Lacking Diversity and Equality: Just a Handful of Universities Control Flow of Ideas, People in Academia

One in eight tenure-track academic members working at the nation's higher education institutions were trained at just five U.S. universities, according to recent data from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder).

The study examines the composition of the American professoriate in the most thorough manner to date. In fact, it collects information from 2011 to 2020 on about 300,000 tenure-track faculty members at more than 10,000 university departments at 368 PhD-granting schools (including where they earned their own graduate degrees). The article will appear in the journal Nature today, September 21.

"Until you actually evaluate the data, it's difficult to gauge just how significant the discrepancies in higher education are." Dan Larremore

According to the report, the majority of academics hail from a select group of academic institutions across all disciplines.

It's the first thing instructors mention in their bios. However, until you actually evaluate the data, it's difficult to gauge just how extreme the disparities in higher education are, according to Daniel Larremor. He is an assistant professor at the BioFrontiers Institute and a co-author of the new study.

The University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison are the five institutions that produce the most professors in the United States. These colleges trained more U.S. faculty than all universities outside the U.S. combined, according to estimations by Larremore and his colleagues. Only 20.4% of the nation's universities awarded doctoral degrees to the 80% of tenure-track faculty members nationwide.

One in eight tenure-track academic members at the nation's higher education institutions were trained at just five U.S. universities, according to new study from the University of Colorado Boulder. This image shows Harvard University, one of the institutions.

The team's findings also portray a potentially bleak picture of developments in diversity across American campuses. For instance, the team found that while there are more women faculty members in a variety of academic disciplines, such gains may soon stagnate.

Hunter Wapman said, "Until additional measures and reforms in hiring processes are done, we should not expect to see gender parity in academia. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and the paper's lead author.

"Quantifying and casting light on these trends will help us alter the system," noted Larremore, who received his own doctorate in Applied Mathematics from CU Boulder in 2012. He added that he hopes American colleges would take the findings as a wake-up call.

Wapman, Larremore, and their colleagues constructed a network of the people flows between colleges using data from the Academic Analytics Research Center as guidance during that protracted process.

Sam Zhang, a doctorate candidate in applied mathematics at CU Boulder, and Aaron Clauset, a professor of computer science, were co-authors of the paper.

"Many systemic disparities are founded in hiring, but attrition exacerbates them." Dan Larremore

Aaron Clauset may be employed by the CU Boulder Department of Computer Science, according to Wapman. We may also notice that he earned his PhD from the University of New Mexico in this example.

This particular data point, one of hundreds of thousands in the network of the team, connects CU Boulder and the University of New Mexico like a spoke in a bicycle wheel.

View interactive visualizations of the research results.

By looking into that network, the researchers learned that while there are many halls in academia, some are more revered than others: Academics who graduated from less prominent colleges hardly ever obtained positions at more prestigious universities.

For instance, only 12% of professors in computer science and only 6% of faculty in economics were able to land jobs at universities that were more prestigious than their own.

Larremore asserts that these rigid hierarchies go beyond the selection procedure. Academics with graduate degrees from less esteemed universities also appeared to depart the sector far more frequently than their counterparts from more prominent universities. The same was true for academics who received their education outside of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, as well as professors who held positions in their PhD institutions.

Many systemic disparities, he asserted, have their origins in recruiting practices but are made worse by attrition.

The study found that women professors are becoming more prevalent in a variety of university departments. Schools aren't hiring more women than they did ten years ago, though; instead, male academics are simply retiring more frequently as they get older on average.

Larremore, Wapman, and their colleagues are unsure of how universities might apply their findings at this time. It is more challenging for novel theories and new research to emerge from lesser-known institutions under a system where a few number of universities train the vast majority of academics. The authors also point out that those same well-known institutions might potentially have a particularly strong capacity to redress the historical disparities in academia.

Wapman stated that "academic inequalities have impacts that we don't often see." Recent studies have demonstrated that academics frequently investigate subjects that are personal to them. A diverse group of academics is something we should strive for if we're interested in finding solutions to the issues that real people face.

By UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER