Labor advantages drive the greater productivity of faculty at elite universities

Abstract

Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, with the small proportion of researchers at elite universities producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige is known to drive such epistemic disparity, but the mechanisms by which it causes increased faculty productivity remain unknown. Here we combine employment, publication, and federal survey data for 78,802 tenure-track faculty at 262 PhD-granting institutions in the American university system between 2008--2017 to show through multiple lines of evidence that the greater availability of funded graduate and postdoctoral labor at more prestigious institutions drives the environmental effect of prestige on productivity. In particular, we show that greater environmental prestige leads to larger faculty-led research groups, which drive higher faculty productivity, primarily in disciplines with research group collaboration norms. In contrast, we show that productivity does not increase substantially with prestige for either faculty papers published without group members, nor group members themselves. The disproportionate scientific productivity of elite researchers is thus largely explained by their substantial labor advantage, indicating a more limited role for prestige itself in predicting scientific contributions.