People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

Just because something can easily be explained using logic doesn't mean that it's outcomes can't be negative. Perhaps this indicates that our society is further stratifying into different classes and upward mobility is being reduced for a portion of the population which I think most people would agree is a bad thing

Isn’t this like saying, “The number of professors whose parents have a car is up 3x since the 1930s?”

Just wait until percentage of parent with a degree reaches 25%. Then you'll see 120% of students having a parent with a degree. Hope that your explanation that "everything is normal" will still hold then.

...or nepotism, which is known to be extremely common in both academia and among billionaires.

Another way that inequality damages society. When your best bet for your future is to appeal to the super rich instead of serving society and getting money from the government society losses its power.

As you say, it is rational to work for the one that can pay you. It's a catastrophe that there general public in aggregation has less power than very rich individuals by themselves.

I guess you're right, as long as you take it as axiomatic that capitalism should govern absolutely every part of our society.

I had people encouraging me to go into academia since I was 4-5 years old, had a desire to go be a professor, etc. But things have changed a lot since I was a child 30 years ago. Now, if I were to go into academia without family or other connections, I'm looking at:

- Unstable employment and a serious amount of overwork. At the end of this I may get a chance at some stability, but given how academia is moving away from the tenure-track, that's less and less likely.

- Restrictions on what I can say and what kind of work I can do based on academic politics, what grants will fund, etc.

- Very little reputational benefit to affiliating myself with an institution: speaking as an American, our institutions are collapsing. Why would I tie myself to a sinking ship? Those who are already in the upper-middle or upper class are all in on maintaining the status quo because it works for them and because they have a safety net if things go south. It's similar to how, no matter what your interpretation of Jan. 6, 2021, I bet there's some reconsidering of people's desires to be staff in Congress. ("I'm not getting shot for Pelosi/McConnell, fuck that noise.")

On the other hand, if I DON'T go into academia, I can still access research and I can say whatever I want. I can also work on my own schedule and only do work that I think has some value (as opposed to chasing after publications and massaging my work to beef up my CV).

Anyone from a poorer background who has the skills to make it in academia also has the skills to recognize that it is a TERRIBLE deal for them at the moment and that they have better options.

Granted, this is also true of higher socio-economic classes, and that's one reason the people from elite backgrounds in academia are also trending towards the more and more mediocre.

I was dating someone that was a civil engineer and she absolutely hated the constant sexual harassment that happens on construction sites in Canada. She came from a poor family that fled Russia as the Soviet Union was collapsing.

I told her I could teach her tech in one month. Whatever she wanted, frontend, backend, didn't matter. Enough to get hired. She took the plunge, dove in and I tutored her about 40 hours a week for a month or so. Got her a mini data science contract with some friends of mine and after this little boost of experience she landed a job at Shopify and more than tripled her already above average salary. Stayed there for years and as far as I know she's still doing quite well.

Yes there are problems in the modern economy. Real, awful problems. We need to look at them with clear eyes and make policy changes to make sure that things don't get worse for the least fortunate in life.

But that said, there are a lot of unsung stories out there and the world is getting better in a lot of little ways. We should not lose hope.

That's a thought. But it smells, unsurprisingly, as petit-bourgeoise thought, where "money" is the end all be all of social striving. So another thought is that a certain class insists that it is the rightful keeper (a whiff of the divine right of kings here btw) of cultural lights and direction of "civilization". And naturally, these cultural shepherds are nurtured generationally in institutions that were created by their forebears. MoMA for example, is a Rockefeller institution.

Anyway, food for "thought".

I just read a reasonably interesting book (In the Garden of Beasts) about an academic who became FDR's ambassador to Nazi Germany. One of the points that the author repeatedly makes is that such positions were very much the preserve of the wealthy, who were expected to spend substantially from their own pockets for both official and unofficial events. Living on his salary alone was an unusual and unpopular move, even within the State Department.

But I think that children of faculty and legacies are not as clear-cut a case. For example, it takes a lot of skill and hard work (and luck) to become a faculty member at Harvard. If you are still there when your kids are college-aged, you are very likely tenured. It would not at all be surprising if your children were significantly above-average in terms of academic achievement. This would be the result of your intelligence, drive, mate selection, and parenting. The fact that your kids are much more likely to get into Harvard (probably around 40%, versus 4%) is due in large part to these facts. The admissions office may put a thumb on the scale, but it's undoubtedly the case that the average faculty child applicant has higher qualifications than the average Harvard applicant.

These same arguments apply to legacy admits, but to a much lesser degree. Harvard did not used to be much of an academic/intellectual filter, but since the 90s or so it was very difficult to get in. If you are applying now and your parents went there, there's a good chance that the hard work and skill that got them in was passed down to you, by nature or nurture.

I don't disagree with you entirely, but I do disagree with the last sentence that frames 'meritocratic' admissions as distinct from children of legacy and faculty who are admitted at higher rates than the average applicant.

Or, maybe they don't anymore. But I bet that historically, there must have been some baked-in probability of how much a student will potentially give back in the future.

Not sure how that correlates with old vs new money. But coming from old money has some clear advantages, like knowing how to play the game.

(I'm fairly sure at least business schools judge applicants on their potential power and influence, in the future.)

I'm sure it's over 40%. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 70. There are a lot of side doors.

My information is dated, but as of circa-2008, the Ivies were including ZIP code and paternal (but not maternal) profession in their predictive modeling. The interviews (which are evaluative, even when people say they're not) are also driven more by class markers than academic factors.

