While it is not breaking news that a PhD from Yale might get more notice than one from Dayton, this study doesn’t tell us much, and may be skewing toward the authors’ presuppositions. I tried to follow the links to learn about the methodology, but no luck. They limit the study to 3 disciplines: Business, History, Comp Sci. Why those three? They also limit their study to 242 schools. But which ones? And how were they chosen? Would studying different disciplines at different schools give different results? What if all were studied?
I just picked a random school where a friend’s daughter attends (Hope College) and looked up seven professors at random from the faculty directory. Here is where they got their PhDs:
Case Western Reserve
Purdue
U of Guelph
U of Iowa
Columbia
U of Virginia
U of Miami
The message of the study and article seems to be that that one must go to an elite school to become a professor, but I know from colleagues and friends that this is not the case.This subject deserves more careful analysis than has been presented in this study.