Global Faculty Networks and U.S. Doctoral Graduates' Monopoly: The Pareto Principle in Academia

This study examines the concentration of doctoral training and faculty production within global higher education systems, revealing a highly imbalanced structure dominated by a small group of top-tier universities. By analyzing data from 6,205 universities or institutions across 104 countries, a longitudinal study spanning 1995–2022 was conducted. The study demonstrates that top-tier universities, especially in the U.S. and U.K., disproportionately produce academic faculty. Findings show that this concentration is most pronounced in STEM fields, particularly in the Natural Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine & Health, while faculty production in the Humanities remains relatively dispersed. Moreover, U.S. universities emerge as critical factors in global doctoral education: graduates from top-tier American universities are over-represented in faculty positions at non-U.S. universities, reinforcing international academic dependency and institutional hierarchies. The study also uncovers significant gender disparities, with male doctorate holders generally facing more concentrated career trajectories than their female counterparts, indicating entrenched systemic biases in academic hiring and promotion. In the short term, the introduction of global university rankings initially widened these disparities, as evidenced by increasing pre-ranking and decreasing post-ranking Gini coefficients; however, the magnitude of this effect appears to have moderated over time. Overall, these results underscore the persistence of monopolistic tendencies in doctoral training and faculty recruitment, and they call for targeted policy interventions to promote greater diversity, equitable recruitment practices, and a more inclusive global academic landscape.