Computer Science Open Data

CS Faculty Composition and Hiring Trends

Analysis of Over 5,000 Computer Science Professors

We host a public dataset comprising profiles of computer science professors in the United States and Canada. The profiles include the names, institution, degrees obtained, subfield, and when they joined the university. The dataset hosted on our platform, Drafty, aims to include all professors who can sole advise computer science students, excluding lecturers, professors of practice, clinical, adjunct, affiliate, or research professors (similar to an older analysis from Jeff Erickson); mainly because we were constrained by time and resources. This analysis uses data collected as of 2022-04-12, so hires in 2020 and 2021 are likely to be grossly underrepresented because of their recency, as this is a publicly-editable dataset; you can help contribute by editing the source directly on Drafty.

Hires among Computer Science Areas

By grouping subfields into four broad categories of Systems, Theory, AI, and Interdisciplinary (this 4-area taxonomy is based on CS Open Rankings), and plotting the professors' Join Year on the x-axis, we can visualize hiring trends.

The most clear patterns are that computer science hiring has been growing since 2010, reaching about 250 new computer science professors hired per year among the 102 universities tracked on Drafty. The broad area of Systems has generally been the largest group of hires, but it looks like AI has closed the gap in recent years, and is on track to surpass it. and Theory and Interdisciplinary areas seem to be keeping the gap with Systems in the past decade.

The Doctoral Degrees of Professors

Probably not surprising, 99.9% of professors have a Ph.D. Where did they obtain their bachelors and doctorate degrees? If a graduate from a university get hired as a professor, we call it a "placement".

The below table shows that a quarter of professors come from just four universities: MIT, Berkeley, CMU, and Stanford. The 15 universities with the most placements make up a little over 50% the professors in the United States and Canada.

Doctoral Institution Placements % All Hires

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 410 8.2%

Carnegie Mellon University 318 6.3%

University of California, Berkeley 288 5.7%

Stanford University 257 5.1%

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 202 4.0%

Cornell University 132 2.6%

University of Toronto 125 2.5%

Georgia Institute of Technology 123 2.5%

University of Texas at Austin 120 2.4%

University of Washington 119 2.4%

Princeton University 112 2.2%

University of Maryland 91 1.8%

Harvard University 88 1.8%

University of California, Los Angeles 85 1.7%

University of Wisconsin-Madison 85 1.7%

Purdue University 82 1.6%

University of Pennsylvania 80 1.6%

University of Michigan 73 1.5%

University of Massachusetts Amherst 66 1.3%

Columbia University 64 1.3%

University of Southern California 63 1.3%

University of California, San Diego 61 1.2%

University of Minnesota 58 1.2%

Brown University 54 1.1%

Ohio State University 48 1.0%

Are there universities that hire their own Ph.D. graduates, either immediately or after returning from first working at other institutions? Actually, yes, and at a higher rate than I expected. 7.4% of professors have a Ph.D. from the same university that they are teaching at. MIT in particular has a high rate of self-hires, with 36% of their professors having MIT Ph.D.s themselves.

University Self-Hires % of Faculty

Carnegie Mellon University 50 23.9%

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 44 36.4%

University of Toronto 28 26.7%

University of California, Berkeley 21 21.9%

Stanford University 13 17.6%

Georgia Institute of Technology 12 11.0%

University of Waterloo 12 12.1%

University of Washington 10 9.8%

University of Utah 9 14.5%

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 8 7.8%

A Wider Diversity of Bachelors Degrees

For bachelors degrees, there is a wider range of source institutions, and many international ones. There are several universities from India and China, and it's remarkable that Tsinghua University is where 2.3% computer science professors in the United States and Canada did their undergraduate. The 15 universities that grant the most bachelors degrees comprise a little under 25% of professors in our dataset, as opposed to over 50% in the case of doctoral degrees.

Bachelors Institution Placements % All Hires

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 184 3.7%

Tsinghua University 116 2.3%

Harvard University 104 2.1%

University of California, Berkeley 94 1.9%

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur 80 1.6%

Cornell University 75 1.5%

Stanford University 74 1.5%

Carnegie Mellon University 69 1.4%

Indian Institute of Technology Madras 67 1.3%

Princeton University 64 1.3%

University of Toronto 59 1.2%

Peking University 57 1.1%

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 57 1.1%

Yale University 56 1.1%

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay 49 1.0%

Shanghai Jiao Tong University 48 1.0%

Brown University 47 0.9%

University of Science and Technology of China 46 0.9%

University of Waterloo 44 0.9%

California Institute of Technology 44 0.9%

Students often want to know if getting a Ph.D. from the same institution they did their undergraduate degree will make it harder for them to continue in academia. This turns out to be more common than I expected: 14% of professors have a bachelors degree from the same institution as their doctorate.