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Ph.Ds From MIT, Berkeley, and a Few Others Dominate Top School's CS Faculties
An anonymous reader writes "A Brown University project collected the background information of over 2,000 computer science professors in 51 top universities. The data shows a skew in their doctoral degrees, "Over 20% of professors received their Ph.D. from MIT or Berkeley, while more than half of professors received their Ph.D. from the [top] 10 universities." For those professors, fewer work in theoretical computer science and there is a growing trend of recent hires in systems and applications. The original data is also publicly-editable and available to download."
...if you want a low paying job in your field after you graduate, get your doctorate from one of the best schools in the country.
Got it!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Ivy league academia is a circle-jerk
I'm the CIO of my company and we don't hire rich kids. They're spoiled, self-important, arrogant assholes who don't listen to instruction. So if mommy and daddy sent you to a $50,000 a year college, good fucking luck getting a job with someone like me who is wise enough to avoid you. You're automatically disqualified. Unfortunately, most of the world is too stupid to see things the way I do. I got 2 degrees from a local but extremely good technical school. Immediately after that I won several programming competitions and on a national Tek Systems/Aerotek exam I beat 88% of their programmers worldwide. So I'm one of the best programmers anyone could hope to hire. Unfortunately, I'm CIO now instead because NOBODY would hire me as a programmer without a degree from a more expensive school. That's right, they ignored my actual proven ability to do the job in favor of someone who went to a better college because their parents had more money. What a load of shit.
It's pretty sad that the other 90% of universities have so little faith in their OWN graduates that they won't hire from within.
If I had just gotten a PhD, and it ended up being so worthless that even my own school wouldn't accept it, I would demand a refund.
Top professors dominate top positions at top school!
Who would have ever guessed.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The reality is that there are way more PhD produced every year than there are academic positions available. The best job candidates on the academic job market each year tend to come from the best programs. When those candidates were entering graduate school a few years before, they were likely to be the best applicants at that time too. Fortunately, for Computer Science PhDs there are a lot of excellent job opportunities outside of academia, so there's not really an overproduction issue like in many other fields. In my experience, a lot of the top 50 schools also have a lot of foreign graduate students who end up getting faculty positions back in their home countries too.
Overheard at lunch there around 2000 (paraphrase): "We hire the most competitive candidates from the most competitive top three schools and then we wonder why they have trouble cooperating and getting along..."
I hope the policy has changed since... It also seemed like they were passing over a lot of interesting people and thus limiting their cognitive diversity.
See also Scott E. Page book "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"
http://www.amazon.com/Differen...
Google probably suffers to a lesser extent from a similar problem as I suggest here:
http://developers.slashdot.org...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Many schools did not even have a CS degree program until recently, so there might be a bias there. What you would really want to see is "what fraction of CS PhDs from this school wind up being professors". Maybe Cal and MIT created more than 50% of the total CS PhDs (they've been cranking em out a long time) and they're actually under-represented.
As for "even my own school wouldn't accept it": This is a perenial problem: schools generate far more PhD people than there is a need for them in academia. Nobody expects to get a tenure track job at their own institution, and, in fact it is discouraged. Historically, for instance, UC would not admit graduates of the same campus to the graduate program at that campus, feeling it was important to get some diversity of experience. When enrollments in colleges were rising (e.g. 50s, 60s, 70s) this oversupply wasn't so bad. Now we have the non-tenure track "adjunct problem". There have been grumblings in the Halls of Academe on this for decades (see old copies of the American Scholar, or Chron of Higher Ed).
As for "I wouldn't hire those entitled rich kids": There are such things as scholarships, of course. And a PhD isn't meant to be a "trade school" or "professional qualification", it is intended to be training for future professors (notwithstanding that in engineering, it has never been so.). A distinction similar to that in Germany between Doktor and Professor might be useful, but will never happen in the US: the hegemony of the classical humanities educational ladder is as fixed as if it were graven upon tablets of stone.
