<p>
</p>
<p>This question interests me. My hypothesis is that it’s mostly a numbers game. LACs produce about 3% of the Bachelors degrees, and we’ve seen that their graduates go on to earn PhDs at a higher rate than graduates of research universities. But starting from that small base of 3% of all Bachelors’ degrees, they’ll almost inevitably end up holding a small minority of faculty positions, even if they are getting into top graduate programs.</p>
<p>And some of them must be, at least in some disciplines. In post #11, I pointed out that 3 of the 26 Princeton philosophy professors whose undergraduate institution could be identified from the departmental website had earned their undergraduate degrees at LACs. (I’m including here only full, associate, and assistant professors, not lecturers, visiting faculty, or other non-core positions). But that’s about 11.5%, well over the 3% of Bachelor’s degrees produced by LACs.</p>
<p>In Princeton’s math department, however, all 29 professors whose undergraduate institution could be identified earned their first degrees at research universities, none at LACs.</p>
<p>LACs are more strongly represented in Princeton’s history department, where 9 of 47 professors have undergraduate degrees from LACs (Carleton 2, Amherst, Williams, Hamilton, Smith, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Ripon). That’s 19.1% from LACs, really quite a strong representation for LACs.</p>
<p>So my preliminary hypothesis is that it probably varies by field, but overall LAC grads are probably represented in quite large percentages at the highest levels of academia relative to the tiny share of Bachelor’s degrees produced by LACs. But that still leaves LAC grads as a small minority of all faculty at such institutions. Even if they’re earning PhDs from top grad programs at impressive rates relative to graduates of research universities, there are just so few of them going in that their numbers coming out the other end of the pipeline are still quite small.</p>