From: Phil Goetz (philgoetz@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Oct 18 2005 - 12:33:23 MDT
--- John Stick <johnstick@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > When colleges and universities hire new grads for faculty
> positions,
> > the primary factor they consider is what university they came from.
> > Likewise for undergrads applying for grad school.
> > Once you've attended a university that cost less than $30,000/yr
> > tuition, there's little chance you can ever get onto the academic
> > track and into a research position. So the ivy-league schools
> > make academia itself a hereditary institution.
> >
> Just a brief note to say this description is totally false to my
> experience.
> As a proud representitive of trailer park trash in academia, I must
> say it
> is not true to my life, to the graduate departments in which I
> trained, or
> the private universities where I taught. Selection of students,
> graduate
> and undergraduate, and hiring of new faculty is very different, in
not
> necessarily more equitable, than that. The demographics of graduate
> students and faculty is very different than that, and overwhelmingly
> middle class.
Okay, I just went and looked up, at random, the faculty in
economics at MIT. I did not select this because of its
statistics; it was the first department listing I found that
listed where its faculty earned their degrees. It lists 39 faculty,
whose degrees were granted at the following places:
12 MIT
8 Harvard
4 Stanford
3 Princeton
1 London School of Economics
1 U. of Minnesota
2 U. of Pennsylvania
2 U. of Chicago
2 Oxford
1 Penn State U.
1 Yale
1 Duke
1 Cal Tech
These do not suggest an "overwhelmingly middle-class" demographics.
These results are very similar to what I saw in 1997,
when I was looking for a job in computer science, and
first noticed that the faculty at research institutions were
composed almost entirely of graduates from upper-class schools.
There are a few respectable middle-class schools, notably
including U. of Chicago, PSU, & UPenn.
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