Reconstruction of Historical Prestige Hierarchies in Academia

The academic system is structured by prestige, with elite universities disproportionately winning academic prizes, producing academic faculty, and directing the course of scientific research. Understanding the dynamics of how academic prestige evolved over time, and how prestige shaped the historical growth of academia, would provide insights into the durability of policy interventions over longer time scales. Yet a quantitative understanding of academic history has yet to be thoroughly undertaken, largely due to an absence of available data. We are filling this gap using data extracted from historical university course catalogs, which are often available through university archives back to the founding of universities. Our initial exploration shows that a large-language model (LLM)-assisted pipeline can extract structured data from course catalogs at scale, allowing us to illuminate the historical evolution of prestige, as well as its impact on the development of academia in domains as diverse as disciplinary structures, course curricula, and labor trends such as adjunctification.