People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
washingtonpost.com
People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
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Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#2Make education expensive enough, and only rich kids can get one. Not hugely surprising. Education used to be a lot cheaper and you got a lot more first generation graduates.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#3Isn't this to be expected with any similarly weighted network?
Guess who private sector loves to promote to executive positions like VP and SVP? Harvard and ivy grads. Even in engineering, where it's supposed to be more of a meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco.
Human idiosyncrasies lead to branding pedigree consistently being selected over pure skill and / or superior experience in favor of an abstract perception.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#4Make education expensive enough, and only rich kids can get one. Not hugely surprising. Education used to be a lot cheaper and you got a lot more first generation graduates.
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.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#5For a person that isn’t from a wealthy background already, it’s hard to justify the path of academia when a more lucrative path has much more potential to be life changing for them and their family.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#6No post body was provided.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#7Make education expensive enough, and only rich kids can get one. Not hugely surprising. Education used to be a lot cheaper and you got a lot more first generation graduates.
Except this isn’t true. A larger fraction of the population than ever before are getting a college education: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai.... More Americans get a college degree than in most other developed countries.
What you’re seeing is an entirely different effect, which is that academic hiring focuses intensely on pedigree. Professors are drawn from the ranks of a handful of elite schools: Harvard, Yale, etc. Graduates of those schools are much more likely to be elites. For example, the vast majority of law school professors went to Harvard or Yale.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#8Make education expensive enough, and only rich kids can get one. Not hugely surprising. Education used to be a lot cheaper and you got a lot more first generation graduates.
Also a lot of lifetime academics are generally insufferable. Hugely important vision of themselves, lack of knowledge of reality, and are totally useless if they had to do a job outside of their hyper-specialized area.
I see a lot of value in hard-science / math research. Don’t see a lot of value in yet another 80 page treatise on Proust that only 8 people will ever read.
Hopefully everything gets priced so high that the vast amounts of money wasted on universities will be greatly reduced.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#9Interesting. Although US graduate students are only 53% white [1] (while the US is 57.8% white [2]) and women account for 53% of doctoral degrees [3], all 5 of the people in the generic stock photos in the article are white males, despite making up only an estimated 25% of graduates. A striking deviation from the photographic trend if one e.g. google image searches for "phd graduate".
[1] https://www.equityinhighered.org/indicators/enrollment-in-gr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
[3] https://www.statista.com/chart/15685/doctoral-degrees-awarde...
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#10For a person that isn’t from a wealthy background already, it’s hard to justify the path of academia when a more lucrative path has much more potential to be life changing for them and their family.
Same. The best decision I could have made was skipping 4+ years of adult daycare. When my peers were getting out of college I was already in senior positions and 6 years of experience on my resume.