Academic Job Market for Doctoral Students

Does academic pedigree equate to destiny? Not necessarily on an individual scale, according to K. Hunter Wapman, Sam Zhang, Aaron Clauset, and Daniel B. Larremore in this September 2022 paper in Nature (vol. 610, pp. 120-127). But the study, spanning 2011-2020, does confirm that a small number of high-ranking PhD-granting institutions (including UCLA) supply the vast majority of tenure-track faculty in the US overall. Furthermore, white male faculty with degrees from these prestigious institutions show the lowest rates of attrition after hiring of any demographic in the study. Scroll down for key takeaways from this study. You can also read the article to explore the data behind these intersecting factors in the composition of the US academy, which highlight the barriers that endure within and beyond the academic job market.