Does pedigree matter in the social sciences?

[socialequity]

Hello!

 

My husband is about to graduate and start a postdoc job in biosciences. His advisor told him that after he graduates with his Ph.D. he essentially gets a clean slate, and that his postdoc is critical for his trajectory. The advisor said that pedigree matters for his postdoc and to apply high. Do you know if this is the same in the social sciences? Does pedigree matter in SS just as much as in biosciences?

 

 

Thanks!

[jacib]

Yes, it does.  Post-docs are less common in sociology, but where you get your PhD definitely matters.  You may be interested in reading Val Burris's article "The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks" ASR 2004.  Part of it is conceptual (how should we think of prestige?) but a lot of it empirical and will give you good data on exactly how much where you get PhD from matters. Of course, there's a confounding variable that the top programs generally get the most promising students, but Burris finds that prestige is not directly connected to the number of articles published.  Here's a PDF of the article.  Here's the abstract:

 

The prestige of academic departments is commonly understood as rooted in the scholarly productivity of their faculty and graduates. I use the theories of Weber and Bourdieu to advance an alternative view of departmental prestige, which I show is an effect a department's position within networks of association and social exchange—that is, it is a form of social capital. The social network created by the exchange of PhDs among departments is the most important network of this kind. Using data on the exchange of PhDs among sociology departments, I apply network analysis to investigate this alternative conception of departmental prestige and to demonstrate its superiority over the conventional view. Within sociology, centrality within interdepartmental hiring networks explains 84 percent of the variance in departmental prestige. Similar findings are reported for history and political science. This alternative understanding of academic prestige helps clarify anomalies—e.g., the variance in prestige unconnected to scholarly productivity, the strong association between department size and prestige, and the long-term stability of prestige rankings—encountered in research that is based on the more conventional view.

 

This is only looking at hiring at the very top schools, however; there's a lot less data about how these prestige effects work further down the prestige hierarchy. 

[Pennywise]

Do you think Burris is really correct that "the graduates of more prestigious departments will tend to monopolize employment not only in elite departments but across the discipline" (Burris: 245)? The "tend to" in that sentence is one of  the only vague glimmers of hope in an otherwise very discouraging article.

 

I wonder if really productive grads of lower-prestige departments can make up for their lack of social capital. It sounds like it would require a lot more aggressive networking to make up for being academically born as lower-caste Untouchables. In the social sciences, I wonder how possible it really is to transcend your caste, even if you publish like crazy and are a networking whiz...

Edited February 23, 2014 by grrlfriend

[mbrown0315]

Do you think Burris is really correct that "the graduates of more prestigious departments will tend to monopolize employment not only in elite departments but across the discipline" (Burris: 245)? The "tend to" in that sentence is one of  the only vague glimmers of hope in an otherwise very discouraging article.

 

I wonder if really productive grads of lower-prestige departments can make up for their lack of social capital. It sounds like it would require a lot more aggressive networking to make up for being academically born as lower-caste Untouchables. In the social sciences, I wonder how possible it really is to transcend your caste, even if you publish like crazy and are a networking whiz...

 

About a half hour of market research would answer that question. Look at departmental websites of programs ranked sub-40 or 50 and note where recent hires (assistant professors) got their PhDs.

 

Stony Brook University (ranked 42) is a convenient example: http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/sociology/people/faculty.html

 

My advice would be to make sure you have a strong command of statistical software and methods if you dip below top 20. The academic job market seems particularly unkind at this level, and knowledge of quantitative methods makes finding a job outside of academia substantially easier. In reality, though, you should leave any program with a strong command of stats.

[jacib]

Look at the type of school you want to work at, then find check CV's to see the trajectories of professors there.  Alternatively, find scholars whose work you think you like and look at their career trajectories.  I noticed that a lot of the best historical sociologists (Charles Kurzman, Charles Tilly, Andy Abbott) started out at large state schools not particularly known for sociology (except Andy Abbot was at Rutgers, which has a notable program outside the top-30) though some (Theda Skocpol, Rogers Brubaker) led touched lives from the word go.  And these are probably some of the best sociological minds out there.

