Importance of undergraduate institution prestige in physics faculty hiring networks

Reforming the professionalization experiences of future faculty members, including their undergraduate experience, provides a possible means to create scalable change in higher education. However, this requires an understanding of where faculty undergraduate training occurs. We analyze data from 7748 tenure-line faculty members across 611 U.S. physics departments, including their undergraduate alma mater and their employer university. The resulting undergraduate professionalization network reveals a prestige hierarchy similar in strength to those previously found in hiring networks at the Ph.D. level, indicating that the road to faculty jobs begins during undergraduate admissions. Furthermore, 42% of physics faculty members earned their undergraduate degrees from institutions outside of the United States. These results reinforce the importance of institutional prestige in academia and offer a potential strategy for driving systemic change.

Figure 1

Inverted Lorenz curve of faculty who earned their undergraduate degrees from U.S. institutions. The majority of tenured and tenure-track U.S. physics faculty earned their undergraduate degrees from a small fraction of physics degree-granting U.S. institutions.

Figure 2

Universities plotted by their hub and authority scores with color indicating block membership. Universities with high hub scores are those who have provided undergraduate training to a larger number of faculty with more of those faculty tending to work at universities with high authority scores. Universities with high authority scores tend to have faculty who earned their undergraduate degrees at universities with high hub scores.

Figure 3

The block model image matrix indicates a layered core-periphery network structure with non-U.S. institutions taking on the role of a second core. Each cell represents the density of directed edges from universities in row blocks to universities in column blocks. For example, there are 660 possible directed edges that flow from the 10 elite universities to the 66 high authority universities, and 49.4% of these occur in our network.

Figure 4

The network structure illustrated by a series of sociographs that layer on additional universities by block membership from core to periphery. The network structure highlights a nested core-periphery structure. The size of each node correlates with the number of former undergraduates who are currently tenured or tenure-track physics faculty at U.S. institutions included in the network. Yellow nodes belong to the elites block; orange nodes belong to the high authority block; light blue nodes belong to the low authority block; red nodes belong to the periphery block; the dark blue node belongs to the non-U.S. block and represents 669 different non-U.S. institutions treated as a single node. Edge thickness corresponds with the number of undergraduates hired.

Figure 5

Percent of faculty working at universities within each block by where they earned their undergraduate degree.