Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty

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 and retention

“…Faculty hiring and retention determine the composition of the US academic workforce and directly shape educational outcomes 1 , careers 2 , the development and spread of ideas 3 and research priorities 4,5 . However, hiring and retention are dynamic, reflecting societal and academic priorities, generational turnover and efforts to diversify the professoriate along gender [6][7][8] , racial 9 and socioeconomic 10 lines. A comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of the US professoriate would elucidate the effects of these efforts and the processes that shape scholarship more broadly.…”

Intersectional Inequalities in Science

“…However, race and gender are not the only spaces of inequality in science; several other variables should be included to create a fully intersectional understanding of inequalities in science. Socioeconomic status, when intersected with race, gender, and topic, is likely to have large effects: A recent study suggested that the estimated median childhood income among faculty is 23.7% higher than that of the general population (75). Inequities have also been observed on the basis of disability (76) and sexual orientation (77)-variables that are often excluded or underreported in studies of the scientific workforce.…”

Temporal Dynamics of Faculty Hiring in Mathematics

“…The result of a search is publicly known eventually, but the list of applicants and the selection criteria used are not revealed. Success in acquiring a faculty position may not only depend on an individual scholar's research productivity and academic credentials (Fernandes et al, 2020), but also on demographic factors such as race, gender, and childhood socioeconomic status (Clauset et al, 2015;Wapman et al, 2022;Morgan et al, 2022;White-Lewis, 2020).…”

“…It concludes that a mixture of two mechanisms, total faculty production and local homophily, likely drives the dynamics of real world faculty hiring (Lee et al, 2021). Another recent study combined a survey of tenure-track faculty members in eight fields, US census data, and the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates to study the impact of socioeconomic status on faculty position acquisition and found that faculty members tended to grow up in wealthier homes and were 25 times more likely to have a parent who held a Ph.D., when compared with the general US population (Morgan et al, 2022). An extensive study of faculty hiring between 2011 and 2020 encompassed 295,089 US faculty members in 10,612 departments across 107 fields and eight domains (including mathematics and computing) using data from the Academic Analytics Research Center.…”