Reply to I find it annoying when people get on here and say it really doesn't matter where your kid goes

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
On one hand, I think I benefited early on from being “top student at a good school” vs “good student at a top school.”  Also, on the employer’s side of the interview table, I feel the “top student at a good school” makes the stronger impression (I work in academia, so this may be field-dependent). 
 [/quote]

Of all the career paths where going to the top school matters, academia is the one where it matters the most.[/quote]

Not really. The most important factor in early career academic employment is the quality of the dissertation.  Do students at higher ranked schools write better dissertations?  Yes, on average, but that has more to do with the individual (and the thesis advisor) than the school.

Beyond the first job (in STEM, usually a temporary position), it’s the quality of the work that matters.  Tenure track hiring decisions are difficult and high-stakes (the goal is to hire a colleague who will stay for their whole career), so the role played by the name of the degree-granting institution is very small. The undergraduate institution is basically irrelevant at that point.

I don’t have experience with many other fields, but in academia there is no analogue of the hiring managers I hear about who are only willing to recruit from 3 or 4 Ivy League schools. 
[/quote]

[b]Yes, really. The most important factor in being hired to an academic job, and where you get hired, is where you got your PhD.[/b]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x#Sec9

For faculty with US doctorates, we find that academia is characterized by universally extreme inequality in faculty production. [b]Overall, 80% of all domestically trained faculty in our data were trained at just 20.4% of universities.[/b] Moreover, the five most common doctoral training universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford—account for just over one in eight domestically trained faculty (13.8%; Fig. 2a and Extended Data Table 3). Even when disaggregated into domains of study, 80% of faculty were trained at only 19–28% of universities (Fig. 2b).

[b]There is a steep prestige hierarchy - you are very unlikely to get hired at a more prestigious institution than the one where you got your PhD:[/b]

Faculty hiring networks in the United States exhibit a steep hierarchy in academia and across all domains and fields, with [b]only 5–23% of faculty employed at universities more prestigious than their doctoral 
university[/b] (Fig. 6a,b and Extended Data Table 4). Measured by the extent to which they restrict such upward mobility, these prestige hierarchies are most steep in the Humanities (12% upward mobility) and Mathematics and Computing (13%) and least steep in Medicine and Health (21%; Fig. 6b). 
...
Among the 1,070 departments that are ranked top-10 in any field, 248 (23.2%) top-10 slots are occupied by departments at just five universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia; fully 252 universities (64%) have zero top-10 departments. These findings show that, both within individual fields and across entire domains, faculty placement power is highly concentrated among a small set of universities, complementing the already enormous concentration of faculty production among the same set of universities (Fig. 2). Together, these patterns create network structures characterized by a closely connected core of high-prestige universities that exchange faculty with each other and export faculty to—but rarely import them from—universities in the network periphery (Extended Data Fig. 2).

[b]In short, if you don't go to one of these highly prestigious PhD programs, you are a damn fool to get a PhD.[/b][/quote]

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