Merit and placement in the American faculty hierarchy: Cumulative advantage in archaeology
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Shott M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8803199 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:The faculty job market plays a fundamental role in shaping research priorities, educational outcomes, and career trajectories among scientists and institutions. However, a quantitative understanding of faculty hiring as a system is lacking. Using a simple technique to extract the institutional prestige ranking that best explains an observed faculty hiring network-who hires whose graduates as faculty-we present and analyze comprehensive placement data on nearly 19,000 regular faculty in three disparate disciplines. Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality. Furthermore, doctoral prestige alone better predicts ultimate placement than a U.S. News & World Report rank, women generally place worse than men, and increased institutional prestige leads to increased faculty production, better faculty placement, and a more influential position within the discipline. These results advance our ability to quantify the influence of prestige in academia and shed new light on the academic system.
| S-EPMC4644075 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Purpose of the studyEarlier studies have identified a pattern of cumulative advantage leading to increased within-cohort economic inequality over the life course, but there is a need to better understand how levels of inequality by age have changed in the evolving economic environment of recent decades. We utilized Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data to compare economic inequality across age groups for 2010 versus 1983-1984.Design and methodsWe examined changing age profiles of inequality using a summary measure of economic resources taking into account income, annuitized value of wealth, and household size. We adjusted for survey underreporting of some income and asset types, based on National Income Accounts and other independent estimates of national aggregates. We examined inequality by age with Gini coefficients.ResultsLate-life (65+) inequality increased between the 2 periods, with Gini coefficients remaining higher than during the working years, but with a less steep age difference in inequality in 2010 than in 1983-1984. Inequality increased sharply within each cohort, particularly steeply in Depression-era, war-baby, and leading-edge baby boom cohorts. The top quintile of elderly received increasing shares of most income sources.ImplicationsIncreasing inequality among older people, and especially in cohorts approaching late life, presages upcoming financial challenges for elderly persons in the lower part of the income distribution. Implications of this increasingly high-inequality late-life environment need to be carefully evaluated as changes are considered in Social Security and other safety-net institutions, which moderate impacts of economic forces that drive increasingly disparate late-life economic outcomes.
| S-EPMC5881660 | biostudies-literature
Project description: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.
| S-EPMC9534765 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Although recent research suggests that the cumulative risk of foster care placement is far higher for American children than originally suspected, little is known about the cumulative risk of foster care placement in other countries, which makes it difficult to gauge the degree to which factor foster care placement is salient in other contexts. In this article, we provide companion estimates to those provided in recent work on the US by using Danish registry data and synthetic cohort life tables to show how high and unequally distributed the cumulative risk of foster care placement is for Danish children. Results suggest that at the beginning of the study period (in 1998) the cumulative risk of foster care placement for Danish children was roughly in line with the risk for American children. Yet, by the end of the study period (2010), the risk had declined to half the risk for American children. Our results also show some variations by parental ethnicity and sex, but these differences are small. Indeed, they appear quite muted relative to racial/ethnic differences in these risks in the United States. Last, though cumulative risks are similar between Danish and American children (especially at the beginning of the study period), the age-specific risk profiles are markedly different, with higher risks for older Danish children than for older American children.
| S-EPMC4192300 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Chemical analysis of residues contained in the matrix of stone smoking pipes reveal a substantial direct biomolecular record of ancient tobacco (Nicotiana) smoking practices in the North American interior northwest (Plateau), in an area where tobacco was often portrayed as a Euro-American-introduced postcontact trade commodity. Nicotine, a stimulant alkaloid and biomarker for tobacco, was identified via ultra-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry in 8 of 12 analyzed pipes and pipe fragments from five sites in the Columbia River Basin, southeastern Washington State. The specimens date from 1200 cal BP to historic times, confirming the deep time continuity of intoxicant use and indigenous smoking practices in northwestern North America. The results indicate that hunting and gathering communities in the region, including ancestral Nez Perce peoples, established a tobacco smoking complex of wild (indigenous) tobacco well before the main domesticated tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) was introduced by contact-era fur traders and settlers after the 1790s. This is the longest continuous biomolecular record of ancient tobacco smoking from a single region anywhere in the world-initially during an era of pithouse development, through the late precontact equestrian era, and into the historic period. This contradicts some ethnohistorical data indicating that kinnikinnick, or bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) was the primary precontact smoke plant in the study area. Early use likely involved the management and cultivation of indigenous tobaccos (Nicotiana quadrivalvis or Nicotiana attenuata), species that are today exceedingly rare in the region and seem to have been abandoned as smoke plants after the entry of trade tobacco.
| S-EPMC6243282 | biostudies-literature
Project description:To foster a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind inequality in society, it is crucial to work with well-defined concepts associated with such mechanisms. The aim of this paper is to define cumulative (dis)advantage and the Matthew effect. We argue that cumulative (dis)advantage is an intra-individual micro-level phenomenon, that the Matthew effect is an inter-individual macro-level phenomenon and that an appropriate measure of the Matthew effect focuses on the mechanism or dynamic process that generates inequality. The Matthew mechanism is, therefore, a better name for the phenomenon, where we provide a novel measure of the mechanism, including a proof-of-principle analysis using disposable personal income data. Finally, because socio-economic theory should be able to explain cumulative (dis)advantage and the Matthew mechanism when they are detected in data, we discuss the types of models that may explain the phenomena. We argue that interactions-based models in the literature traditions of analytical sociology and statistical mechanics serve this purpose.
