One of my favorite scholars of higher education policy is Dominique Baker who, along with Christopher Bennett, has just released a new analysis of who is most likely to get prestigious private academic fellowships. With the chaos around federal grant funding, private fellowships are ever-more important as these career-defining awards that provide time and money to pursue scholarship and creative work. Along with the unrestricted time and material support provided by these awards, recipients enjoy career-long prestige and access to elite networks.
Looking specifically at the Guggenheim fellowship, Baker and Bennett find that overwhelmingly, recipients are chosen from a very small number of elite, high-resourced universities. The rich, Baker and Bennett observe, get richer, and the scholarly work of the rich is elevated over other possible projects.
There are any number of explanations for this "stability in the status hierarchy". Many more excellent people apply for these fellowships than can be funded, and "campus prestige" can be one shortcut when sifting through the applicant pool. Wealthy campuses also have many more resources to support the development of applications: professional staff to review drafts, research assistants, internal funding supports the development of literature reviews, faculty with lower teaching loads with more time to invest in their applications. Possibly, those who work at these institutions are the most likely to seek prestigious fellowships and then to reapply after being turned down.
Or perhaps, selection committees make arbitrary decisions that scholars from these institutions are pre-screened for their potential to do breakthrough work.
Yet scholars who have come up through prestigious, well-resourced high schools and colleges and graduate schools and are then hired to work in elite places will be curious about different sort of questions than will scholars who have been denied access to each of those steps on the ladder.
As Baker and Bennett write:
There is no shortage of talent and brilliance across the country and the larger world. Funders get to decide how they identify that talent—and, equally importantly, whose talent they choose to cultivate.
The historical trends show that the longstanding methods of selection, which often overlook the cumulative advantages provided by prestigious institutional affiliation, tend to coincidentally find talent in the same places, year after year. Ignoring this reality will result in replicating the status hierarchy of the past decades, all too often rewarding those already flush with resources at the risk of slowing or even halting innovative work from those less well-connected.
