Small group of top schools in the US supply most of the nation’s faculty
By 
Rebecca Trager2022-09-26T13:30:00
Approximately 80% of all faculty trained in the US got their PhDs at 20% of the country’s universities
About 80% of faculty that trained in the US received their PhDs from just 20% of universities there, according to new analysis by a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The group examined data on tenured or tenure-track faculty working at 368 PhD-granting universities in the US from 2011 through 2020.
The researchers found ‘universal inequalities’ in which a small minority of universities supply a large majority of faculty across fields in the US. ‘Analyses of faculty hiring networks, which map who hires whose graduates as faculty, show unambiguously in multiple fields that prestigious departments supply an outsized proportion of faculty,’ the study’s authors wrote.