Abstract
The academic job market for fresh Ph.D. students to pursue postdoctoral and junior faculty positions plays a crucial role in shaping the future orientations, developments, and status of the global academic system. In this work, we map the domestic hiring network of 23,994 internationally active Ph.D. holders trained in Chinese universities between 1990 and 2020, based on ORCID and OpenAlex records. Using the Minimum Violation Rankings algorithm, we reconstruct a network-based prestige hierarchy that reveals a pronounced stratification: a small number of elite institutions consistently dominate the production and placement of faculty across diverse disciplines. We find that, within this research-active subset, only a minority of scholars are placed at institutions more prestigious than their doctoral alma maters, and such upward placement has become increasingly rare over time. These patterns suggest the existence of persistent hierarchies in faculty mobility. While our findings align with Bourdieu’s theory of academic capital and Becher and Trowler’s account of disciplinary stratification, we interpret them as exploratory patterns shaped by both institutional reproduction and broader structural changes in the academic labor market. Importantly, our sample excludes overseas Ph.D. returnees and reflects only internationally visible scholars; thus, the results should not be generalized to the entirety of Chinese higher education but rather understood within a specific subpopulation.
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Data availability
The database we used in this work (ORCID: https://orcid.org/; OpenAlex: https://openalex.org/) is publicly available. The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The computation in this study was supported by the Center for Computational Science and Engineering of the Southern University of Science and Technology. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62006109).
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Authors’ contributions CT: Data curation, Discussion, Visualization, Investigation, Writing—Original draft preparation. XJ: Data curation, Discussion, Visualization, Investigation. YH: Discussion, Validation, Writing—review & editing. LM: Data curation, Discussion. YM: Conceptualization, Project administration, Writing—review &editing.
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Tian, C., Jiang, X., Huang, Y. et al. Mapping university prestige and hierarchy in China via faculty hiring networks of internationally active Ph.D.s.. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06717-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06717-y
