Other So you want to be a professor in the US

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Only 11% of US faculty hold non-US doctorates, with the majority coming from the UK and Canada. A significant concentration of faculty is found at a few prestigious universities, with 80% of domestically trained faculty coming from just 20.4% of institutions. Faculty hiring in the US shows a steep hierarchy, with only a small percentage employed at universities more prestigious than their doctoral alma mater. New hires at top-ranked institutions are increasingly likely to be trained internationally, and male faculty representation rises with institutional prestige. These patterns illustrate the interconnected nature of elite academic networks and the dominance of a few universities in faculty training and hiring.
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Some highlights from a a study of tenured or tenure-track faculty employed in the years 2011–2020 at 368 PhD-granting universities in the United States

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x#Sec2

- Only 11% US faculty have non-US doctorates
- Of those with non-US doctorates, 35.5% come from the United Kingdom & Canada (3.9%)
- In the Natural Sciences 19% of faculty have non-US doctorates

- Among the departments that are ranked top-10 in any field, 23.2% are occupied by departments at just 5 universities: UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia

- 80% of all domestically trained faculty were trained at just 20.4% of universities
- 5 doctoral training universities account for 13.8% of domestically trained faculty: UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford

- Professors who are employed by their doctoral university account for 9.1% of all US professors
- Faculty hiring networks in the United States exhibit a steep hierarchy in academia and across all domains and fields, with only 5–23% of faculty employed at universities more prestigious than their doctoral university
- These patterns create network structures characterized by a closely connected core of high-prestige universities that exchange faculty with each other and export faculty to—but rarely import them from—universities in the network periphery
-The typical professor is employed at a university that is 18% further down the prestige hierarchy than their doctoral training
- New hires in all domains are substantially more likely to be trained outside the United States as prestige increases
- Both new and existing faculty are more likely to be men as prestige increases for academia as a whole
 
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I'm not surprised.

The highly ranked schools are big. This is at least partially how they are ranked.

There are maybe 800 schools that offer a BS in physics and maybe 140 offering the PhD. So (ignoring foreign faculty) that means we expect most faculty to be trained at 20% of the universities. Further, half of all physics PhDs are granted by about 10% of the PhD-granting institutions. It's not surprising that a similar distribution if exhibited in faculty hires.
 
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