It is very interesting, and points out a well-known issue in many academic fields, which is the obsession with “prestige” when hiring faculty or in how scholarship is regarded. It creates a self-sustaining feedback loop, in which extends to the scholarship produced. The scholarship produced in more “prestigious” departments is given more weight, and more likely to receive awards. Of course, the prestige of departments results in the people who end up in influential positions in the professional societies tend to be from the more “prestigious” departments. They are the ones who decide which scholarship is highlighted, which papers and books are accepted for publication, and what and who receive awards and recognition.
It is ironic that academia can be pretty insular in this regard. Most of this is pretty hidden from the public, and generally has little effect on the perception of
You are absolutely correct in your assumption that this obsession extends into the reputation of the LoR writers. It often focuses even on where the LoR writer work, rather then just on their accomplishments.
Another article which presents some actual numbers and names is this: “The Academic Origins of Economics Faculty” by Todd R. Jones and Arielle A. Sloan. It’s also a working paper, but you can google the title and get it.
You can see that CS has a similar issue, or at least had similar issues circa 2015 (I don’t believe that it’s better):
These results demonstrate the enormous role of institutional prestige in shaping faculty hiring across academe, both for institutions and for individuals seeking faculty positions. Prestige hierarchies are also likely to influence outcomes in other scholarly activities, including research priorities, resource allocation, and educational outcomes, either directly through prestige-sensitive decision making or indirectly through faculty placement. Despite the confounded nature of merit and social status within measurable prestige, the observed hierarchies are sufficiently steep that attributing their structure to differences in merit alone seems implausible.
“In-State Publics” include Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, UVA, UNC, UIUC, and many others, all which are good enough even for the most prestige-ridden.
Yet per the authors of the paper, NONE OF THESE undergrads are considered high prestige for the purpose of PhD or academic career. You blithely ignored this when you replied to my post, but to me this is revelationary.
It varies by discipline- which of course, nobody likes to hear.
In the broad field of Antiquity for example- Michigan and Berkeley are generally considered in the top tier along with U Chicago, Harvard, and some of the other privates. But it varies- no one university can be tops at everything. So an undergrad interested in a specific area of Near Eastern studies? Brandeis. Interested specifically in Archaeology in a particular region? That requires research- field studies are multi- year (and sometimes decades long) projects, and when the original sponsoring faculty retire, there may or may not be someone at that institution to pick up the reins- or someone from a different university may take it on with the funding moving with it.
Grad school isn’t like undergrad- with a really broad and wide lens so that individual topics don’t really matter. A prospective doctoral candidate will be evaluated by the people who are subject matter experts-- and they care about the individual topics!
U Mass is one of the top linguistics programs in the country (undergrad and grad). But that doesn’t help the undergrad who is majoring in European History with an interest in a doctoral program in pre-Soviet Russian History!
Your post was implicitly about the general population of students, because those are the students to whom we say that “prestige doesn’t matter for most careers”. You cannot shift the goalposts and claim suddenly that you specifically meant “students who want to do a PhD in economics”. Just because the title of the thread was changed to correctly reflect the article you cited does not change your original claim.
Yet even here, if you look at the working paper “The Academic Origins of Economics Faculty” that I cited, you will find that Berkeley is up there on top, while Michigan, UCLA, and other publics are similarly highly ranked.
However, as I wrote, economics PhD students are a small fraction of PhD students in general
When we look at, say, CS, of whom there are twice as many a year as economics PhDs, you can see that Berkeley, Washington, UIUC, Michigan, and GTech match or exceed all other colleges except, perhaps, MIT, CMU, and Stanford. Caltech and Harvey Mudd are also that prestigious, but they have relatively few students, and HMC does not have a PhD program.
In fact, these same list of universities will pop up at the top of all engineering lists of “the most prestigious programs” for all engineering fields. There are 10,500 engineering PhD recipients in engineering, excluding CS, every year, versus 1,200 economics PhDs. There are around 1,500 PhD recipients in Ag and natural resources a year, which is more than economics PhD students, and there are almost no private universities who even have these programs.
