NATURE PODCAST

21 September 2022
Huge data set shows 80% of US professors come from just 20% of institutions

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week: uncovering where most US professors
get their PhDs.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

And the latest from the Nature Briefing. I’m Benjamin Thompson.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

And I’m Nick Petrić Howe.

[Jingle]

Interviewer: Nick Petrić Howe

We know a lot of you listening have PhDs, and if you’re part of the subset of that
group who are US-based and working at an institution with tenure track, I might
also be able to take a good guess at where you got that PhD, thanks to a new paper
published in Nature. This study has looked at a huge dataset of US faculty from
2011-2020 to get an understanding of where they were all trained and then where
they ended up working. The answer may not surprise you. To find out more, I caught
up with one of the authors, Dan Larremore, and started by asking him what we
already know about US faculty.

Interviewee: Dan Larremore

Most faculty come from a minority of institutions, so there's inequality in faculty

placement or production. And if you sort the institutions by which institutions
they draw their faculty from, a social hierarchy emerges. It's not exactly a
pecking order. These are endorsement interactions. If my institution hires a
graduate from the University of New Mexico, my institution is implicitly endorsing
the quality of the candidate that came from that institution. And so, if you zoom
out, you can understand a hierarchy of prestige and endorsement, simply from the
flows of faculty hiring. And past studies have identified in individual fields, in
individual snapshots in time, that these kinds of patterns exist. What hasn't been
known is whether or not these patterns are ubiquitous across fields, whether some
fields show steeper hierarchies than others, and how these patterns are evolving
over time.

Interviewer: Nick Petrić Howe

And so, given this kind of background, what was your motivation for your new paper?
What sort of questions were you trying to answer?

Interviewee: Dan Larremore

This paper starts from the observation that oftentimes, when somebody gives a
presentation, or is introduced as a speaker, or just introduced in general, one of
the things that comes along with their name is their credentials. And this sort of
raises a larger question of like, well, where do professors come from at a large
scale? So, in this study, led by my graduate student Hunter Wapman, what we did was
analyse all of the tenure-track faculty at PhD-granting institutions in the US over
a decade. That amounted to around 300,000 professors, 368 institutions in around
10,500 departments.

Interviewer: Nick Petrić Howe

And when you looked at this data, what did you find?

Interviewee: Dan Larremore

Well, our first question was, where do professors come from? And we answered this
first by looking at national origins. So, it turns out that around 11% of faculty
come from outside of the US in their doctoral training. It’s not national origin,
but around 11% of faculty have their PhDs from outside the US. It turns out that
this varies a lot by field. So, for example, in education, 2% of professors got
their doctorates outside of the US. In natural sciences, this was 19%. When we dig
down a little bit further and we look at country of origin, we found that among
those US professors who were trained outside the US, around 35% came from Canada
and the UK alone. I want to contrast that with another number, which is the total
professors who were trained doctorally in Africa and all of the Americas, excluding
Canada and the US, and that was just around 5%. So, a huge fraction of the faculty
who are coming into the US from abroad are trained in the UK and Canada, and a
small minority are coming from Africa and the rest of the Americas.

Interviewer: Nick Petrić Howe

And you also then looked at people who got their doctorates within the US, and what
did you find here? Where were these people coming from?

Interviewee: Dan Larremore

So, in the US, what we found was that there is stark inequality in production. What
you might say is that the United States tenure-track hiring market is dominated by
a small minority of institutions. So, for example, this follows the Pareto
principle or an 80-20 rule, where 80% of US-trained faculty come from only 20.4% of
institutions. Another way of looking at that is to say that 1 in 8 US professors
comes from just 5 US institutions. And these five institutions train more than all
of the non-US faculty combined. So, in general, what you could say is that the US
faculty hiring market is really unequal in terms of where professors come from.

Interviewer: Nick Petrić Howe

And so, the places, this sort of 20% where 80% of the faculty are coming from, are
they mostly prestigious universities, or do we not know this yet?

Interviewee: Dan Larremore

They are mostly prestigious. What we can do is actually measure prestige directly
from faculty hiring networks. And in fact, what we find is that there's again
inequality when it comes to prestige in these systems. So, basically, the elite
positions in these hierarchies of prestige are occupied by just a few institutions,
and most institutions have no departments at all that are in those elite top slots.

Interviewer: Nick Petrić Howe

And as I understand that is well, your data also gave some insights into the gender
of the faculty. What are you able to tell me about this?

Interviewee: Dan Larremore

That's right. So, we were also interested in understanding gender inequality in the
academy. And the first thing that we did was we looked year by year between 2011
and 2020 at the different fields and their gender representation over time. And
essentially what we found is that women's representation has been increasing in
almost every field, but not for the reasons that we might think. Because we could
identify new hires and we could identify attritions, so people who left the academy
early or who retired, we could compare women's representation in those inflows into
the academy versus the representation of the outflows. And essentially what we find
is that in almost every field there are more women who are coming in and more men
who are going out. And when you look at the demographic curves, this really
explains what's happening. Retirement-age faculty tend to be far more likely to be
men than newly hired faculty. One question that we had was whether or not the
percentage of women among newly hired faculty was itself changing over time. And we
essentially found that hiring rates for women are flat over a decade of
observation. So, what this is telling us is that the increases that we've seen in
women's representation in the US academy have been driven by past changes in
hiring, which are creating these demographic waves that are making their way
through, or we have more men retiring and more women being hired. But what we don't
see is continued change at the hiring stage. So, this is especially important for
areas like mathematics and computing, engineering and natural sciences, where,
still today, men are more likely to be hired than women, suggesting that without
future efforts to change things at the hiring stage, we're unlikely to see gender
parity over the next decade.

