Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention

Abstract

Faculty hiring and retention determine the composition of the US academic workforce and directly shape educational outcomes1, careers2, the development and spread of ideas3 and research priorities4,5. However, hiring and retention are dynamic, reflecting societal and academic priorities, generational turnover and efforts to diversify the professoriate along gender6–8, racial9 and socioeconomic10 lines. A comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of the US professoriate would elucidate the effects of these efforts and the processes that shape scholarship more broadly. Here we analyse the academic employment and doctoral education of tenure-track faculty at all PhD-granting US universities over the decade 2011–2020, quantifying stark inequalities in faculty production, prestige, retention and gender. Our analyses show universal inequalities in which a small minority of universities supply a large majority of faculty across fields, exacerbated by patterns of attrition and reflecting steep hierarchies of prestige. We identify markedly higher attrition rates among faculty trained outside the United States or employed by their doctoral university. Our results indicate that gains in women’s representation over this decade result from demographic turnover and earlier changes made to hiring, and are unlikely to lead to long-term gender parity in most fields. These analyses quantify the dynamics of US faculty hiring and retention, and will support efforts to improve the organization, composition and scholarship of the US academic workforce.

Temporal Dynamics of Faculty Hiring in Mathematics

“…This result remains relatively constant between 1950 and 2019. The hierarchical structure of faculty hiring networks, that has been found in studies of other academic disciplines (Clauset et al, 2015) and of mathematics using a different data set (Wapman et al, 2022), is also observed in our analysis.…”

“…The result of a search is publicly known eventually, but the list of applicants and the selection criteria used are not revealed. Success in acquiring a faculty position may not only depend on an individual scholar's research productivity and academic credentials (Fernandes et al, 2020), but also on demographic factors such as race, gender, and childhood socioeconomic status (Clauset et al, 2015;Wapman et al, 2022;Morgan et al, 2022;White-Lewis, 2020).…”

“…Recent years have observed a growing interest in quantifying the faculty hiring process in various fields (Hanneman, 2001;Barnett et al, 2010;Clauset et al, 2015;Cowan and Rossello, 2018;Fernandes et al, 2020;Mai et al, 2015;Zuo et al, 2019;Fowler et al, 2007;Lee et al, 2021;Wapman et al, 2022). For instance, researchers used a network science approach to study the trajectories of 19,000 faculty members in business, computer science, and history (Clauset et al, 2015).…”

“…The study also finds that recent changes in gender parity of faculty members are explained mainly by the retirement of older faculty members, who tend to be men. (Wapman et al, 2022). A survey-based statistical analysis of academic job seekers primarily in the life sciences identified significant associations between receiving an academic job offer and the number of job applications filed, winning a career transition award, total citation count, authorship of high profile papers, and postdoctoral fellowships (Fernandes et al, 2020).…”

Trends in Self-citation Rates in High-impact Neurology, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry Journals

“…This naturally leads to fewer self-citations for women, and it may reflect that women are less extensively included in co-authorship networks than men 27,28 . These self-citation and authorship discrepancies could contribute to the "leaky pipeline" of women in STEM 29 , which contributes to disparities in academic faculty positions [30][31][32] , editorial boards 33 , and awards 34 . Nevertheless, future work is needed to determine if and how lower self-citation rates contribute to these outcomes.…”