| S-EPMC4659671 | biostudies-other
Project description:ImportanceThe Medicare Advantage (MA) program is rapidly growing. While previous work has found that beneficiaries with substantial health needs disenroll from plans at higher rates, the long-term frequency of disenrollment is not well understood.ObjectiveTo compare cumulative disenrollment trends in the MA program by beneficiary and plan characteristics.Design, setting, and participantsThis retrospective, serial cross-sectional study included beneficiaries with any MA enrollment from January 1, 2011, to December 31, 2020. Data analysis took place from September 2022 to March 2023.ExposuresBeneficiary characteristics, including race and ethnicity, length of Medicare enrollment, dual eligibility, and comorbidity burden, and contract characteristics, including vertical integration status, premium, and MA star rating.Main outcomes and measuresThe main outcome was disenrollment from an MA contract within 5 years. Rates of cumulative disenrollment by beneficiary and contract characteristics were compared. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to assess the correlation between a contract's 1-year disenrollment and the contract's disenrollment over a longer period.ResultsThe sample included 82 377 917 beneficiaries (524 442 225 beneficiary-year observations; 56.7% female; mean [SD] age, 71.9 [10.3] years). After 1 year, 13.2% of nondually enrolled and 15.9% of dually enrolled beneficiaries had left their contract, increasing to 48.3% and 53.4%, respectively, after 5 years. Black enrollees disenrolled at the highest rates among race and ethnicity categories, with 14.8% disenrolling after 1 year and 52.6% disenrolling after 5 years. Contracts had a median disenrollment rate of 9.8% (IQR, 4.5%-19.0%) after 1 year and 56.1% (IQR, 23.1%-79.0%) after 5 years. Contracts rated 5 stars had substantially lower 5-year disenrollment rates (23.0% after 5 years compared with 41.2% for 4- to 4.5-star contracts and 67.2% for 3- to 3.5-star contracts). Disenrollment from a contract after 1 year was not well correlated with disenrollment after 5 years (r, 0.46).Conclusions and relevanceThis cross-sectional study found substantial cumulative rates of disenrollment from MA plans within 5 years between 2011 and 2020, with wide variation in 5-year disenrollment by contract. The findings suggest that evaluating long-term disenrollment rates in MA performance measures may capture different outcomes than single-year disenrollment alone.
| S-EPMC10457718 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cumulative advantage-commonly known as the Matthew Effect-influences academic output and careers. Given the challenge and uncertainty of gauging the quality of academic research, gatekeepers often possess incentives to prefer the work of established academics. Such preferences breach scientific norms of universalism and can stifle innovation. This article analyzes repeat authors within academic journals as a possible exemplar of the Matthew Effect. Using publication data for 347 economics journals from 1980-2017, as well as from three major generalist science journals, we analyze how articles written by repeat authors fare vis-à-vis less-experienced authors. Results show that articles written by repeat authors steadily decline in citation impact with each additional repeat authorship. Despite these declines, repeat authors also tend to garner more citations than debut authors. These contrasting results suggest both benefits and drawbacks associated with repeat authorships. Journals appear to respond to feedback from previous publications, as more-cited authors in a journal are more likely to be selected for repeat authorships. Institutional characteristics of journals also affect the likelihood of repeat authorship, as well as citation outcomes. Repeat authorships-particularly in leading academic journals-reflect innovative incentives and professional reward structures, while also influencing the intellectual content of science.
| S-EPMC9007338 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The American black bear (Ursus americanus) was long thought to be solitary and its social organization has not been well described. Here, we present new data on black bear social structure. The objectives of the study were to make detailed observations of the behavior of wild black bears to determine their social interactions and structure. We tested whether black bears interacted socially beyond mating and competing for resources, if black bears tracked relationships and interacted regularly even when resources were not limited, and whether the social structure of a population of black bears was based on a matrilinear hierarchy. We collected data by direct observation of bears from 1993 to 2014. Observations of 1210 social interactions at a provisioning site indicated that females compete and form matrilinear hierarchies. Dominant bears established a hierarchy for food, control of space, and control of younger bears. Post interaction scent marking took place, which suggested that dominant females were conditioning subordinates to their scent marks. Affiliative behavior occurred between related and unrelated bears and helped to establish the social structure of the bear community. Based on our data, human-bear conflicts can be reduced by behavioral modifications by humans when they encounter bears. Knowledge of bear behavior and the matrilinear hierarchy provide a basis for non-lethal management of bears that find themselves in a bear-human conflict situation.
| S-EPMC9291961 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Audits of tenure-track hiring reveal faculty prefer to hire female applicants over males. However, audit data do not control for applicant quality, allowing some to argue women are hired at higher rates because they are more qualified. To test this, Williams and Ceci (2015) conducted an experiment demonstrating a preference for hiring women over identically-qualified men. While their findings are consistent with audits, they raise the specter that faculty may prefer women over even more-qualified men, a claim made recently. We evaluated this claim in the present study: 158 faculty ranked two men and one woman for a tenure-track-assistant professorship, and 94 faculty ranked two women and one man. In the former condition, the female applicant was slightly weaker than her two male competitors, although still strong; in the other condition the male applicant was slightly weaker than his two female competitors, although still strong. Faculty of both genders and in all fields preferred the more-qualified men over the slightly-less-qualified women, and they also preferred the stronger women over the slightly-less-qualified man. This suggests that preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts. Thus these data give no support to the twin claims that weaker males are chosen over stronger females or weaker females are hired over stronger males.
| S-EPMC4611984 | biostudies-literature