Faculty Hiring at Top-Ranked Higher Education Administration Programs: An Examination Using Social Network Analysis

DiRamio, David; Theroux, Ryan; Guarino, A. J.

doi:10.1007/s10755-009-9104-5

Cited by 25 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Such high rates of self-hiring across fields and universities are surprising, because academic norms treat self-hiring negatively—for example, it is sometimes called 'academic inbreeding' 51 . Elevated self-hiring rates may indicate an unhealthy academic system 52 because self-hiring restricts the spread of ideas and expertise 3 , and many decades of study suggest that it can correlate with lower quantity and quality of scholarship 53 , 54 . In this light, the sharply elevated rates of self-hiring at elite universities present a puzzle 51 , with uncertain epistemological consequences, yet these trends seem to be driven less by recent new hires and more by attrition or hiring patterns preceding our decade of observation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention

Wapman

Zhang

Clauset

et al. 2022

Nature

128

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Faculty hiring and retention determine the composition of the US academic workforce and directly shape educational outcomes1, careers2, the development and spread of ideas3 and research priorities4,5. However, hiring and retention are dynamic, reflecting societal and academic priorities, generational turnover and efforts to diversify the professoriate along gender6–8, racial9 and socioeconomic10 lines. A comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of the US professoriate would elucidate the effects of these efforts and the processes that shape scholarship more broadly. Here we analyse the academic employment and doctoral education of tenure-track faculty at all PhD-granting US universities over the decade 2011–2020, quantifying stark inequalities in faculty production, prestige, retention and gender. Our analyses show universal inequalities in which a small minority of universities supply a large majority of faculty across fields, exacerbated by patterns of attrition and reflecting steep hierarchies of prestige. We identify markedly higher attrition rates among faculty trained outside the United States or employed by their doctoral university. Our results indicate that gains in women’s representation over this decade result from demographic turnover and earlier changes made to hiring, and are unlikely to lead to long-term gender parity in most fields. These analyses quantify the dynamics of US faculty hiring and retention, and will support efforts to improve the organization, composition and scholarship of the US academic workforce.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention

Wapman

Zhang

Clauset

et al. 2022

Nature

128

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…2 The names of the AERA Fellows, their institutions, and the years they were inducted, were added to a Google spreadsheet. Similar to previous research which used network analysis in academe (see DiRamio et al., 2009; Hartlep et al., 2016), we used curriculum vitaes to cross-check and supplement the data we found above. We recorded the Fellow’s degree(s), the year they were conferred, and in what field, as well as the Fellow’s institution.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Homophily in higher education: Historicizing the AERA member-to-fellow pipeline using theories of social reproduction and social networks

Hartlep

Hensley

Wells

et al. 2017

Policy Futures in Education

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This study examines select demographics of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellows ( n = 644), and whether or not the cohorts of AERA Fellows are becoming more diverse in racial and gender terms in relation to the inaugural year of Fellows in 2008. This study tests the mission statement of this exclusive program to ‘… recognize excellence in research and be inclusive of the scholarship that constitutes and enriches education research as an interdisciplinary field’. Our findings suggest that homophily – a sociological phenomenon that describes the ways in which individuals and institutions prefer sameness – is a real problem in higher education, and programs such as the AERA Fellowship are not accomplishing their mission to recognize the research of faculty of color, women faculty, and faculty in interdisciplinary fields. In contrast to the AERA Fellows mission statement, we find that the Fellowship program relies on homophilous social networks in selecting AERA Fellows and, in turn, reinforces social reproduction in higher education.

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“…Watanabe and Falci (2016) looked at friendship network size among faculty members and its relation to perception of work-family culture. Diramio, Theroux, and Guarino (2009) used networks to look at faculty hiring patterns at top universities.…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Campus Connections: Student and Course Networks in Higher Education

2020

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Residential higher education brings thousands of students together for multiple years and offers them an array of shared intellectual experiences and a network of social interactions. Many of these intellectual and social connections are formed during courses. Students are connected to students through courses they take together, and courses are connected to one another by students who take both. These courses and the students who take them form a bipartite network that encodes information about campus structures and student experiences. Because all institutions of higher education collect and maintain precise records of what courses students take, it is possible to assemble a student-course network that quantitatively describes the interactions among students and courses. We provide an example that demonstrates the identification of courses effective at creating unique connections among students and reveals how students and majors can be strongly connected or dispersed. We show how social network analysis can be used to improve our understanding of the learning environment at the University

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Faculty Hiring at Top-Ranked Higher Education Administration Programs: An Examination Using Social Network Analysis

Cited by 25 publications

References 18 publications

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention

Homophily in higher education: Historicizing the AERA member-to-fellow pipeline using theories of social reproduction and social networks

Campus Connections: Student and Course Networks in Higher Education

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