I will say that given a typical industrial setting (let's get that application or new hardware developed) I'd rather pick someone with a 2 year degree and 6 years industry experience of good quality vs a 8 year PhD whose sole work experience is working in their advisor's lab. OTOH, I'd also hope that the 2 year degree included freshman composition and language skills.
The number of jobs where one needs the finely developed knowledge in the narrow area that represents your PhD work is very, very small. However, as a signal or marker that you can slog through 2-4 years of seemingly capricious and arbitrary process imposed on you, it's not bad. However, so would decent work experience in a shop that wasn't at CMMI level 0 maturity. Experience at the latest cowboy hacker company who's going to make millions, if not billions, isn't all that valuable, and will create unrealistic expectations and long term unhappy workers when it gets past the thrill and fun of working 120 hour weeks to get that release out, and you're into the more common projects like "let's change the account number field from 8 characters to 10 characters across the company" or a even a Y2K remediation or regulatory compliance. There it's just the long slog to build a pyramid over 20 years.
the poor might one day rise up & eat them http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rulers+history+of+being+eaten one reason we must provide them with layers of armies to defend themselves against us & the spirit of fearless freedom in general
Slashdot only allows censorship including but not limited to when the sponsor's message is compromised &/or when it's you again,, mynuts won; too cruel for school... between a rock & a heard place https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0LEVyvqFYJTxDsA2cNXNyoA?p=rulers+fear+poor&fr2=sb-top&fr=yfp-t-901 some things almost never change...
Given that the #1 source of professors is CMU and the #2 is GIT, the title of the post calling out MIT and Berkeley is surprising
I think you just misread the data. The ones near the top are about the make-up of the departments, so CMU and Georgia Tech simply have a lot of professors. The tables at the bottom are about sources of professors (placements).
So basically, if you wanna be a prof, don't bother getting a PhD outside the top 10. If you don't wanna be a prof, don't bother getting a PhD at all.
I'm not a PhD or even Masters. But the arrogance of candidates coming out of "top" schools with PhD really does imply PiledHigherAndDumber.
Example: my group interviewed a PhD grad, but in his mind, we were uninteresting, and merely a "checklist" item. Solely because of attidude, we declined to make him an offer. And at the time, we were bleeding edge. Personally, I'll choose a hard-worker from a "B" or "C" school if they are focused and passionate about the pertinent sub-field. Additional points to candidates with actual relevant experience.
Enormous minuses for collosal egos.
And I can (and do) make/break interviewees.
Professors get hired for their research work. And while many schools give a good education in CS, research is mostly done at the top 10% schools.
This phenomena is also why large-scale paradigm shifts in a field only tend radiate outward from top universities. As a professor, you disseminate wholly new ideas via your graduate students, who then take positions at other universities and influence others.
It's pretty much impossible to fundamentally change minds once they're established in the field - after all, who wants to embrace something that makes much of their past work irrelevant?) So paradigm shifts tend to occur by seeding your graduate students into lots of different departments and waiting for the older generation to retire.
As for why hire from top universities? Well, that's easy. Given any field where there's lots of uncertainty, human beings naturally gravitate to any metric we can. And a PhD from a top university is about as solid a metric as one can get. Of course, it helps that the secondary metrics that are used (papers published, cited, etc.) are also established by editors and readers who also use the same metric to judge whether something is worth publishing or reading. Like so many things, we *make* in-built biases become truth by our actions.
Elitism and trust in the elites is a completely human reaction to uncertainty. Doesn't mean it's optimal, but it is human.
