So you want to be a professor in the US

[gwnorth]

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

 

[Vanadium 50]

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.