Study shows extent to which wealth shaped the professoriate

Fifty percent of American academics who became professors in the seven decades before 1970 were from the top income quintile. Even more indicative of how wealth determined the professoriate, children of fathers in the 100th income percentile were 56% more likely to become academics than children whose fathers were one percentile less (that is, the 99th percentile).

By contrast, fewer than 5% of academics came from households where their parents were from households at the lowest income quintile, states “Climbing the Ivory Tower: How Socio-economic Background Shapes Academia”, published last month by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research.

“Overall, the paper highlights the importance of understanding the role of socio-economic background in shaping the academic workforce and the creation of new knowledge,” Professor Ran Abramitzky, co-director of the study noted.

According to Abramitzky, who teaches economics at Stanford University (SU) and who, along with economics professor Fabian Waldinger (at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) co-directed the study, professors who grew up in poorer families have been “severely under-represented” for the seven decades between 1900 and 1970, especially in humanities and elite universities.

“We find that [the] father’s occupation predicts [the] professor’s discipline choice and, thus, the direction of research. Academics from poorer backgrounds are both more likely to not publish and to have outstanding publication records, making them riskier hires,” he said.

“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,” he noted.

Largest dataset of US academics

The study relied on data concerning more than 46,000 academics and drew on the largest individual-level dataset of US academics ever assembled. In addition to the US Census, it used several databases. One is the World of Academia Database, compiled by Waldinger and his research team, with a roster of American academics detailing their disciplines and academic rank.

Another was the Clarivate Web of Science, which provided the citation records for medicine, biology, biochemistry, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. The Census Linking Project, directed by Abramitzky, and the Census Tree Project provided the granular socio-economic data that makes “Climbing the Ivory Tower” the “most comprehensive analysis of socio-economic background of US academics covering all disciplines and the near universe of universities”, they write.

While pointing out that scholars who became academics in the 1960s and 1970s were active professors for decades and, hence, the fact that the study ends with the 1970 census is predicative of the professoriate that has only recently left the lecture halls, Waldinger explained that data constraints flow from US law.

“The reason we stopped in 1970 is basically the data constraint of the US Census. The last census publicly available is from 1950. That’s why we cannot look at, say, data on people in 2000. We have them in the academic data, but we cannot match them to the census data – and it is in the census data where we find the individual’s parent’s occupation,” Waldinger elucidate.

Shocking results

The predictive power of the family wealth of a professor – which includes both income and other factors such as education and cultural capital – may, Waldinger told University World News, be expected, but it was still shocking. “We expected to see the top 1% massively over-represented and individuals from poor backgrounds massively under-represented,” he said.

In fact, the data showed that “approximately half of all academics come from the top 20% of the parental socio-economic status (SES) rank distribution … Individuals born to parents in the 95th percentile are more than three times as likely to become academics than one would expect under the equal representation benchmark”, indicated by a line on the graph titled, “Representation by Socio-Economic Background: Baseline Parental Income Prediction”.

By contrast, the total number of academics originating from families in the bottom 20% of SES status totalled barely 5%.

A persistent pattern

One of the study’s most surprising findings was the discovery that over more than half a century, the SES of professors born before 1870 to after 1920 remained almost the same.

“The share of academics from the top quintile of the parental SES rank distribution for the birth cohorts born after 1920 is 52.65%, almost identical to the share of 52.3% in the pre-1870 cohorts. Similarly, the share of academics from the bottom quintile of the parental SES distribution is around 4-5% and hardly changes over time,” the authors write.

The perseverance of this employment pattern is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that the decades between 1870 and 1920 saw momentous changes in America, including rapid industrialisation, the arrival of millions of immigrants, the First World War – and in higher education the establishment of hundreds of public universities, including Iowa State University (ISU, Ames), the University of Kansas (Lawrence), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and University of Wisconsin (UW, Madison).

The professoriate at America’s elite universities, Abramitzky, Waldinger, and their four co-authors found, has also been heavily skewed towards individuals who come from higher socio-economic backgrounds.

“Sixty per cent of the faculty at Harvard come from the top 20 income percentile ranks,” Waldinger told University World News. “Very few, something like 3%, come from the bottom ranks,” he noted.

Further, they found that a disproportionate share of the faculty at Ivy Plus schools, that is, the highest-ranked public institutions, come from the wealthiest backgrounds.

“While the average university in our sample [of more than 1,000 institutions] recruits 3.4% of their academics from the top 1%, the share is about 5.2 percentage points higher in Ivy Plus universities. In contrast, public elite universities [for example, ISU, University of Illinois] recruit their faculty from lower socio-economic backgrounds than Ivy Plus universities,” they write.

Stratification along discipline

Abramitzky and Waldinger’s granular data allows them to drill down to the department level, where, somewhat to their surprise, they found that disciplines were also socio-economically stratified.

Almost 60% of humanities professors came from the top 20% in terms of socio-economic standing. The same was true for archaeology, architecture, cultural studies, and medicine. Almost as high were law, arts, and sociology. In the humanities about 12% of faculty came from the bottom three socio-economic quintiles; in law, that figure rises to just over 20%.

