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Kieran Healy
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Whoops, I just noticed the link I posted above might have been inaccessible to some people. Here it is again: http://bit.ly/hzUrsC It should work now.
You have to be careful about which population you condition on, but in general I'd expect where you got your PhD to matter more to long-term mobility than who your first employer is. High-prestige schools produce most of the PhDs in the field, and departments tend to hire from schools they perceive as peers or of higher prestige. This makes for a cascade of people down the status order. Upward mobility out of a first job should be more common for those with PhDs from higher-prestige departments, though of course not all of them will move (or could move: there isn't room). You can get a rough sense of this from the PGR respondents. See http://bit.ly/hzUrsC, for example. As we'd expect, most respondents teach at a lower-prestige school than the one they received their PhD from. (Notice there are fewer points below the 45 degree line than above it.) This is a static snapshot of a narrow population, and the reality is a much more complex and dynamic business. But you get the general idea. Of course, the U.S. college & university system has many different niches, so mobility is about more than moving up or down a one-dimensional status order.
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Dec 15, 2010