80% of professors at Ph.D.-granting universities attended the same handful of colleges — from highereddive.com by Laura Spitalniak

Dive Brief:

  • Just 20.4% of U.S. institutions account for 80% of tenured and tenure-track faculty at Ph.D.-granting universities, giving prestigious colleges disproportionate influence over the spread of ideas, academic norms and culture.
  • That’s according to new research published in Nature, a peer-reviewed journal. It concluded that academia “is characterized by universally extreme inequality in faculty production.”
  • Just over one in eight domestically trained faculty were educated at five doctoral institutions: the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University. The same five universities trained more faculty than all non-U.S. universities combined.