhD from one of the top five programs in your field. Why would they take you over someone who has such disqualifications and is thus probably a much more productive and influential up-and-coming researcher?"</p>
<p>True. I don't think so much top 5 is necessary. I think mostly 1. you need good work. 2. The school you got your degree from needs to be internationally known in the field, which i would say usually the top 15 programs will all satisfy that requirement. Not limited to US schools either say if you get a degree from places like LSE, Oxbridge, a few french schools, Tokyo U, Toronto, McGill, Melbourne, or a few other asian and european schools.</p>
<p>Mostly, just go to a school with a really good program that every school knows about (or at least that every school that matters knows about).</p>
<p>My uncle got his PhD in philosophy from cornell and now teaches at Amherst, although he is not tenured yet.</p>
<p>bigtwix - The reasons they might hire a low-tier person over a higher-tier person are many. Perhaps the lower-tier person has amazing work experience. Perhaps s/he has fantastic research - cutting-edge stuff. Perhaps s/he has a connection between an SC member and advisor. perhaps the higher-tier candidates invited to interview were insufferable jerks.</p>
<p>The tier matters. Do not kid yourself. But on rare occasions, someone sneaks through, because when it comes down to it, they aren't hiring based upon tier. It's just that the stuff that makes you top-tier quality is easier to complete/obtain at an equivalent university.</p>
<p>The head of the Berkeley Mech E. department got his degree from SUNY- Buffalo.</p>
<p>I am now a tenured professor (PhD) at a mid-tier medical school. I went to a third-rate school for my doctorate and for many years had a tenure-track appointment at Columbia University (where, in my heart, I knew that tenure was out of the question). Of course, I had other things going for me, other than the quality of the school where I received my doctorate. It can be helpful for your letters of reference, right out of grad school, to be able to say things like 'the best graduate student that I've ever seen in my XX years of experience' and to have multiple publications. So, one can surmount the quality of one's graduate school and get a tenure-track position at a top-tier school, but you've got to have other exceptional characteristics.</p>
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^ I think that's misleading. When reviewing your application, the tenured faculty of your prospective top 5 department will certainly care if you haven't received your PhD from one of the top five programs in your field. Why would they take you over someone who has such disqualifications and is thus probably a much more productive and influential up-and-coming researcher?
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<p>Well, I wouldn't go quite that far. There is no doubt that coming from a top program helps. But somebody who comes from a low-ranked program but who has been publishing highly regarded and award-winning papers in top journals and is strongly endorsed by his advisors will certainly have a huge edge over somebody who graduated from the #1 program but who is publishing mediocre papers in mediocre journals and who is not strongly supported by his advisors. </p>
<p>As a case in point, Victoria D'Souza got her PhD in biology and then did a postdoc at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. UMBC is a fine school, but it's not exactly the cream of the crop. Nevertheless, she's been doing some very interesting research on the virology of HIV and last year, after completing her postdoc, she placed in the MCB department at Harvard. </p>
<p>The</a> Harvard Crimson :: News :: D’Souza Takes New Approach to Fighting AIDS</p>
<p>It's called 'swimming upstream'. It is doable, I know of people who have done it, but the odds are very much not in your favor. But your odds - holding all else constant- are extremely likely that you'll get a job at a school on par, or lower, than the place you did your PhD.</p>
<p>I recommend this recent piece about the search process. It addresses (but does not really answer) the question of why job applicants from top programs most often have an edge in the hiring process. </p>
<p>I suspect the phenomenon described in the article is at least partly due to the selectivity of the more prestigious schools; those students have already passed a similar process.</p>
<p>I'm wondering, does the prestige of the undergraduate degree play much of a role? Or is it only important insofar as securing admission to a top graduate program?</p>
<p>sirD, </p>
<p>I would agree that there is a good deal of self-selection at play here, due to the selectivity (at the admissions level) of rigorous PhD programs. </p>
<p>In answer to your question, it is my perception that the "prestige" of an undergraduate program plays less of a role in hiring. </p>
<p>However, having said that, I do have some colleagues in the humanities who are positively influenced when they note an applicant's undergraduate preparation at a top LAC (as opposed to a top research university), because they see this as a potential indicator of highest quality undergraduate education in the humanities.</p>
<p>If I were to attempt to interpret this inclination to favor candidates from elite LACs, I would say this: PhD programs are about specific focus. A quality undergraduate liberal arts education is, in part, about breadth. Effective teaching of undergraduate courses in the humanities often requires one to draw upon that breadth.</p>
<p>What if your PhD comes from program that is not anywhere near a top 10 program but you worked under a leading scholar in the field? Does that help with job placement?</p>
<p>Depends on the "leading scholar." Does s/he usually do a good job placing her students?</p>
<p>Some people who went to ivy undergrad and ivy grad/professional school become a prof at a school below top 50 or even 100. I know a prof like that. (She had her B.A. in Biology from Cornell and PhD in genetics from the Yale University school of medicine.) Why would they do that?</p>
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Some people who went to ivy undergrad and grad school work as a prof at a school below top 50 or even 100. Why would they do that?
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<p>I can think of several reasons:</p>
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<li><p>Many of the Ivy PhD programs are not exactly 'best of class'. For example, the Dartmouth PhD Psychology program is ranked only #81 according to the NRC. Hence, a new such grad placing as an assistant prof in the top 50 would actually be a step up.</p></li>
<li><p>There tends to be far more graduates from the top PhD programs than there are new academic openings at the top schools. For example, I believe that MIT all by itself generates more new EECS PhD's every year than there are new assistant professor openings at the top 5 EECS schools, and that obviously doesn't even count the new PhD's generated from Stanford, Berkeley, etc. And this is EECS I'm talking about, which is one of the least competitive of all disciplines when it comes to academic placement, because many industry jobs exist for EECS PhD's, and hence many grads are happy to take that instead of competing for academic placement.</p></li>
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* Many of the Ivy PhD programs are not exactly 'best of class'. For example, the Dartmouth PhD Psychology program is ranked only #81 according to the NRC. Hence, a new such grad placing as an assistant prof in the top 50 would actually be a step up.
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<p>But the prof I specifically mentioned had her PhD in genetics from the Yale University school of medicine. Isn't the genetics PhD program at Yale school of medicine "best of class"?</p>
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* There tends to be far more graduates from the top PhD programs than there are new academic openings at the top schools. For example, I believe that MIT all by itself generates more new EECS PhD's every year than there are new assistant professor openings at the top 5 EECS schools, and that obviously doesn't even count the new PhD's generated from Stanford, Berkeley, etc. And this is EECS I'm talking about, which is one of the least competitive of all disciplines when it comes to academic placement, because many industry jobs exist for EECS PhD's, and hence many grads are happy to take that instead of competing for academic placement.
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<p>I see. This would be a more probable reason for the prof I'm talking about.</p>