 

You'll find some people without top 25 degrees at top 25 programs.  I just happened to look through UT Austin because I knew Javier Auyero, who got his degree from the New School, was there.  About 10% of the tenured or tenure track faculty who got their degrees in the U.S. have non-top 25 degrees (I'd guess this is particularly high, I checked with Washington as a comparison case: between 0%-10% of the comparable faculty have non-top 25 degrees, depending on where exactly Albany, Santa Barbara, and Vanderbilt were ranked in the 80's and 90's--notice no one with a degree since 1997).  But often these people's career trajectories are unreal.  Auyero, for instance, wrote 4 books (and edited two others) before he was promoted to associate professor.  Another guy, Ken-Hou Lin who got his PhD from UMass, had two first author AJS articles, an ASR article, and then three other articles before he finished graduate school.  These are truly exceptional career trajectories in both senses of the word.

At schools like Tufts, or BU, or BC, or Brandeis, or Georgetown, or American (selective private schools without prestigious PhD programs in sociology), you see a bit more of a mix, but younger faculty is still mostly top 25-ish degree (but by no means totally).   At SUNY Buffalo, to choose a random non-flagship state school, about 20% are non-top 25ish (again, it's imperfect because some schools like Albany have dropped), but at SUNY Buffalo you certainly do see a lot of people from elite schools.  For example, of their faculty who earned their PhDs in the last ten years, you have Northwestern (x2), Wisconsin (x2), Cornell (x2), Arizona, Chicago.  I tried a couple other non-flagship state schools off the top of my head but I couldn't see any other that listed all the faculty's Ph.D.s on the same page.  The Assistant Professors at Cal State Fullerton were from UCLA, CUNY, Colorado, and Brown.  The two assistant professors (among a sea of lecturers) at Colorado - Denver were from Harvard and Riverside.  The assistant professors at UW-Milwaukee were from Northwestern, Connecticut, Madison, New Mexico, and Austin.

It's obviously not impossible to get a tenure track job with a degree outside the top-25 (and it's not like a degree from a top 10 school guarantees you a sweet job).  It does seem like people with prestigious degrees can be found teaching at a wide variety of schools.  It does seem even that some spectacular people get top-25 positions without having a top 25 degree.  Mostly, though, people from the top 25 get a lot of jobs (this probably has something to do with how big some of these cohorts are).  I don't know if there's one clear take away.

[rync]

Interesting. Anyone account for why programs like UCLA and other programs classified as "top 10-15" have lower placement?

[mbrown0315]

Interesting. Anyone account for why programs like UCLA and other programs classified as "top 10-15" have lower placement?

 

UCLA has very good placement.

[rync]

UCLA has very good placement.

I guess I should have been more specific. Burris has a table (albeit it's from 2005) that ranks departments by their placements in top-25 departments.

 

UCLA comes in at 20, with only several at top departments.

[RandomDood]

Just wanted to add my 0.02 to the discussion.

Although it is certainly true that pedigree--as measured by the prestige of the program one has attended--matters a lot, especially in academia, we should also not forget that "pedigree" is also--and I would argue especially--a function of who one has studied with.

Auyero's name, for example, gets thrown around a lot when it comes to show that people from so-called "lower tier" schools can rise to the top. Yet nobody ever bothers to mention that Auyero's advisor was Chuck Tilly (for whoever does not know who Chuck Tilly was, he basically created the field of contentious politics and is arguably the most influential historical political sociologist of the last 50 years).

My point is that if we look at "PhD exchange networks" we will certainly find relevant inter-departmental ties, but we should not let this observation cloud the fact that "departments" themselves are not agentive entities; the people who form a department are.

My hunch is that perhaps, especially in academia, departmental pedigree is a pretty reliable, but by no means entirely accurate proxy for advisory pedigree. 

[mbrown0315]

UCLA comes in at 20, with only several at top departments.

 

Good things have happened since that article was published. UCLA has been placing a lot of grads at prestigious departments.

[Darth.Vegan]

I would also like to add that while prestige is a seriously important consideration in terms of job placement it isn't the only thing that matters. Some departments fill certain niches well and seem to have better placement than their ranking would suggest. That said, the old adage that you end up placed in a department a tier below the one you are in stands. Tenure-track jobs from lower ranked departments are possible though, look at University of Oregon, they seem to place quite well. You're not gonna get a job at a top 30, but a lot of their students get tenure-track.                                   

[vaiseys]

Please remember that as long as programs are selecting who (not) to admit and students are choosing where (not) to go, departmental prestige is associated with many individual-level factors related to productivity in graduate school and job "placement." I'd love to see this acknowledged at least once in a while, rather than the (implicit) assumption that incoming students are just blobs of clay "trained" by their programs and stamped by their prestige. OK, rant complete.