A signal detection theoretic argument against claims of unmeritocratic faculty hiring

To achieve faculty status, 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, & Larremore, 2015). It was therefore argued that the academic faculty job market is not purely meritocratic, because it seems unrealistic that students from top-ranked universities could outperform their peers by as much as six times in productivity. Here we dispute the claim that substantially higher rates of faculty production would require substantially (and unrealistically) higher levels of student productivity; a signal detection theoretic argument shows that a high threshold for hiring (due to keen competition) means that a small difference in average student productivity between universities can result in manifold differences in placement rates. Under this framework, the previously reported results are compatible with a purely meritocratic system. As a proof of concept in the field of Psychology, ranks for universities were gathered from the U.S News and World Report (2016) and students’ productivity was quantified by the impact factors of the journals in which they published. 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.