A signal detection theoretic argument against claims of unmeritocratic faculty hiring

Abstract

To get a faculty job, graduating doctoral students have to substantially outperform their peers, given the competitive nature of the academic job market. In an ideal, meritocratic world, factors such as prestige of degree-granting university ought not to play a substantial role. However, it has recently been reported that top-ranked universities produced about 2-6 times more faculty than did universities that were ranked lower (Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore 2015), necessitating un-meritocratic factors: how could students from top-ranked universities be six times more productive than their peers from lower-ranked universities? Here we present a signal detection model to demonstrate that substantially higher rates of faculty production need not require substantially (and unrealistically) higher levels of student productivity. Instead, it is a high hiring threshold due to keen competition that causes small difference in average student productivity between universities to result in manifold differences in placement rates. Under this framework, the previously reported results are compatible with a purely meritocratic system. As a simple proof of concept, we examined the association between university ranking and the impact factors of students publications from a small selected sample of psychology departments in the U.S. The results are in agreement with our theoretical model. Whereas these results do not necessarily mean that the actual faculty hiring market is purely meritocratic, they highlight the difficulty in empirically demonstrating that it is not so.