Patterns of Mobility of New Ph.D.'s Among American Academic Institutions

Patterns of mobilty from doctoral institutions to first academic appointments are analyzed for a sample of 682 scholars who obtained doctorates in 1957. Mobility within and between general geographic regions and prestige levels of institutions is examined as a means of testing previous hypotheses about the structure of the academic stratification system. Mobility within prestige levels is found to be not as pervasive as suggested by earlier investigators, with tendencies toward inbreeding by individual institutions and intra-regional mobility being somewhat stronger. Some implications of these results for notions of disciplinary schools and interregional cultural differences are suggested.