Interviewer: Nick Petrić Howe

You've found these stark inequalities in where US faculty are coming from. What
sort of impacts do you think this could have on the sort of institution of science
or the institution of education and learning?

Interviewee: Dan Larremore

Where faculty come from makes a difference in the questions that they ask. And in
fact, their affiliations are known to affect things like paper acceptance rates.
Prestigious affiliations increase the likelihood that one's paper gets accepted.
Faculty-prestigious universities have more resources, they write more papers, they
receive more citations and attention, they win more awards, and their graduates go
on to experience greater wage growth. So, we know that where professors come from
and these affiliations are really important for all kinds of markers outside of the
quality of their ideas and the quality of their scholarship alone. So, in general,
US faculty are coming from a highly stratified population, and that has impacts on
what questions are asked and what people work on.

Interviewer: Nick Petrić Howe

That was Dan Larremore from the University of Colorado, Boulder in the US. For more
on this story, check out the paper in the show notes.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Coming up, we’ll be talking about the science of grieving for a public figure.
That’s on the Briefing chat. Right now, though, it’s time for the Research
Highlights, read by Dan Fox.

[Jingle]

Dan Fox

Chocolate may be one of the world's most popular foods, and cacao trees, which
produce the seed kernels used to make chocolate, are also popular with a variety of
wildlife. Researchers wanted to quantify how the different species living on small-
scale cacao farms collectively affect production. The team marked out mini plots of
cacao trees in a cacao-growing region of Peru. Some plots were surrounded by a cage
of bamboo poles and fishing mesh that excluded birds, bats or both. One tree in
each mini plot was treated to exclude ants, and flying insects were excluded by
bagging one branch per tree in fine mesh. They found that flying insects, birds and
bats all increased the total amount of cacao grown, probably because insects
pollinated the flowers and birds and bats provided pest control. Trees that were
accessible to birds and bats had more than doubled the yield of trees that were
not. The authors think that the future of agriculture lies in fostering
biodiversity, which can support high productivity. Read that research in full in
the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

[Jingle]

Dan Fox

Large planets orbiting massive stars a great distance might have been adopted or
stolen rather than home-grown. Scientists have seen Jupiter-sized exoplanets
orbiting stars that are more than three times the mass of the Sun, but the size of
such planets is a puzzle, as the conditions around these massive stars should stunt
planetary growth. Researchers modelled the dense stellar nurseries in which stars
are born and found that at least once within the nursery’s first 10 million years,
a massive star is likely to steal a planet from a neighbour or adopt a free-
floating wanderer. The authors predict that such planets would end up hundreds of
times as far from their star as Earth is from the Sun. And this work backs the
theory that planets on the most distant orbits originate from outside their current
star system. Read that research in full in Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society.

[Jingle]

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Finally on the show, it’s time for the Briefing chat, where we discuss a couple of
articles that have been featured in the Nature Briefing. Nick, what have you got
for us to talk about this time?

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Well, Ben, as you and many of the people listening to this podcast will know, the
Queen has recently passed away. And I've actually been reading a bit about the
science of grief. We've got an article in Nature about it and how it relates to
public figures.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, we're recording this on Tuesday, Nick, and the period of national mourning
has just ended. And of course, there were a lot of people around the world who very
much were grieving, who were in mourning.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Yeah, and the first thing to say about this is the people interviewed for this,
these experts on grief, they emphasise that this is real grief that people are
feeling, even though it's a figure they may never have met. And that's the sort of
interesting part of this because why would it be that you would feel this way about
someone you've never actually met, and that's sort of what this story delves into.
Host: Benjamin Thompson

Right, so in many cases, there is kind of a distance between the person who has
died, in this case, the Queen, and those who are experiencing grief. What are
researchers saying about this then?

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Well, the first thing to caveat this with is we don't know a lot about grief. Grief
is quite a hard thing to study because we're not exactly sure what it is, like it's
a very complicated combination of emotions. But what we do know is that it can
arise due to a sort of disruption of our experience of the world. So, we have
assumptions of how the world is, like the Sun will rise, and when something like
this happens, even when it's a public figure, our assumptions can be sort of
shattered. Those things that we've thought and expected all our lives are now
suddenly not the case anymore. Like the Queen has been around for my entire life
and suddenly she's not there anymore, and this can cause sort of feelings of grief.
And then there's also the fact that many people will identify with a public figure
like the Queen. They'll share similar values or, in fact, their person, like how
they define themselves, will be in part defined by this person. Maybe they feel
very British, and being very British to them means that they honour the Queen. So,
there are lots of different reasons why people may be mourning the Queen in this
particular case.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

