A disproportionate number of professors are children of academics
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Surveys of US tenure-track faculty show that academics are disproportionately drawn from highly educated families, with faculty being significantly more likely to have parents holding advanced graduate degrees compared to the general population.
nd the National Research Council (NRC), which allowed us to contrast survey characteristics with patterns in the general US population.
We conducted the online survey between summer 2017 and autumn 2020 on a frame of 46,692 current tenure-track faculty across 1,360 Ph.D.-granting departments in Computer Science, Business, History, Psychology, Physics and Astronomy, Sociology, Anthropology and Biology. These eight academic disciplines were chosen for their diversity of scholarship and represent a broad sample of tenure-track faculty at research intensive institutions in the United States. The sample frame was constructed from the online public directories of institutions, allowing us to explicitly compare respondents with the frame.
In total, 7,204 faculty provided information on a parent’s level of highest education (15.4% of survey frame) and 4,807 provided the US zip code in which they grew up (10.3%).
Parents’ education
Faculty tend to come from highly educated families. Nearly a quarter (22.2%) report at least one of their parents holds a Ph.D., and 3.7% of faculty report both parents hold Ph.D.s. Across all eight disciplines, over half (51.8%) of faculty have at least one parent with a masters degree or Ph.D. (29.6% and 22.2%, respectively; Table 1 ). In comparison, among adults in the United States aligned to when faculty were born, on average, less than 1% held a Ph.D., and just 7.4% held a graduate degree of any kind.
Table 1.
Percentages of faculty by their parents’ highest-held degree
Some HS or less
HS
Some college
College
Masters
Ph.D.
All professors
5.5
13.7
9.5
19.5
29.6
22.2
Anthropology professors
3.1
14.9
7.3
19.4
32.1
23.1
Biology professors
6.5
14.3
11.6
19.5
26.2
21.9
Business professors
5.6
14.5
8.4
24.1
30.9
16.6
Computer Science professors
6.6
10.8
8.9
21.6
26.1
26.0
History professors
2.9
10.5
8.6
17.0
34.3
26.7
Physics/Astronomy professors
8.2
12.1
10.2
18.3
27.3
24.1
Psychology professors
3.7
17.4
9.9
17.1
31.1
20.8
Sociology professors
4.5
Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty | Nature Human Behaviour
### Subjects
## Abstract
Despite the special role of tenure-track faculty in society, training future researchers and producing scholarship that drives scientific and technological innovation, the sociodemographic characteristics of the professoriate have never been representative of the general population. Here we systematically investigate the indicators of faculty childhood socioeconomic status and consider how they may limit efforts to diversify the professoriate. Combining national-level data on education, income and university rankings with a 2017–2020 survey of 7,204 US-based tenure-track faculty across eight disciplines in STEM, social science and the humanities, we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years. Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.
### Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring
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