"The preferential hiring within prestigious groups reflects return mobility" - new article by INCHER researchers reveals the driving force behind concentrated hiring patterns at German universities.

Stefan Buechele, Guido Buenstorf, Matthias Huegel, Johannes Koenig, Maria Theissen (2026): Is the dominance of graduates from top-tier universities among tenured faculty driven by prestige or output? Evidence from 50 years of university appointments in Germany, Research Policy  55(3) 105411, ISSN 0048-7333,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2026.105411.

Research has shown that a significant proportion of tenured faculty in the US and other countries were trained at few highly prestigious universities. Is this concentration due to competitive advantages of applicants from these universities or does it reflect the greater output of young researchers applying for faculty positions at these universities? To answer this question, the authors analyze data covering the entire population of doctoral graduates in Germany since the 1960s. Similar to studies of the US higher education system, they find a strong concentration of professors trained at only a few universities, with the five largest universities accounting for 17.9% of all appointed university professors. However, there is no evidence that the prestige of the university awarding the doctorate systematically influences the chances of being appointed to a professorship. Despite increasing stratification tendencies within the German higher education system, the results also do not indicate that the importance of the doctoral university for the academic careers of its graduates has increased over the last 50 years.

Link to the OA article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733326000028

^{Caption: U15= is an association of fifteen leading German universities with a strong research tradition; . TU9 = is the Alliance of leading Universities of Technology in Germany}