<p>How do professors decide which school they want to work at?
Why are some professors able to get a job at prestigious institutions while others can't?
With a PhD, it seems everyone would have very high credentials. I don't understand what separates them when it comes to finding a job in a higher ranked vs. lower ranked school.</p>
<p>Also, in terms of the undergrad program, do top institutions have better professors in terms of their teaching ability?</p>
<p>More like the more respected professors will work at higher ranked schools for the reputation of it.</p>
<p>The criterion that separates MOST professors into the different tiers of schools is their research output. Professors with more impactful research mostly end up at the prestigious schools while those with the more average research fall to the middle of the pack. There are obviously exceptions.</p>
<p>As for teaching, it will be hit or miss no matter where you go unless it is a primarily teaching-oriented school. In that case you would presumably see better teachers, but less top-quality research, if any.</p>
<p>These are very good questions to ask. Because I think you are getting at something that is not often talked about, but is important to consider when looking at college. </p>
<p>There are tons more PhDs than there are tenured track teaching jobs in most subjects, first of all. So the pool of talent (at least technically) is VERY deep in many areas. Although I am not sure this applies as much to engineering as some other areas, I still think it is true.</p>
<p>Also, different types of colleges reward different types of behavior. At large research colleges, publishing is paramount – you will not get tenure if you do not publish a lot of high quality research. Hence, those professors are very focused on their research. At some highly ranked research universities, teaching quality definitely takes a back seat to research, which results in some profs who are terrible teachers still ascending the tenure track. And many of them push as many teaching responsibilities as they can off on TAs. At many lower ranked schools, there is still a need to research and publish, but the focus is more on teaching quality. Hence a student may have a much better experience with teachers at a college that is not the highest ranked school (although that has to be weighed against the quality of students at the school as well, since that also contributes a lot to the learning environment). </p>
<p>Some of the most talented math and science students I knew from my college days went on to get PhDs. One became a professor of math at a small LAC (top 100 ranked), another ended up teaching physics at a state directional, and a third ended up at a prominent research university with a plum appointment to work on a world renowned project for many years. The competition to land a teaching job at a top ranked school is really, really intense. Most PhDs end up taking the first tenure track position they can get, regardless of location, rather than end up with no position at all. So “choosing” a school isn’t always what is really going on… finding a seat in a game of musical chairs is a better analogy. </p>
<p>The spots at the top schools go to PhDs from other top schools (or sometimes the same school) who have published impressive research, interview well, and maybe have connections with faculty at the institution offering the job. Having a specific specialty at a time when one of those schools is looking for it helps as well (but is hard to predict). But generally, just think of it as like undergrad HYPS admissions on steroids.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the responses. </p>
<p>boneh3ad, by research output production, do you mean research output production from the person’s graduate school experience? I think that’s what intparent is suggesting. </p>
<p>Why are top tier institutions held so highly for their undergrad programs if the quality of their teaching is not noticeably better than less well known schools? Is it just because the name of the school will look good or something? </p>
<p>From the looks of it, if professors are equally as bad/good in the different tiers, then I don’t see why employers and grad schools place preference on students from higher ranked schools, provided that other parts of their credentials are the same. They are, after all, receiving the same kind of education (largely the same courses) and the same quality of education.</p>
<p>As for the latter question, the answer is not from my experiences nor from what I’ve heard.
