Lots of assuming going on here:<p>&gt;&quot;The majority of schools require faculty to apply for tenure after 7 years. I consider one year before and after the 7th year to account for people who go up for tenure early or late because of a leave of absence, for example. I put universities into bins of 3 based on their ranking and assume that an individual is denied tenure if that person moves to a lower-ranked university group after 6-8 years. For example, a person who moves from Harvard to MIT after 6 years is not assumed to have been denied tenure since he moves within the same bin of schools. Someone who moves from Harvard to UCLA after 6 years is assumed to have been denied tenure since he moves to a lower group of schools. As another example, a person who moves 5 or fewer years after his initial appointment is not assumed to have been denied tenure since he moved before the tenure window (years 6 through 8 at an institution) starts.&quot;<p>Arbitrary binning of universities, using a change in employer as a proxy for getting tenure, using number of papers published as a measure of productivity, fitting lines to a relationship that does not appear linear (and in fact cannot be linear since fraction getting tenure must be in the range 0-1).<p>This issue may exist, but I don&#x27;t think this analysis is capable of producing anything convincing.