Yeah, given that there are more PhD-holding job candidates than their are faculty positions available in a given year, this is the expected result in two scenar

Yeah, given that there are more PhD-holding job candidates than their are faculty positions available in a given year, this is the expected result in two scenarios: 1) The scenario where signalling matters above all else. So there's too many highly-credentialed candidates for the openings at the institutions they graduated from, so they apply to jobs at lower-tier institutions. 2) The scenario where these institutions are producing truly better candidates and the interview process is robust. There's still too many great candidates for the "same-tier" positions, so they apply to lower-tier. This rules out a few scenarios such as: "the interview process is robust BUT these institutions produce no-better candidates" but it doesn't tell us much specifically about the interviewing process or the candidate quality because of the candidate pool size. A few interesting followup data points would be: 1) what ratio of graduates go into faculty positions for each tier of school. It must approach 0% at the lowest tier, but how quickly does it fall off? 2) what does industry hiring look like? Do you see a similar distribution, or are faculty positions preferred by enough PhDs that top-tier industry companies have to "settle for" a broader set of schools?