So no, I did not ignore anything.
Just so there will be no misunderstandings - academic is deeply obsessed with prestige. My point is, again and again, that what people outside of academia, like you, think of as “prestigious” programs, are often not what are considered to be “prestigious” by people in the field.
One of the measures of “prestige” which many non-academics use is whether a college is private or not. Many non-academics automatically assume that private colleges are all more prestigious than publics. One of the reasons is that many non-academics often equate “prestige” with USNews Ranking. Since USNews uses factors that are mostly indicators of the wealth of the students who attend the colleges, the private colleges at which most of the students are affluent will rank higher.
Another reason that some private colleges are more prestigious is because the prestige of publics is usually restricted to their state, while privates have always done their best to market themselves nationally. So OSU is considered by most Ohioans to be the more prestigious than almost any college out there. While they may have heard of HYPSM, you can bet that the vast majority of people in the state will respond “what, there is a university called Brown? Next you’re going to tell me that there is a university called ‘Blue’”, they will think that UPenn is the same as Penn State, and never have heard of Vanderbilt or Duke.
But even here, the colleges which people have heard the most about, outside their region or state, are those which are at the top of college football. Most of the colleges at the top of the college football rankings are publics, with some exceptions like Notre Dame, Tulane, and USC.
There are some exceptions, like HYPSM, because of the masterful marketing that HYPSM has, and some colleges which pop up in popular culture.
I do not see why this question is interesting, and I do not see what the results of such a study will add to any understanding of human nature or of college admission culture. The interesting question is “what makes a college prestigious, and for whom?”, because it helps us understand not only human nature and college admission culture, but economic trends as well.
Missouri M&T- prestigious in Academia AND industry in the engineering disciplines, even if your aunt in Palo Alto has never heard of it. Alfred U in NY- one of the top ceramics programs in the country. U Maine in paper technology. Stonybrook in a bunch of disciplines in the sciences. Rutgers in Poli Sci, Georgia Tech in too many disciplines to list.
There is no shortage of prestigious public U programs. The problem is conflating “have I heard of it” with prestigious, AND the “it doesn’t matter where you go” chorale both on CC and in real life.
Your kid wants to teach third grade language arts? Then the world is his/her oyster. Your kid wants to study Topology and is already highly advanced in math? Then do some research because it WILL matter where he/she goes since many colleges will not have the right curriculum and the right faculty to provide the kind of opportunities required in that subject. Just being a math major at a college which spits out HS math teachers ain’t going to cut it…
What make some universities and/or some departments within universities “prestigious” are the people at those universities/departments, in the past and the present. Quality begets quality. They naturally tend to attract higher caliber faculty and students. Some public universities, or departments within these universities, have more than succeeded in attracting some of the most talented people (faculty and students). There’re areas where some of the well-endowed elite privates enjoy an advantage over the publics, but academically, they are all equals.
That’s a pretty big generalization from a single analysis.
It looks like it matters for the ~1200 people receiving economics doctorates yearly. Only a proportion of whom received a US undergraduate degree. And of those who did, it was reasonably likely to have come from an institution with an economics doctoral program, a small number of schools … and prestigious.
It’s an answer in that very specific scenario. Good to know, for those whose interests lie in that direction!
Yes. It’s like examining the educational background of the top 25 orchestral conductors in the world and figuring out if your 7th grader should study flute or violin.
And not necessarily in economics, but sometimes in math or statistics. US undergraduate economics programs typically do not include the desired upper level math and statistics courses to prepare for economics graduate school – these need to be taken as electives by undergraduate economics majors preparing for PhD study.
Yes, but that’s not the entire story. When talking about prestige in the field, this is indeed a large part of it. That is how you get programs that are highly prestigious in Fish and Wildlife in places like Wyoming or New Mexico - top people in the field are attracted to the location, and establish these programs in the field, and this attracts other top faculty.
