The Socio-Economic Backgrounds of American Academics

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.”

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