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<p>Really? I haven’t done a systematic study of this, but my rough sense of the academic fields I’m familiar with is that you’re sorely mistaken.</p>
<p>Just to confirm my impressions, I did a quick survey of the c.v.'s of the faculty in Princeton’s philosophy department, a field I’m familiar with. The overwhelming majority got their undergraduate degrees from major research universities: Harvard 4, Princeton 2, Cambridge 2, Oxford, University College London, Melbourne, Notre Dame, Goethe University Frankfurt, Rutgers, Dartmouth, Arizona, Fribourg, National University of Ireland, Columbia, Monash. </p>
<p>LACs were also represented: Swarthmore 2, Calvin College </p>
<p>That’s research universities 23, LACs 3. Now I suppose you could say that means LACs are strongly overrepresented, since they produce only about 3% of the output of Bachelors degrees. I’ll grant you that much. But the research universities must be doing something right at the undergrad level as well. And it’s certainly a mistake to imply, as your post does, that a majority of faculty at top research universities got their undergrad degrees at LACs. At least that’s not the case in philosophy. If it’s different in other fields, I’d like to see evidence of it.</p>