gher in more prestigious environments; (ii) research groups becoming larger, i.e., the individual group members are no more or less productive, but group sizes grow with environmental prestige; or (iii) a mixture thereof. Across disciplines, we find that group member productivity does not increase substantially with prestige, whether we consider disciplines as a group ( Fig. 1A ) or separately, e.g., chemical sciences, engineering, biological sciences, and sociology (fig. S9). On average, an increase by one prestige decile is associated with a significant but negligible increase of 0.0075 papers per year for non-faculty ( t test, P < 0.001). Labor advantages at prestigious institutions A necessary condition for the average research group to be larger in a more prestigious environment is that a department’s per-faculty available labor must tend to increase with departmental prestige. Holding a funded researcher position typically implies being formally advised by a faculty researcher in the same department and collaborating with them on research, depending on the discipline’s norm. Hence, a department’s per-faculty number of funded researchers provides an estimate of faculty group sizes in disciplines where faculty lead such groups. Institution-level counts of funded graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, by discipline ( 28 ), show that access to funded scientific labor grows with institutional prestige, and some disciplines employ substantially more labor than others. With each additional prestige decile, institutions gain, on average, 0.05 to 1.37 funded graduate and postdoctoral researchers per tenure-track faculty, depending on discipline ( Fig. 1, C and D , and fig. S6). This systematic pattern reflects an uneven distribution of labor across prestige (average Gini coefficient G = 0.27 across disciplines, ranging from 0.11 to 0.36), and this advantage in available labor at elite institutions appears in all disciplines, not only those with group collab