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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> Would be like saying that 50% of all Americans who become teachers come from just 20% of the states - but not adjusting for the fact that 50% of the population lives in the top 10 largest states.

There's data here for number of doctorates awarded by school in 2020: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22300/data-tables

#1 was... Walden University. Which I'd never actually heard of before. It's a private for-profit online school.

The rest of the top 10 is 2. Michigan 3. Illinois 4. Berkeley 5. Purdue 6. Texas A&M 7. Stanford 8. Texas 9. Wisconsin 10. Ohio State.

So there's not a direct correlation between "eliteness" and volume of doctorates produced. Some of the elite schools are represented in this list, but "non-elite" schools are too.

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I think you are mixing up what I am saying - or what that stat was saying.

Firstly, if Walden University produced zero tenured professors it would end up weighting exactly the same in the data as random small private university that produced 10 PhDs that also didn't become professors.

The state does not involve "eliteness". They simply ranked all schools by number of PhDs they produced and took the top 20%.

And fwiw considering this would be about 90 universities Im almost certain every school you listed would make that cut. I guess all I'm saying is that it would be nice to know what percent of total PhDs the same 90 schools are accountable for. My guess is about 50%.

The list you cite undermines the article's claim about elitism because it looks like 4 out of the 5 schools that it lists are also on your list. So the conclusion is that the 5 schools that produce the most professors...include 4 of the top 10 schools in terms of PhD graduates. Not much of a surprise there!

You can't just look at supporting evidence and ignore contrary evidence. That's profoundly unscientific thinking. What about the 6 schools — the majority! — on my list that are not elite?

Not all of the schools on the top 5 list are that elite. Three are public and only two are private. And UW Madison is not a super elite institution. For many people it wouldn't be in their top 20 schools, maybe more. I was surprised there was only one Ivy on the top-5 list. When I saw that list of schools, I thought "this person is saying these are the hyper-elite schools that are making too many professors?"

Madison is more elite than you think. "Among the 1,070 departments that are ranked top-10 in any field, 248 (23.2%) top-10 slots are occupied by departments at just five universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia; fully 252 universities (64%) have zero top-10 departments." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x

That's not evidence of eliteness. It's evidence that they produce a lot of professors. And as the top-10 list above points out, they produce a lot of PhDs.

It is an open question as to whether the reason they make a lot of professors is because they make a lot of PhDs, or because they are "elite".

Those are top 10 rankings by prestige, not by number of professors.

Thanks for clarifying. But it's actually if they're top 10 in any department, so there's a clear tilt in favor of universities that are large and have lots of departments.

Lots of universities are large and have lots of departments. That doesn't explain the success of the top 5 elite. For example, 6 universities grant more PhDs than UW-Madison yet have less success.

This conversation is getting repetitive and tiresome, I'm done.

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