Why do most tenure at an institution less prestigious than the one where they began teaching, and than where they received their Ph.D? Can you please elaborate on these two tendencies separately? The quotation assumes that your PhD alma mater differs from the university where you first taught. First, why less prestigious than PhD alma mater? Second, why less prestigious than the university of the first teaching position?

In 2005, thanks largely to his field experiments, List was offered a tenured professor position at the
University of Chicago, perhaps the most storied economics program in the world. This wasn’t supposed to
happen. It is a nearly inexorable law of academia that when a professor lands a tenured job, he does so at
an institution less prestigious than the one where he began teaching, and also less prestigious than where
he received his Ph.D. John List, meanwhile, was like a salmon who swam downstream to spawn, into the
open water. Back in Wisconsin, his family was unimpressed. “They wonder why I’ve failed so miserably,” he
says, “why I’m not still in Orlando, where the weather is really great, instead of Chicago, where the crime is
really high.”

Dubner, Levitt. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (2009). P 118.
This is called the &quot;law of descending prestige.&quot;

Most universities hire the most prestigious faculty they can.
The number of PhDs from the top universities is larger than the number of job openings at universities.
Therefore, so long as PhDs seek employment at universities, most of them will get jobs at less prestigious universities than their PhD university.

It is not &quot;inexorable,&quot; just probable.