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People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

washingtonpost.com

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Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#31

Post by frognumber »

legalcorrection wrote: post #24

Criteria for becoming an academic: - Above-average IQ - Intellectual upbringing - PhD, i.e. spending five years of your life in your mid to late 20s getting your union card - During those five years, at least one of: no other mouths to feed, a working spouse, independent wealth, or well-off parents willing to support you - Willingness to get a PhD for a less than - Left-wing cosmopolitan social and political views

I think all of that is accurate except for "PhD, i.e. spending five years of your life in your mid to late 20s getting your union card"

A lot of this depends on your advisor, but some programs are a lot more than that.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#32

Post by cm2187 »

> In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts.

> This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degrees and college-age children rose 10 percentage points, to 14 percent, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. But compared with the typical American, a typical new economist is about five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree.

So % of parents with college degree increased by 3.5x (from 4% to 14%) and % of students coming from parents with college degree increased 3.3x (from 1/5 to 2/3). That more than explains it, doesn't it?

Also there should be a high correlation between kids being college-material and parents being college-material. Whether you believe in nature (genetics) or nurture (good parenting, high standards, role model, access to education, etc), or a mix of both, either way, you should not expect the % of college students from graduate families to match the % of graduate families in the country. So not sure what point the article makes.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#34

Post by frognumber »

Elite schools want people from the power class. A lot of this is explicitly baked into admissions. Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.). This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.

There is some amount of meritocratic admissions as well, but you can't look at this as an accident.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#35

Post by Hydraulix989 »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #27
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. It's all about what you can do, and in larger corporations, also how politically savvy you are. Most of middle and upper management (VP / SVP) also has degrees from no-name schools. If anything, they'll have degrees from worker bee / nerd schools like CMU, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, not Ivy degrees (except for Cornell, which is basically a public school). Upw…

come on you can't make blanket statements like that. Plenty of my Ivy friends who took the tech path are senior ICs at big tech, startups (not founders), etc. Same as the stanford, caltech, MIT kids.. some are managers now of course. they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a h…

Nope, I worked at two FAANG companies and with not a single Harvard or Stanford graduate. I hosted an intern from Stanford once who received a top of band return offer and rejected it for a "better option." I had one coworker from MIT who admitted he should have gone in finance instead. He later left for a prestigious hedge fund and 7 figure compensation. Most of my coworkers ended up here on H1-B visas from top schools in their home countries, but no network or strong family wealth here in the US. I always joked that Harvard graduates are above putting up with the semi-annual hoop jumping FAANG companies have for "performance reviews."

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#36

Post by muglug »

AinderS wrote: post #26
muglug wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could go further and observe that all of the article's pictured students are graduating from Oxford, whereas the article discusses students at US universities. But that's grasping at straws — it really has no bearing on the article itself.

A search for "uk phd graduate" or "uk university students" likewise yields exceedingly diverse results.

Presumably a bored photo editor, trying to think of "elite" images, typed in "oxford university graduation" into Getty Images and got these results: https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/oxford-university-graduat...

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#37

Post by AlexandrB »

eek2121 wrote: post #14
zamfi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And prior to that, education used to be a lot more expensive, and was only for the rich. Your claim is not just cause-and-effect, it's historical fact too.

Not in the US it wasn't? Costs for higher education have tripled in the past couple decades, to say NOTHING of costs in the 80s or 90s. Note that I already knew this, having a free ride thanks to the U.S. Pell Grants, however I DID to a basic google search. Among many other sources, this one is eye opening. Curious as to what your thoughts are: https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-ongoi... In case y…

Whenever this comes up, I'm always puzzled about where the extra money is going. Is it just pure profit for the University?

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#39

Post by jordan_curve »

This makes sense as graduate school gets more and more competitive. Getting a tenure track position nowadays often requires being among the best students of a top graduate program. Even just getting into a PhD program can be difficult depending on the subject.

If your parents have graduate degrees or are professors its likely that graduate school was on your radar much earlier in life. You probably had more time to consider what steps you'd need to take to get there. You're also probably more likely to be interested in graduate school at all, since many people don't even view it as an option for themselves at all.

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