> I left academia--more-or-less--after doing several post-docs and taking a hard look at an employment landscape where colleagues who were at least as good as me were taking offers from second- or third-teir institutions because that was all that was available. I knew some of them were profoundly lonely and struggling in those positions, outside of the charmed circle of the top teir they had comfortably inhabited for so long.

Honest question, if your colleagues were "top tier" researchers, and they ended up at "second tier" schools, does that not somehow imply that those "second tier" institutions are more prestigious than their presumed "second tier" status? They obviously are able to recruit quality.

I guess the real question that I'm trying to ask is why the obsession in academia (and HN) with segmenting institutions into "tiers"? It just seems odd and contradictory that academia would be so bent on self-imposing a caste system.