Professors are mainly hired to do research. Teaching is the least of the hiring committees’ worries. </p>
<p>The ‘name’ of the school has more to do with the ‘name’ rather than the quality of ‘undergrad’ education.</p>
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<p>It could be that they are the best for the most motivated top students – the kind that are desirable to admit to PhD programs. These students benefit from the research opportunities, more course offerings, and the peer group, while being less disadvantaged if they encounter courses with mediocre teaching quality.</p>
<p>On the other hand, lower ranking does not necessarily mean a greater emphasis on teaching quality. Budget constrained state universities may choose to provide an acceptable educational experience for many over top teaching quality for few.</p>
<p>At lot of the answers to your questions can be attributed to standards of excellence. </p>
<p>It’s really hard to get a faculty position at a top school. Most junior faculty in these positions spend between 80-90 hours per week working. That’s not an exaggeration. Everything else takes a back seat so that they can do all of the administrative, teaching, professional society obligations and research that they need to do to maintain their spot at the top to get tenure. Once granted tenure, most of these people don’t really know how to slow down. Many are absolutely brilliant, though you sometimes meet some that you wonder about how they made it through. </p>
<p>In order to get a faculty position, you must really already be known in your field because you wrote an impactful dissertation, and you have a respected advisor who helps you network. A selection committee chooses a handful of “finalists” from a stack of hundreds of applicants and they each give a seminar. Then the committee makes it’s decision. Committees don’t meet that often so the whole process can take 4-6 months from interview to offer. </p>
<p>The expectations on the depth and pace of courses at top schools is often higher, deeper and faster. They attract students who can handle this pace. Professors will design cutting edge electives and graduate courses in their area, which may be a new area to begin with. </p>
<p>As a student, if you can keep up with the pace and gain access to faculty at top universities, their recommendations carry a lot of weight to get into graduate school. After undergraduate, recommendations cannot really be underestimated, and the person writing the recommendation has his or her own reputation on the line when writing them, so they aren’t given out willy nilly. </p>
<p>What I find in my field is that professors at the top schools often do research that is most relevant and solve critically important cutting edge problems that people actually have. They are thought leaders. There is a lot of research at lesser places that seem to create solutions in search of problems, but occasionally there is a gem.</p>
<p>Like anything in life, people try to be the best that they can be, but some people just really wow.</p>
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<p>Most of this is important. However, faculty positions are almost never given to people who have obtained their PhD from that institution unless they have had one or more faculty positions elsewhere first. Otherwise this is a form of academic inbreeding and looks bad on the department in question, plus it degrades the diversity of perspective among the faculty.</p>
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<p>I mean research output throughout their entire career leading up to getting that faculty position. For a new hire, that usually means graduate school and a post-doc. It may also include other faculty positions if they have already had one. The emphasis is also on recent publications versus older ones. This is what intparent was getting at, though in more detail. Theirs was posted while I was typing mine so I hadn’t seen it yet.</p>
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<p>Almost no one, including your own committee, reads your dissertation. No one cares how impactful your dissertation is, including hiring committees for faculty position. They care about how many articles you have published in journals and what the impact factors of those journals are. Now, if you play the game right, your dissertation will provide enough data to support the publishing of one or more journal articles in the major journals in your field, plus you ought to get one or two other articles before your dissertation where you are at the very least on the author list.</p>
<p>Still, most graduate students don’t get the number and types of publications that faculty positions tend to require in graduate school and have to go do a post-doc to bolster their research portfolio before having a real shot at being hired. Your chances of getting hired into a top position without a post-doc rise substantially if your graduate advisor is well known and has good connections.</p>
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<p>So getting back to this question, it is really a quite complicated answer. Part of the answer is because of the fact that rankings typically disproportionately take into account a schools reputation with voters, so being a highly ranked school is a self-fulfilling sort of status. These opinions are usually based on the quality of graduate programs as well, and the quality of graduate programs at a school has almost nothing to do with teaching quality of individual professors and more about of great the faculty reputation is and how great the research opportunities are, after all, you learn more in the laboratory in graduate school than you do in the classroom. If you don’t, you are doing it wrong.</p>
