Is the dominance of graduates from top-tier universities among tenured faculty driven by prestige or output? Evidence from 50 years of university appointments in Germany

Prior research has shown that a large fraction of tenured university faculty in the U.S. and other countries were trained at a small number of highly prestigious universities. The question remains whether this concentration is due to competitive advantages held by candidates from these universities, or whether it reflects the larger output of early-career researchers aspiring to faculty positions by these universities. To address this question, we analyze data covering the full population of doctoral graduates in Germany since the 1960s. Similar to studies of the U.S. system of higher education, we observe a strong concentration of professors trained at a small number of universities, with the top five universities accounting for 17.9% of all appointed university professors. However, we find no systematic evidence indicating that the prestige of the doctoral degree-granting university systematically affects individuals' odds of being appointed to professorships, as prestigious universities train disproportionate numbers of doctoral graduates. Despite increasing stratification tendencies within the German system of higher education, our results also do not indicate that the importance of the degree-granting university for the academic careers of its doctoral graduates has increased over the past 50 years. While doctoral graduates from top-tier traditional universities and top-tier technical universities appear to be more likely to secure faculty positions at universities of the same category, this pattern reflects a large share of doctoral graduates returning to their degree-granting university after initial appointments elsewhere.