Prestige is more important than merit in academic hiring

Eva-Maria Swidler, A Modest(y) Proposal, from the AAUP:

An article detailing some stark facts about social inequality within academia made a small blip in higher education three years ago. According to Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore in their February 2015 Science Advances article, “Systematic Inequality and Hierarchy in Faculty Hiring Networks,” prestige has come to predominate strikingly over merit as the primary consideration in the selection of tenured and tenure-track professors. Examining three disciplines, the authors found that “faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality,” showing a strong preference—unaccounted for by any measure of merit—for appointing faculty members with degrees from prestigious universities. They reported that in my own discipline of history, more than half of all tenured or tenure-track professors in 144 surveyed institutions had received their PhDs from only eight institutions. The authors also pointed out that the greater the importance of non-meritocratic factors in hiring, the weaker the correlation between prestige and merit. In other words, the prestige of the university where you received your PhD has replaced consideration of your actual qualification or worthiness as defined by knowledge, wisdom, skill, or work. In Sarah Kendzior’s words in her 2015 ChronicleVitae piece “Academia’s 1 Percent,” “The fate of aspiring professors is sealed not with job applications but with graduate-school applications. Institutional affiliation has come to function like inherited wealth.”