Ever wonder why it seems that the relative "reputation" rankings among universities never seem to change very much, despite continual change in the faculty members who make up those schools? (E.g., Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, are always at the top. Michigan, Berkeley, Penn are just below them. Big "state"schools are lower still, and so on down.) Is it about scholarly productivity? Is it about talent? Is it about money? Is it about the fierce tenacity of (misguided) "conventional wisdom"?
Here is an interesting paper by a sociologist (Val Burris of U. Oregon) who claims to show, quantitatively, that it is mostly about the department's position in the social network that exists among departments of the same discipline at different schools (e.g, all sociology departments). He argues that a given department's position in the network is determined mainly by how many of its PhD graduates hold faculty positions in prestigious departments. http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~vburris/caste.pdf <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Evburris/caste.pdf>
Some 84% of the variance in the "prestige" rankings of US sociology departments is accounted for by a measure of its position in this network (its "social capital"as Burris calls it). By contrast, article publications, citations, and grants alone account for less than 30% of the variance. Including article publications, citations, and grants in the "social capital" regression equation adds only 4 percentage points (for a total of 88%). This holds any number of interesting implications, if Burris is correct. For one, a department does *not* improve its relative standing by hiring graduates of prestigious departments. It can only improve its position by placing its graduates on the faculties of prestigious departments, and this, he argues, is almost impossible to do because of the social exclusion practiced by prestigious departments (e.g., 91% of the faculty positions in the "top 20" sociology departments are filled by graduates of the "top 20"). Thus, we get the notable resistance of academic prestige hierarchies to change over time. For graduate students, it means that the prestige of the school from which they get their degree has a greater impact on the prestige of the school at which they get their first job than anything else, *including* their level of scholarly productivity.
He compares to whole thing to the marriage practices of the traditional Indian caste system.
Inquiring minds want to know! :-) -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-5115 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ====================================== --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
