Exhibit number whatever in reasons I tell students not to pursue graduate work in history, despite history being the best choice of major as an undergraduate, hands down.
" The data revealed that just a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada in these three fields. Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors,
and eight schools account for half of all history professors."
"...In fact, after graduating with Ph.D.s, only about 10 percent of faculty move “up” the academic prestige hierarchy as defined by theScience Advances study (with “prestige” being determined by the university’s ability to place faculty at the widest variety of other institutions). Most faculty instead slide 25 percent down the scale."
history is not alone, either,
"Oprisko’s experiences inspired him to research faculty hiring on his own. In 2012, he conducted a review of the 3,709 political science professors who were then employed by Ph.D.-granting universities and found that just 11 schools had produced 50 percent of the total. Harvard, at the top of the list, was responsible for 239 of the professors. Purdue, on the other hand, was responsible for 10 of them."
...
"It’s not just young scholars who suffer under the current hiring hierarchy; innovation across all disciplines may be stifled. Because graduates from only a small number of universities account for the majority of faculty jobs, new ideas and discoveries from those elite institutions may be far more likely to gain traction in academia and in the wider world than those from outside this group. (Not to mention that bad ideas coming out of this core group of schools may get more attention than they deserve.)"
(You know, bad ideas like the one generated by Yale and Harvard grads, such as the Iraq War)
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