Steinn links to a post by the "Incoherent Ponderer" that was pretty much guaranteed to raise my blood pressure. It's an analysis of "Ph.D. Pedigree", spinning off earlier arguments at Cosmic Variance and elsewhere in which the Ponderer argued that there's a hiring bias in favor of "big name" Ph.D. programs.
The analysis in this case consists of tallying up the Ph.D. institutions of the faculty at the Top 50 research universities, and coming to the shocking conclusion that:
Top 10 universities contribute 59% of US PhD hires, those ranked 11-20 provide another 18%, the next ten ranked 21-30 provide 10%, and ALL of the remaining US universities contribute remaining 12% or so.
Actually, that's not terribly shocking. Nor would it be all that annoying, were it not for a few missing words: Top 10 universities contribute 59% of US Ph.D. hires at Top 50 research universities. This is the thing that drives me absolutely nuts about the Ponderer and his ilk: the constant promotion of the pernicious myth that the only job worth having is a tenure-track job at a Top 50 research university.
There are 764 colleges and universities listed as granting degrees in physics in the most recent AIP data. The Top 50 universities constitute a whopping 6.5% of the total number of educational institutions. Acting as if those are the only jobs that matter is actively insulting to those of us who have chosen to work at the other 93.5% of the academic institutions in the nation.
I'm tempted to rant about this at length, but it's really not worth it. I've been around and around with the Ponderer about this, and really, it would be more productive to hit myself in the head with a brick. I'm leaving for a conference tomorrow afternoon, and I have packing to do, papers to grade, and lint to pick off my sweaters. Let's just note that having the top 1.3% of the colleges and universities supply three-fifths of the faculty for the top 6.5% of the colleges and universities in the nation does not strike me as irrefutable evidence that academia is all a giant con job, and leave it at that.
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In a comment to Steinn's post, I wondered if the "top 50," or even "top 10," places are also hugely overrepresented in college faculty jobs in general. I suspect they are, although not to the same degree.
-Rob
Ranking like this only perpetuates the notion that there is a hierarchy in terms of jobs you can get with a PhD. Which is absurd. Selling the point of getting a PhD to become a professor at a Top 50 institution is selling a pyramid scheme. A PhD is an academic degree. It is not a professional degree like say an MD or JD. The skills learned over the course of earning a PhD can be applied to so many different jobs that limiting oneself to just one type of position is crazy (heck doors are open to those who do get professional degrees). Being a professor at a "top 50" university might not be the best fit for what you want to do with you life. Maintaining the sense of hierarchy is just downright harmful.
chad, ponderingfool - if you read the entire post, you will realize that I used top 50 merely because this is what I have time and data for - in the post I comment on how I would love to expand to top 100, top 150, whatever - but filling in 150x150 spreadsheets will take a bit more time than 50x50.
There was no implied statement that quality of research department has a top-50 cutoff.
If anyone out there wants to do a follow-up, the data is out there.
As to alternative careers, read the bottom of the post - once again, I would love to see how this works out if I had the data. Obviously almost everyone with a PhD is employed doing *something* so once you expand to all jobs, I am not sure what statistics like this can tell you.
I question the entire Top 764. Can't one get a PhD outside the United States of America in, you know, the rest of the known galaxy? Can't one drift into Physics from another field altogether, such as Math or Computer Science, just as a hardy lot of Physicists drifted into Molecular Biology in the 1930s and 1940s? Can't one do interesting Physics with no PhD at all? It's all so hide-bound, constricted, elitist, departmentalized, anti-Renaissance.
Bluntly, who the hell should care where you went to school, if you do good experiments, explain experiments with good theory, teach well, or collaborate well on papers?
I have no degree in Physics at all. Yet I feel that there are no physical laws with which the universe bars me from figuring any of it out. If nobody wants to pay me to so so is my problem, because there are other ways to earn money and, if one really loves Physics, one can do it as an amateur, and keep one's day job. Which, with the sole exception of the anomalous 20th century, is how it's been done.
Also, to be fair, the top 50 departments tend to be disproportionately large.
The other 700 have significantly smaller faculty on average.
I don't have the numbers at hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if ~>20% of all physics faculty are in the top ~ 50 departments.
But I don't believe the IP meant to ignore the other departments, just did not have the data at hand.
Steinn's guess seems pretty good. The AIP data
http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/acad/table1.htm
say there are 9000 physics faculty. 20% would require about 36 per department in the top 50, and the AIP says the average PhD department is 29.
The AIP does not tabulate data on 2-year institutions, which hides a substantial market. (Our CC has 2 PhD, physics and astrophysics, and 1 MS. Apropos this analysis, the physics PhD's in our CC are from 2nd-quartile R1 institutions, both in the AAU.) That could add almost as many PhD jobs as are listed for BS-only departments.