Does the reputation of a faculty member’s graduate programme and institution matter for labour market outcomes?

Abstract

For a future faculty member the choice of which graduate programme and institution to attend is considered to have important implications for securing academic employment, developing skills to succeed in academia, and yielding positive returns on investment of time and money in education. Yet does it matter where a faculty member attends graduate school – and if so, is it the reputation of the programme or the institution that matters most for his or her labour market outcomes? In this study, we used nationally representative data from the U.S. to estimate the relationship between a faculty member’s graduate programme and institution and their institution of first academic employment, research productivity, and salary. Our findings suggest that the reputation of one’s graduate department may factor more heavily than reputation of institution in the type and level of institution at which he or she is first employed, while graduate institution reputation has notable marginal, positive benefits associated with research productivity and salary. We discuss implications for the influence of graduate education on academic careers.

Keywords:

• Academic careers
• graduate education
• human capital
• rankings and prestige

Acknowledgment

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, April 2014. The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Nick Hillman and the editor and anonymous reviewer for this journal.