Dive Brief:
- A small portion of departments in each academic discipline produce the majority of future tenure-track professors, leaving those from less prestigious departments with little hope, a reality explored more fully in papers and books about the graduate school application process and institutional hiring.
- Science Magazine reports only 25% of universities produce 71-86% of all tenure-track faculty across computer science, business and history departments, fields that are distinctly different in many ways but very similar in the ways in which prestige shapes hiring.
- A new book by University of Michigan education researcher Julie Posselt finds the reputation of an undergraduate’s college goes with GRE scores and GPA as three strongest determinants of graduate school admission, which shuts out many candidates from underrepresented groups early in the process.
Dive Insight:
Student protesters across the country called for more diversity in their institutions’ faculty hiring throughout the fall. That is a difficult demand. Many administrators started discussing ways to diversify the Ph.D. pipeline and create a larger pool of scholars from which to pick for later faculty hirings. The conversation often centered on ways to keep underrepresented minorities in academia, as many of the most promising candidates are pulled into industry. But perhaps the focus should be on earlier interventions — like ways to diversify the pipeline of candidates getting into graduate school.
A small number of institutions have stopped requiring GRE scores for certain applicants. This helps overcome testing bias that researchers have identified. With such ingrained systemic issues that favor certain groups over others, admissions and hiring committees must rethink their processes from the beginning.