The Academic Labor Market

This post by Steven Teles at The Reality-Based Community has some interesting ideas about the way the academic labor market operates. Here's the gist (more after the break):

the sorting processes of the academy are characterized by substantially incomplete information. The information that hiring committees have available to them varies in predictive quality, from the dissertation (could be more a function of the good ideas of the candidate's advisor than the candidate), to the job interview (could be more a measure of slickness of presentation than underlying intelligence or productivity) to recommendations (which may simply operate as a proxy for the candidate's PhD granting institution, since their substance is often remarkably similar). Furthermore, academic hiring committees are committees--because of the need to put together majorities, committees may converge on non-offensiveness, not predicted productivity. So, while the job market for freshly minted PhDs is probably a less than perfect predictor of future academic productivity.

The initial sorting of PhDs to institutions would be self-correcting if mistakes at this first stage were corrected in the “secondary” market for job candidates. But—and this is the key to the argument—there are reasons to believe that this will not occur. First, initial allocations are sticky, because PhDs are less mobile in the secondary market than they were in the initial job market. Once they have settled in to an institution, and their spouses have made a life wherever they initially landed, there may be limits on reallocation.

Second, and most important, quality (as measured by scholarly productivity) is to a significant degree endogenously produced by initial allocation to institutions. Rick Hess has published an interesting article in PS that shows that it is almost impossible to “write your way out” of low-ranked institutions. The reasons for this are obvious to anyone who has spent time in a variety of different university settings. In lower ranked institutions, a great deal of scholarly time is taken up by grading, and opportunities to teach courses that closely track with research interests are limited. Resources for research are more limited the further down the pecking order one goes (funding and time off of teaching in particular). As one goes down the pecking order, the average quality of research assistance one can obtain from graduate and undergraduate students declines. Institutions further up the pecking order have a constant flow of visiting speakers that help stimulate ideas for research and expand scholarly networks. Funding sources are also more willing to support research at higher-ranked institutions. For all these reasons, PhDs at higher ranked institutions will find it considerably easier to produce a stream of high-quality work than their counterparts at lower-ranked institutions.

The consequence of this is that initial allocations of individuals to institutions will tend to be highly sticky—high potential PhDs who end up at the “wrong” institutions in the original sort will have a hard time producing the scholarship that shows that they “deserve” to be at the higher ranked institutions (that is, that shows that at the higher ranked institutions they would produce more quality scholarship than incumbents). At the same time, those who have the good luck to end up at the “right” institutions will produce significantly more quality work than they would if they had been sorted into the institutions that matched their inherent potential.

As a consequence of this, those at the higher-ranked institutions will, as a consequence, appear as if they really do have more intrinsic “merit” than those at lower-ranked institutions. And on average, given that the original sort is not random, they will. The point, however, is that the endogenous production of academic quality will make it look like the original sort was more efficient than it actually was.

If true, this is a bit depressing, since it seems that your first job closes off a lot of options. But are there any strategies to prevent this from happening if by chance you happen to land a job at a less than perfect institution, for whatever reason, and want to "move up" eventually, or simply want to produce good quality research? My first thought is that there must be some way to increase the productivity of say, grading and other non-research-related activities - by designing better courses and tests, relying more on peer evaluation, and so on - so that they do not detract as much from one's research and so on. This might entail some significant upfornt investment, but it might (just might) pay off. Technology (e.g., blogs, e-mail exchanges, etc.) might also compensate (to some limited degree) for the lack of first-class scholarly networks. (All this assumes that one wants to move up to a more prestigious institution - which of course one may not want to, for any number of reasons, both personal and professional. Lots of people are perfectly happy where they end up). Thoughts?