By contrast, in fields like pedagogy, veterinary medicine, and agriculture, between 25% and 30% of the faculty originated in the highest SES ranking – while between 40% and 50% originated in the two lowest SES quintiles.

“Some disciplines,” Waldinger explained, “are more egalitarian than others and are easier for poor people to enter. There are more poor people in agriculture, veterinary medicine and mathematics (in which 40% come from the highest quintile, just under 10% from the lowest, and fully 60% from the three lowest)”.

These findings, they write, suggest that “disciplines that require sophisticated language skills [and, Waldinger added in our interview, a culturally rich background] have less representation from individuals of lower socio-economic backgrounds”.

Using the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), the nationwide test used by most American graduate schools as a proxy, Abramitzky and Waldinger found that “representation from lower socio-economic backgrounds is indeed higher in disciplines that require more quantitative relative to verbal skills”.

“The estimates imply that an increase in relative quantitative versus verbal skills by 0.5 (approximately the difference between history and mathematics) is associated with a 7.8 percentage point decrease in the share of academics from the top quintile of the parental SES rank distribution,” they noted in “Climbing the Ivory Tower”.

Father’s occupation

For generations, classical music scholars have noticed that musical talent runs in families such as the Strausses, Mozarts, Bachs, and Haydns. And, anecdotally, it’s long been noted that families of wealthy lawyers often have sons who become lawyers. Abramitzky and Waldinger’s team also shows that across academia the father’s occupation disproportionately determines his children’s academic discipline.

“Children of architects are disproportionately represented in architecture and the arts, while children of artists and art teachers gravitate toward arts-related disciplines,” they write. “Children of lawyers, medical doctors, or pharmacists predominantly pursue law, medicine, and pharmaceutics, respectively. Children of editors and reporters are over-represented in communication studies, which encompasses journalism as a sub-discipline.”

One of the most innovative aspects of “Climbing the Ivory Tower” is what Abramitzky and Waldinger call “Semantically Close Academic Disciplines”, which allows them to link an individual scholar’s discipline with his-her father’s career even if it is several steps removed.

“Children of clergymen go into the clergy more often. But what we wanted to develop was an external measure of what children of fathers with certain occupations might be that are less obvious; whether, for example, they entered close disciplines.

“To do this we used a text string such as ‘mechanical engineer’ to see what the closest discipline was in terms of the 36 disciplines we have in our database. Is it theology? Is it music? Or is it engineering?”

The semantic over-representation index is 3.28 for the closest discipline. This means that children of a farmer are 3.28 times more likely to become professors of agriculture than they are likely to become professors of theology or music, for example.

Scholarly success

“Climbing the Ivory Tower” is equally concerned with charting the scholarly life of professors. To do this, the team examined which group of professors – those who come from higher or lower SES quintiles – publish more.

“After standardising the data to take care of differences over time and across fields, we found that academics of poor SES backgrounds publish the same number of things on average as do those from wealthier backgrounds.

“However, we also found that individuals from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to have no publications whatsoever. That means that academics from poorer backgrounds published more often, by a factor of 1.4, which makes them [those who do publish] superstars in the publishing sense.

“Further, and more importantly, we found that professors from poorer backgrounds were more likely – by about 17% – to introduce novel concepts. We judged this by determining the likelihood of their papers introducing a ‘novel’ word that signals a new idea. Professors from poorer backgrounds were much more likely to do this, which means they were more likely to be producing ‘new knowledge’,” they noted.

Despite this, “Climbing the Ivory Tower” goes on to show they receive less recognition from their colleagues as measured by citations.

“We find that papers authored by teams from higher socio-economic backgrounds receive more citations. Specifically, papers authored by individuals whose fathers, on average, ranked at the 25th percentile of income distribution receive approximately 0.05 standard deviations (or 5%) fewer citations compared with papers authored by individuals whose fathers ranked at the 75th percentile,” they write.

In medicine, this translates to a paper written by a professor from a wealthier background being cited 13% more times than might ordinarily be expected.

The same disparity, Waldinger explained, can be seen through the ranks of academic honours, up to and including Nobel Prizes.

“Scientists from richer backgrounds are more likely to be nominated for Nobel Prizes and are more likely to actually win the Nobel Prize, despite the fact the poor people actually introduce more novel scientific terms and produce more new knowledge,” Waldinger said.

While Abramitsky’s and Waldinger’s dataset does not allow for certainty, a reasonable surmise is that this is a manifestation of established networks (the proverbial “old boys network”). Further research, Waldinger said, is planned to test this hypothesis.

Persistent lack of diversification

In an email exchange, I asked Abramitzky whether the methodological issues that Waldinger explained limit the “Ivory Tower” to scholars who became professors before 1970 and also limit the usefulness of the study in understanding America’s universities today.

He answered by referring to a companion paper, “The GI Bill, Standardised Testing, and Socioeconomic Origins of the US Educational Elite Over a Century”, also published in November of last year.

“We find that while elite colleges have become more racially and geographically diverse, there has been no increase in the economic diversity of elite private and public colleges in terms of undergraduate students. Our current paper shows a similar persistent lack of diversification of the socio-economic background of professors,” Abramitzky wrote.