This brings us to funding. Academics need funding for their research, and universities which can provide the funding will attract top faculty.
So another element is the the funding and other resources that a department can provide. So the departments who can pay the most and provide the most resources will attract the most applicants, and these will generally include the top ones.
One of the reasons that so many top engineering programs are at publics is that state and federal governments tend to be very generous with funding for engineering. DoD, DoE, and other governmental agencies have a lot of grant money for these fields. There are also historical reasons, mostly the fact that most public universities were established to provide tech and engineering education. BTW, the top private universities in Engineering, i.e., Caltech, MIT, CMU, Stanford, and Cornell (partly private), were also established to provide tech education and research.
In short, you are correct that having a strong programs attracts strong faculty, however, the ability to pay high salaries and to fund research also plays a big part, as does other reasons that make a program attractive (like location).
One of the big reasons that private “elite” universities are generally more prestigious than “elite” publics in humanities fields is that, as a rule, “elite” private universities provide more support and better pay for their humanities faculty. Not having to justify paying money for research which populist state legislators do not like or do not understand makes supporting history or gender studies a lot easier.
I wouldn’t discount the importance of funding. It’s certainly a necessary ingredient. But the most critical ingredients are the talented people. Talents tend to want to congregate around other similarly talented people in their fields (or in adjacent fields), so they can exchange ideas and be informed more quickly and efficiently. What makes a university, or a department, or any entity or place for that matter, a success is a critical mass of talented people. Some rich Arab Gulf states were able to, periodically, attract some talents to their universities, but they never managed to achieve a critical mass. On the other hand, CMU, not very well endowed (by the standards of some elite privates), managed to create a critical mass of talents in computer science in its early days to become a powerhouse in that field.
Just to clarify, this is a “yes, and” post, not a “yes, but” post.
Alternatively, UIUC became a CS powerhouse by investing heavily in CS. Having one of the supercomputing centers in the mid 1980s was also part of it, though their proposal would not have been selected had they not already invested heavily in CS. In many ways, UIUC is a CS powerhouse because of NCSA.
On that topic - PSC, another supercomputer center, was also likely part of CMU’s rise to prominence in CS. That was a huge investment from NSF. CMU also got the equivalent of $6 million in 1962 to establish a CS department, and the equivalent of $50 million in 1965.
It’s also good to remember that CMU also has a long history of funding by The R. K. Mellon Foundation - some $300,000 until now, and they have now established a partnership. They were the ones who provided the heavy support for established CS in CMU.
They also have the Dietrich foundation, another almost 1.5 billion, which also functions essentially, as an endowment, their relationship with the RK Mellon foundation, which provides more than the distributions they get from their endowment, and the funding that they can raise for projects like expanding CS.
So their endowment is not the whole story of their ability to fund CS.
However, you’re also right. In 1970/1971, they lost around half of their faculty, but two Turing awards in 1975 and a Nobel in 1978 probably did a lot to start bringing more people in.
So funding is required for established a “prestigious” department in most cases, but it’s not enough. The department has to also be run in a manner which foster work that generates interest in the field. There are many stories of well-funded assorted initiatives in academia which amounted to little because they were run badly. For example, departments which get a chunk of money, go on a hiring spree, but neglect to provide the new faculty with the resources (equipment, graduate student assistantships, etc) that the faculty, both new and established, need to succeed.
I’m just pointing out the importance of funding or other benefits which both bring the initial “star” faculty and support their research, and which help draw faculty from other places which may not provide as much research support.
All of that being said, it’s also good to remember that academics have sizable egos, which can sometimes make building a good department which includes a number of “stars”, more challenging. Having a extensive resources can mitigate some of those challenges.
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Another factor that’s attractive for faculty, especially those who are not yet full professors, is having a program which is attractive for grad students. Having good grad students is essential for having a good and productive lab. That means both resources (to support grad students), but, often more important, especially these days, are other types of support, as well as having an overall culture which is not toxic.
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