Table 1.
Names of the institutions and units that house the 38 mechanical engineering programs studied. The numbers of relevant faculty members identified in each unit (N) are also listed.
Table 2.
Number of faculty, N, trained per institution (minimum of 4).
Fig 1.
Cummulative distribution function indicating that a small minority of institutions (22%) contribute 78% of faculty, close to the 80/20 rule of the Pareto Principle.
Table 3.
Number of faculty, N, trained per country (minimum of 4).
Fig 2.
Arc diagram indicating the hiring relationships of mechanical engineering faculty within the 38 institutions.
Each coloured arc represents a link from a training to an employing institution, with greater line weights indicating a larger number of faculty. Node size corresponds to the total number of faculty within the identified unit of that institution. The institutions are ordered by descending PageRank, with the colour groups corresponding to the four tiers of prestige uncovered using the k-means clustering with the assumed pyramid shape. Arcs on the left indicate hiring by a lower ranked institution and those on the right indicate a candidate was hired by a higher ranked one. Self-hires and other institutions were not included in the calculations.
Table 4.
Number (percentage) of trainees that are hired by institutions of a given prestige tier, based on the prestige tier of their training institution. Other indicates institutions outside the 38 studied.
Fig 3.
Chord diagram indicating the institutions from which faculty members at a given university obtained their PhD; however, only the U15 Canada group of research-intensive universities are included.
Each coloured arc represents a link from a training to an employing institution, with institutions ordered by descending PageRank. The colour groups correspond to the four tiers of programs uncovered using the k-means clustering with the assumed pyramid shape. Self-hires and other institutions were not included in the calculations.
Fig 4.
Institutional values and boxplots showing the proportion of female-presenting faculty and self-hires.
The indicates the national average. The open circles above the whisker plots indicate outliers outside the 5–95% percentile range.
Fig 5.
Cumulative distribution function indicating that faculty hiring is not evenly distributed across doctoral advisors, with 40% of advisors responsible for 60% of faculty.
This value is a lower-bound estimate since only advisors with at least one hire are considered.
Fig 6.
Histogram and box plot of the academic ages for all faculty based on years since they obtained their PhD relative to 2024.
The indicates the mean. Circles indicate outliers beyond the 95% percentiles shown by the box plot.
Fig 7.
Stacked histograms and box plots for the academic ages for partitioned by rank (assistant, associate, full professor) and gender.
The purple indicates the female-presenting faculty, with the percentage of the total included. The indicates the mean. Circles indicate outliers beyond the 95% percentiles shown by the box plot.
Fig 8.
Chord diagram indicating the institutions from which faculty members at a given university obtained their PhD; however, only those who received their doctoral degrees from 2010–2019 are shown.
Each coloured arc represents a link from a training to an employing institution, with institutions ordered by descending PageRank. The colour groups correspond to the four tiers of programs uncovered using the k-means clustering with the assumed pyramid shape. Self-hires and other institutions were not included in the calculations.
Fig 9.
Chord diagram indicating the institutions from which faculty members at a given university obtained their PhD, where the weightings from an institution are normalized by the total number of faculty members of that institution.
Each coloured arc represents a link from a training to an employing institution, with institutions ordered by descending PageRank. The colour groups correspond to the four tiers of programs uncovered using the k-means clustering with the assumed pyramid shape. Self-hires and other institutions were not included in the calculations.