<p>So why are these top schools ranked so highly for undergraduate programs when the teachers are not likely noticeably different from elsewhere? I can think of a few reasons why this might be. For one, the preexisting reputation of a school has a pretty good correlation with the caliber of employers who recruit there. Going to these top schools may not net you any better teachers, but it will give you more opportunities with the big name companies nationwide, whereas less respected schools typically have a smaller geographic area across which it draws recruiters.</p>
<p>Second, the reputation likely takes into account the fact that the people doing the rankings assume that a given student going through a program will take advantage of at least most of the educational opportunities afforded him at a particular school. At most of those top schools, while the teachers may not be better at teaching, those teachers are usually better at research, and this means that students will likely have more opportunity to be exposed to cutting edge ideas and research assuming that they utilize that opportunity. Not all of them do, but the ones who do are generally getting an experience that most lower-ranked schools can’t match.</p>
<p>In short, there are two things that really set the top institutions apart despite the fact that their teachers usually aren’t substantially better: the array of extracurricular activities available as a result of the strength in research and the caliber of the companies that recruit the school as a result of its reputation.</p>
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<p>The employer preference is really just for the entry-level/fresh-grad employees. Once you have experience and/or learn the “latest hot thing” in software engineering, the employer school preference is reduced greatly. This is why the resume of an experienced engineer (well at least in software engineering) lists the educational background near the bottom of the resume.</p>
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<p>This is simply not true at MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and UIUC, where I have the most insight. Professors help their best students get faculty jobs. Their best students are the ones with the most important and original research. I’ve written tenure letters for several people in my field and at the top schools, it’s the impact of the work that matters - how much is the field is now DEFINED by their monumental work. Numbers are important, but the number of times a monumental paper has been cited is probably more important than the number of papers.</p>
<p>Also, my committee read my dissertation. I had markups and comments throughout and my defense had issues that I had to handle. It wasn’t a rubber stamp.</p>
<p>I’m not claiming its a rubber stamp deal; or at least it shouldn’t be. Your advisor will of course read the dissertation and give feedback, and committee members certainly don’t ignore it. I know several very well-known (in their field) professors who tend to do some skimming for theses that are not their own students, though, and dissertations are not often read by those outside your department. They just aren’t that visible.</p>
<p>This is the reason why I mentioned journals, and most good dissertations (or the work that goes into them) spawn several journal articles so we may just be arguing semantics on that. Otherwise it seems we agree. It’s about the impact of your research. The best way to make that impact is through high-impact journals.</p>
<p>All these comments are on point but I don’t recall seeing mention of the role of research funding in the posts above. I know for certain that in engineering and physical sciences (disclaimer: I am a physics professor and have served on university tenure review committees) having research funding is absolutely essential for tenure at top schools. Getting a lot of high impact publications can somewhat mitigate this but not completely.</p>
<p>It is also worth mentioning that many of the most selective universities make it very hard to get tenure but if a faculty member does not get tenure at that high profile university, there is a good chance that he/she will land in a less prestigious university and get tenure.</p>
<p>As others have pointed out, the undergraduate reputation of a university is generally highly correlated to it’s research standing. This is somewhat paradoxical because as has been stated, the most driven researchers are not always terribly good teachers. The fact is that these reputation factors tend to feed on themselves and raise the quality and number of applicants so the university can be more selective and is then perceived as having a better reputation. I can say that in physics, the curriculum across the United States is more or less the same and if a university has a Ph.D. program with funded research, the opportunities for undergraduates is equivalent.</p>
<p>After a prof gets tenured, can they go work for another university easily? If so, are they tenured at that university as well?</p>
<p>The reason I ask the second question is because at my majors department, some professors are hired and automatically have the title “associate professor.”</p>
<p>Switching universities, from what I gather, is easier than landing that first job but still or terribly easy unless you are a highly clouted researcher. Whether or not you retain tenure would be part of the negotiation process unless, again, you are already a highly clouted researcher.</p>
<p>The big problem with switching after tenure is just that, tenure. Very few faculty members will give up tenure to move to a new university and go through the process again. This makes many of them less mobile unless, as @boneh3ad says, they are big stars in the field. That level of person may switch once or twice if there is a better opportunity.</p>
<p>Another, non-trivial issue with moving is that if you are an experimentalist, like me, getting anew lab set up will take significant time.</p>
<p>I thought the answer was kinda simple… the same way anyone picks where and what job they want. Research, money, prestigious level of University are not only factors. These people have families and other factors to consider. I don’t think it is too case-by-case to say.</p>