> The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers
It's interesting that you use the word "potential". Tenure-track positions are very hard to get, and most newly minded PhDs have very little track record. If they're lucky, they have a publication or two in a journal, but many will have only their dissertation. So I think the question is whether PhDs coming from prestigious schools are judged to have more "research potential" based on where they come from rather than their limited record.
The "potential" problem is even worse when it comes to admitting undergraduates into graduate programs.
If you don't get a tenure-track position right out of grad school, it can be difficult to ever work your way up to one, because you'll probably have to take a job at a school with a greater teaching load than a typical research university, which leaves little time for you to do your research and prove yourself. In a sense, the "potential" becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
This is why it has become normal to do 3-7 years of postdoc research positions before being considered for a tenure-track faculty position, even for those from elite universities.
Only in fields where there’s no demand for their skills outside academia, like English literature or History, or vastly more supply than demand, like most of the sciences. Fields like Economics or Computer Science have post docs but they’re not normative. Most people who end up with tenure track jobs never do one.
Hogwash! It depends on far more than the field. In Computer Science, factors such as the current “heat” of the market, saturation in terms of hires at institutions in your field, procedures in a given country, “production rate” of PhD students, etc. all have a major impact on whether you will have to “run the postdoctoral gauntlet”. About half of the tenured professors that I know in my “generation” had to do several years of work before ending up on the tenure track and I am both in Computer Science and in a field that has been very hot for nearly ten years.
It's interesting that you use the word "potential". Tenure-track positions are very hard to get, and most newly minded PhDs have very little track record. If they're lucky, they have a publication or two in a journal, but many will have only their dissertation. So I think the question is whether PhDs coming from prestigious schools are judged to have more "research potential" based on where they come from rather than their limited record.
The "potential" problem is even worse when it comes to admitting undergraduates into graduate programs.
If you don't get a tenure-track position right out of grad school, it can be difficult to ever work your way up to one, because you'll probably have to take a job at a school with a greater teaching load than a typical research university, which leaves little time for you to do your research and prove yourself. In a sense, the "potential" becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.