And so, what are the researchers in this news article saying then about the process
of grief, right, because obviously it can be very different for different people.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

It can indeed and, in this case, what the researchers are saying is that because
it's a public figure, it's likely that it'll pass more quickly than other kinds of
grief because the length of grief is often to do with the time, proximity and
closeness that someone has with someone else. And so, because this is a public
figure that they've not actually shared a lot of time with and are not personally
very close to, they will probably come to terms with this much more quickly. And
also, to come to terms with it, some of the researchers were saying that they will
find qualities in the Queen that they admire and they will carry them forward.
They’ll be like, I like the way that she was x and therefore I will carry that
forward, and that's how people sort of come to terms with this as well. But again,
like I say, grief is a very complicated thing. It's not like there's a grief gland
in your brain that just starts pumping out chemicals when someone dies, so it's a
very complicated process and there's a lot that we don't know about it. But that's
all for my story this week, Ben. What have you got for us to discuss this time?

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, Nick, the story that I've got this week, I read about it in The Guardian, and
it's based on some research published in the journal Current Biology, and it's an
example of what's being dubbed an ‘interspecies innovation arms race’, and it's
occurring in Australia between sulphur-crested cockatoos and humans.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Okay, so, pray, tell me what is an innovation arms race and why are cockatoos doing
it with humans?
Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, it's quite a neat one because it's about social learning between the groups,
right, and I'll come to that in a bit. But let's have a little bit of background
here. So, this story centres on wheelie bins. Now, these are rubbish bins or trash
cans, I guess, on wheels, as the name suggests, and folk leave them out once a week
and their rubbish gets collected by the trash van. And these bins have hinged lids,
okay? And cockatoos are very, very smart birds. And a team of researchers showed a
little while ago how the birds learnt how to open the hinges on these things and
get the waste food inside. And the researchers showed that this skill was passed
from one cockatoo to another, and this behaviour spread very rapidly through the
suburbs of Sydney. And now these researchers are back and they're looking at the
human response.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Well, if I was a human, I'd probably try and stop them getting in by maybe putting
a little clasp on the bin to stop it being opened, something like that.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, that would be a good way of doing it, Nick, but there's a problem with that.
The problem is you can't lock these bins down, right. They need to be opened and
emptied by the automated garbage truck, right, so you can't just lock the bin.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Tricky.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

So, the people who live in these areas have come up with different ways to stop the
cockatoos getting in. And the researchers behind this work have surveyed a few of
these suburbs, looked at the areas here, and they've showed that there's a variety
of methods that are used, right? I mean, a rubber snake was one of them. One of the
most popular ones is just putting a brick on top of the bin. But the problem is
cockatoos, they're pretty clever, and they learn to push those bricks out the way
and then get in, right. So, there's some escalation of the protection that was
shown in some areas, and the humans got more creative. Shoes jammed into the hinges
is one, so the bin lorry can still open it but the cockatoos can't. Zip tying water
bottles on top. And the researchers showed that protection was more common in areas
with more cockatoo bin raiding, which is what you'd expect. But things do get
interesting when you look at the areas, okay, and there's a spatial element to
this.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Right, so the prevention strategies work better in some areas rather than others or
something like that?

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Well, what the team have revealed is that some of the techniques used appear to be
clustered in specific areas, right? So, some people would learn the same technique
as their neighbours, right? So, if they could see the house across the street, they
might give that a go. But houses that they couldn't see each other, like the house
on the street behind, there wasn't that kind of clustering, right, so it seems like
there's this kind of interesting dichotomy here. So, there’s this socially learned
behaviour for the cockatoos on how to get into the bins, and then there’s this
socially learned sort of defensive mechanism in the humans to protect their bins as
well.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Right, okay, so this is the innovation arms race that you talked about the start.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Yeah, that's right. So, each population is learning and escalating, where required,
and I think one of the questions is, how far will this go? Will the cockatoos learn
from each other and pass on that knowledge of how to get round the shoes trapped in
the hinge, if they can get round it at all, for example. And what's neat is that
there's also examples in this work of de-escalation as well, like in in some areas
where the cockatoos stop trying to get into the bins, the people there stopped
trying to protect them, and the reasons why they stopped isn't fully understood,
but maybe less trash was being thrown out in these areas. So, lots of questions to
answer about sort of the social learning and this innovations arms race.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

Wow, that's super interesting, Ben. And if there are any aspiring sci-fi writers
out there, Interspecies Innovation Arms Race is quite a good name for a novel. But
listeners, if you're interested in those stories and want to read more about them,
and for where to sign up to the Nature Briefing to get more like them to your
email, check out the show notes.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

And that's all for this week. But just before we go, there's time to mention that
we've got a new video on our YouTube channel. It's all about flying robots that 3D
print millimetre-accurate structures, and you can find a link to that in the show
notes.

Host: Nick Petrić Howe

And as always, you can keep in touch with us over on Twitter – we’re
@NaturePodcast. Or you can send us an email to podcast@nature.com. I’m Nick Petrić
Howe.