PhDs in computer science are probably rare, since advanced degrees are not typically worth the expense for normal careers in technology. So how many PhD candidates are there who graduate with degrees who want to go into academia? Big-name schools like MIT would attract the people who are hardcore about becoming professors, right? Is this study just a Captain Obvious thing of big-name academic schools self-selecting the people who want to go hardcore into academics? A fifth of the sample being from a big-name academic school seems low. If you're going to look for a computer science professor for your school, the pool of potential professors is probably small and you'll be looking at people from a few major academic schools. It's not like when you give a successful businessperson an honorary degree and have him teach management classes. You have to know your stuff to teach computer science.
In Silicon Valley, what you've accomplished matters more than where you went to school. Open source recognition will get you far if you want to be a programmer. At my company, we hired a guy from Tunisia who's an expert in computer vision.. They did not even give him a programming test, as it was clear from his open-source project what kind of code he was capable of writing.
One thing that managers often really dislike are people that are overly arrogant. I've seen good people turned away because of this.
Silicon valley is a metetocracy. Pretty much my entire team are from Ivy league schools, where I am not. Not everyone that goes to an Ivy leaguge school is rich..All the people I worked with who graduated from Ivy leauge schools are from middle-class families, the sons of teachers and farmers, etc. With few exceptions, they just seemed like normal people. The one's I work with seem driven and foucsed, and wise beyond their years.. I think it's easy to have a good team dynamic despite their degrees.
As a comp. sci. grad student, I often read papers originating from many sources. Generally, the best research comes from top professors at top universities - plain and simple. They are the best of the best and therefore got hired at the top schools and get the most funding. With this funding, they attract the best students in larger numbers which often translates into better research and the cycle continues.
How can these obvious and natural facts be controversial to anyone?
You think because you attended 'a' college somewhere that this entitles you to any position anywhere? Just because you play community baseball does not entitle you to the majors.
Time to wake up to reality. There is a vast difference between an education at a top school and the other colleges. Did you know that the average bachelor's graduate (4 yrs) in the US is about at the same level of proficiency as the average Japanese high school student? If you'd like to know more about how low the average college education in the US is, read:
http://skills.oecd.org/skillsoutlook.html
You will be shocked. But you probably will only read a bit as it will make you feel poopy inside your feely feelies. Then you can continue with your delusions of all the injustices of a system which keeps you from your well-deserved tenure at Stanford.
Within the US maybe.
Your school is unwilling to employ you, but that guy's school is unwilling to hire him. It sort of evens out.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That this study is going to eventually morph into demands for more CS professors from women's colleges.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
All things considered, using crude language (and especially swearwords) is typically a sign of weakness in people. As in: being unable to get their point across without being vulgar and being frustrated at their own inability to do so. Or simply being too lazy to care.
Suppose you're in charge of hiring engineers and you can get someone who (being equally competent on the engineering side) has the added benefit of polishing their shoes, not looking like some bum from the slums, and being able to convince people to adopt their views (as in collaborating with e.g. customers, prospects, colleagues) and to get their thinking across clearly, effectively, and without needlessly antagonising their audience (as in making presentations to e.g. management, prospects, competitors).
Would you choose someone who comes across as a potty-mouth, a bum, a Neanderthaler or someone more sophisticated?
I suppose it depends. If you want a small corporate cog that you'll never have to worry about reaching management levels himself (and perhaps turning into competition), by all means: go for the one lacking polish (or even the potty-mouth). Your only worry will be to pay said cog market value (for their technical competence only: they have no other qualities) and keep them fully booked.
If, on the other hand, you're looking for someone who might be suitable to represent your company externally (after you verified that their head is screwed on right of course) and who's promotable in due time, go for the one with a few extra qualities. Such as politeness and articulateness. You'll find yourself paying extra for such people. They're scarcer and more in demand because they're more useful.
My university, NUI Maynoth just isn't well endowed, big and powerful enough to trust it's own grads. It has some visiting professors from America and the US, and locally from UCD and Trinity, which are the premier universities in Ireland. Not many actually graduated from Maynooth, and if they did, they did postgrads in the States, or the 2 big aforementioned. I imagine this happens everywhere. We all respect prestigious universities.