The Socio-Economic Backgrounds of American Academics

An interesting empirical study. (Updated)

Does an individual's socio-economic background affect their likelihood of success in academia or their field of study? It certainly might.

A new study, "Climbing the Ivory Tower: How Socio-Economic Background Shapes Academia," by Ran Abramitzky, Lena Greska, Santiago Pérez, Joseph Price, Carlo Schwarz, and Fabian Waldinger, casts some light on this subject. Here's the abstract:

We explore how socio-economic background shapes academia, collecting the largest dataset of U.S. academics' backgrounds and research output. Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely underrepresented for seven decades, especially in humanities and elite universities. Father's occupation predicts professors' discipline choice and, thus, the direction of research. While we find no differences in the average number of publications, academics from poorer backgrounds are both more likely to not publish and to have outstanding publication records. Academics from poorer backgrounds introduce more novel scientific concepts, but are less likely to receive recognition, as measured by citations, Nobel Prize nominations, and awards.

And from the body of the paper:

While individuals from higher socio-economic backgrounds are overrepresented in all disciplines, there are large differences across disciplines (Figure 7). Agriculture, veterinary medicine, pedagogy, sociology, and pharmaceutics are the disciplines with the highest representation of individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds. In contrast, the humanities, archaeology, architecture, cultural studies, medicine, anthropology, and law have the lowest representation.24 Contrary to the common perception of economists, economics is more representative than the median discipline.

Peter Boettke comments: "This might actually explain a lot about how we should think about the two cultures thesis of CP Snow for our era."

UPDATE: It is worth noting that the study is based on those who entered academia between 1900 and 1969. While this facilitates some aspects of the authors' inquiry, it also justifies caution. What was true about 20th century academics may or may not be true today.

Comments

[Brett Bellmore]

"cultural studies"

I certainly wasn't shocked by that: How many people who actually need their degree to pay off would be majoring in "cultural studies"?

[Drewski]

This is a perfect, if inconsequential, example of Brettlogic: Poor students are rational actors who naturally gravitate away from purely academic fields like cultural studies, yet simultaneously gravitate toward purely academic fields like sociology. Because Brett doesn't like cultural studies, conceptually.

[Dr. Ed 2]

" law have the lowest representation"

That is not good for the long-term stability of a legal system.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The problem with a study like this is that it fails to account for both the Great Depression and the GI Bill.

The Great Depression is the last time that the social order was shuffled -- it was the last time that the upper middle class literally "lost everything" and became the lower working class. And then some working class people with war-necessary jobs in shipworks or auto plants became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams with all the war work overtime.

And then while people think that the GI bill was undergrad degrees, and it largely was, a lot of people who already had degrees (i.e. a Normal School teaching degree) went to war and then came back and used their GI benefits to get their PhD. I knew several professors who had done that, and they'd been working class before the war.

In the 1950s you had a lot of people who had been wealthy who still held those values even though they were quite poor, and then you had those who had been poor but now weren't.

So there's way too much variance here to draw many conclusions.

[MaverickNH]

“It is worth noting that the study is based on those who entered academia between 1900 and 1969.”

The paper itself has no “limitations of this study” section. Has anything changed in 55-124 years? The Iron Horse was commonplace then, at least…