Somewhere on the MIT campus, a prospective PhD candidate is being discreetly courted in a seminar room with spotless whiteboards, uncomfortable chairs, and the distinct buzz of a building full of people thinking very hard. Not with pamphlets. Not while taking a tour of the campus. With access to ideas, faculty, and a community of people functioning at a level that most scholars only read about. The competition now operates in this manner. Silently, purposefully, and at great cost.
For a long time, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Michigan have understood something that is often overlooked in the larger discussion about higher education. The talent pool at the top is incredibly small in theoretical fields like physics, economics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science. Every year, a few dozen students worldwide are truly exceptional at this level. And they are desired by all major research universities.
The intensity has recently changed. According to research by Brown economist John Friedman, being close to other exceptional people is more valuable than instruction or even prestige at an elite institution. That lesson has been fully absorbed by PhD programs in theory-heavy fields. These days, recruiting resembles something in between talent scouting and courtship rather than admissions.
Examining MIT’s stance in this case on its own terms is worthwhile. There are no unfunded graduate students at the institute; all of its PhD candidates in science and engineering are fully funded. In addition to eliminating one level of competition, that baseline commitment raises the stakes in other areas. What distinguishes the top programs if funding is roughly the same? Research culture and the unique character of everyday intellectual life appear to be the solution more and more. which faculty members are in fact present. Who’s coming? What issues are being addressed this year as opposed to last?
Stanford is driven by a different kind of gravity. A theoretical PhD program benefits from being close to Silicon Valley in a way that is difficult to explain and more difficult to ignore. A “Stanford inside Stanford”—a parallel reality for the most gifted students, pulled in multiple directions by forces that have very little to do with scholarship—was described by Theo Baker, who broke a significant story about Stanford’s culture while still a student there. Depending on the student, that dynamic may ultimately benefit or harm the top theory learners. Some people flourish when given choices. It is distracting to others.
Michigan is in a different position; it is less mythologized, academically strong, and possibly underappreciated as a result. Michigan’s faculty depth is on par with or better than that of its more well-known rivals in a number of theoretical domains. Depending on the particular subfield, it is plausible that a PhD candidate pursuing a career in, say, theoretical computer science or mathematical economics would be better off in Ann Arbor than in Palo Alto. Michigan appears to be arguing that point more forcefully than it did in the past.
The competition is a reflection of a larger global trend in research universities. Francisco Ramirez, a professor at Stanford, has spent years researching how universities have changed from being repositories of knowledge to producers of it. They are now engines of quantifiable output that are ranked and ranked again using metrics that were nonexistent a generation ago. Competition for the inputs—the students who will ultimately generate the research that supports those rankings—increases as a result of this change. One exceptional PhD student can produce work in theoretical disciplines that completely transforms a field. Everyone is aware of that. Nobody expresses it clearly.
It’s possible that this arms race has truly positive effects, such as improving PhD education at all three institutions due to the fierce competition and making students feel desirable. It’s also possible that the recruiting machinery starts to optimize for the appearance of excellence rather than the circumstances that genuinely produce it, distorting the process. Undergraduates are not the only ones affected by Stanford’s “duck syndrome”—the cultural emphasis on effortless achievement Theo Baker described.
The competition doesn’t appear to be abating. If anything, the pressure will only increase due to the declining number of funded faculty positions and the increasing interest from around the world in prestigious American research universities. Until someone writes something valuable, the whiteboards remain spotless.
