Alex Engler

To currentpsstudent: You're right, and that's the real difficulty of this research question. There is data out there that can be used as reasonably of a proxy for 'student quality' going into admissions, but they are hard to get (I'll have to ask the authors if they intend to buy it). Indicators of 'quality of training' may not even exist, though I certainly could be wrong. To blackcoffee64: Yes. Again, I'm not doing the research, but the regression results in the working paper will control for class population.

That's a perfectly valid response. I think the strength of this article is that it backs a common sentiment with hard data, but I don't expect anyone to be completely shocked by it. To your question: I don't know. What I can tell you is that as it stands now, academic jobs seem very skewed. That being said, hopefully the sentiment that Justice Thomas advocates for gains some ground. Ideally, just talking about this issue will help hiring boards realize their biases, and thne focus more on demonstrated merit. I'm informed on the research, though I'm not performing it myself, and there will be more developments as the working paaer progresses. I'll be sure to post those here.

So just to be totally upfront, this is somewhat self promoting, in that I am going to link to an article published the Georgetown Public Policy Review, which I run the online side of. That being said, I have been on Grad Cafe as an observer quite a few times (it helped me chose Georgetown for my MPP), and the research contained herein is actually very interesting and highly pertinent to political science graduate students. The article discusses the skewed distribution of political science PhDs who get tenure track professorships. It really is useful information. A highlight: "...eleven schools contribute 50 percent of the political science academics to research-intensive universities in the United States. Over 100 political science PhD programs are graduating students that will contest the remaining 50 percent of openings." You can read the rest here (if the moderators find this appropriate): http://gppreview.com/2012/12/03/superpowers-the-american-academic-elite/