[sadfaceunread]

This really isn't that surprising. It could also be explained largely by self selection. If one believes that top schools by prestige also attract the top students, and that these schools are reasonable efficient at selecting among these applicants we'd expect a strongly one sided distribution of talent.

If the top 10 institutions have the vast majority of the top 1% of grad students, I'd expect they produce the vast majority of professors.

[qiqing]

There's also something else at play that isn't just "cream rises."

If you're a top student who chose a slightly suboptimal grad school for personal reasons (to be near a significant other, taking care of a family member, already have a house somewhere, etc.), you may not realize that the game became cripplingly hard for you until you're near the end of your program.

The top universities often: (1) send grad students to conferences (including travel costs) whether or not they have results to present that year, (2) hire lab techs and admins, which allows grad students more time to do actual research, and (3) make it more likely that the student gets a grant proposal accepted by the NIH/NSF/other agency.

And you know, maybe you hold out hope because your advisor let you and your lab mates volunteer stuffing all the swag bags the night before a conference that happens to be in your city that year so you can go talk to all the other folks at the top of your field. Maybe you actually get a grant funded, unlike your classmates. Maybe you put in that many more hours so you can handle your share of the grunt work on top of research you'll actually get published. No weekends for five years. Do you do it? Maybe.

[tsotha]

You might do it if you were sure you'd actually land on the tenure track and get tenure. That's far from assured, though. Seems like most people reach 35 or 40 before they're officially denied tenure, meaning you've wasted your most productive years chasing a career that's not going to happen.

[benbreen]

I recently paid a visit to one of Ivies for a postdoc interview and a group of professors there were discussing the study that this article refers to. They all believed that "cream rises to the top" wasn't sufficient to explain the studies findings, and acknowledged that there are biases built into the academic job search that go beyond selecting for raw talent. Completely anecdotal of course, but it was still striking to me to see how dissatisfied they seemed with the selection process that they (as tenured professors at one of Iviest of Ivies) were the gatekeepers of.

[bhayden]

Agreed, not sure why no one throughout the writing or editing process of this article realized this obvious fact.

[calibraxis]

Article discusses that argument. ("Meritocracy")

Furthermore, articles would be greatly puffed up if they had to preempt random arguments which uncritically mention notions like "top 1% of grad students". (Kind of depresses me that I'm immersed in such a tech/managerialist culture that this argument popped into my head too while reading the article, requiring me to spend time evaluating it.)