> 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.

This. Which is why I get so angry about right-wing populism. Yes, DEI initiatives mostly come from a place of insincerity. Corporates care about more about making the elite look more palatable than changing how it actually governs, and the minorities being accepted into the outer fringes of the (still inbred at heart) corporate elite will be discarded the minute they are no longer needed. But, nevertheless, the causes (racial, social, and gender justice) from which "wokeness" sprung are still quite laudable and necessary. The fact that we've allowed insincere corporate assholes to carry a banner on these issues is a travesty... because, while they don't know it, a lot of the right-ish populists are motivated by justified anger at the corporate system... and for us on the left to say that they're actually motivated by "anti-woke" racism does no good for anyone.

That is not a goal of having eunuchs around. Eunuchs usually don't have children, but they pretty much always have family members.

That just tells us nepotism is bad. We have much better ways of dealing with it -- strong independent institutions, transparent rules, free education, social programs for the poor and so on.

Diversity and equity is taught at elite cadre schools and used as a distinguishing marker from the proletariat. This gives elite children a wedge to get into Ive League institutions without high test scores.

Think of it as the new "extracurricular activity" on steroids. Diversity and equity have been co-opted by the elites and are a powerful tool (smoke screen).

That's exactly my reaction. It's like concluding that 1+1 is equal to 2.

You state this as if it's an inescapable fact instead of something that we as a society should improve upon.

Case in point, I grew up in a "working class" factory but thanks to socialist policies of affordable and state-sponsored education, I got a college degree and work in IT now. Everyone should have that opportunity IMO.

Of course, your point does stand, because our government started to pull up the ladder behind me; first with policies to reduce "eternal students", people who abused the system and stayed in school until their 30s because they got paid; then with getting rid of the state-paid thing entirely, changing the whole scholarship system to a loan - leading to young graduates to start their career tens of thousands in debt. Great start, keep 'em financially weak. They seem to be reversing that, but there is a whole generation now that has suffered under it.

TL;DR, I think education at all levels should be free or cheap / affordable, to avoid education becoming something for the rich elite.

Nobody said it is surprising. You don't need something to be surprising to write an article about it.

Nepotism has been around for millennia and it's good to point the finger at it.

Plenty going on in such a phenomenon I feel. There’s the relative directionless-ness that can plague smart people coming out of unchallenging high school environments; the often accompanying “prestige for the sake of prestige” logic that you can get in middle-upper class culture, and, IMO, the inflated value and prestige of actually having a PhD in the modern (ie production-line) education system. A healthy dose of cynicism about the corporate world is often involved too I’d say.

I personally find it unfortunate how classist and stupid Grad school would feel at times.

MD's kids are 24x more likely to become MDs as well.

Of course, the level of competition changed dramatically between their generation and mine. Then you could go directly from grad school to a tenure-track position and generally expect lifetime employment. Now, in the sciences, you're expected to live a nomadic life as you go from postdoc to postdoc, making less than $50k, perhaps eventually landing that coveted tenure-track. In the humanities it's even worse, where you work adjunct jobs that pay less than minimum wage.

It's no surprise that people with family money are most likely to win these contests of endurance. If you need to earn your own money, it's simply irrational to persist in the academic rat race.

The C-suite is a different story: The Ivy Grads are either joining their parents' companies, going into VC, or starting their own companies (YC), not working as lowly "senior" ICs at say Amazon. Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad who spent their school years partying and networking in social clubs instead of studying...

You might further split Ivy into HYPS and others (Stanford is much more like the other Ivies than Cornell). The others like Brown and Dartmouth are more like a Northwestern / U-Chicago, for people who didn't quite make the cut or for good test takers from upper middle class rather than upper class backgrounds.

UPenn and Columbia lean in the middle. Sure, Elon Musk and Donald Trump went to UPenn, but the school itself still mainly graduates "just" worker bees in finance / investment banking. Your coworkers at Google didn't go there, though.

There are always outliers at all of these schools, but by definition, they are the exception rather than the rule...

No. This has not been my experience working at bigcos -- the opposite is true. This isn't even hard to disprove -- just take a look at any large company (outside of those with Ivy funnels like management consulting). Just go to their websites. Many executives often did not attend Ivy league colleges.

You'll find that most US executives actually didn't go to prestigious schools. This fact surprised me when I first observed it, but it makes sense. Assuming US management is a meritocracy, those who make it to the top are those who are in some way good with people. Ivies optimize for intellect, but this often has a negative correlation with social skills.

The undergrad curriculum in Physics at MIT and a good state school are hardly dissimilar.

Yale doesn't report this statistic as far as I could find, although I found a blurb that says "more than one out of every six" (https://admissions.yale.edu/advice-first-generation-college-...).

Princeton's class of 2025 was 22% first-generation (https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/04/06/extraordinary-year...).

Or status over money, similar to upper-class careers in journalism.

Pretty rare to find a well educated person who places no value on education. Guys like Peter Thiel (educated, but promote non-traditional routes) are outliers on that spectrum, in my experience.

Huh?! 16th century's UK was a feudal society.

> smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids

You are confusing intelligence, effort, education and opportunities.

Your claim is not just cause-and-effect, it's historical fact too.

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.

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.

But actual education and attainment of knowledge is cheaper than ever. Just YouTube alone is a massive driving factor. Or Kahn Academy.

But to benefit from things like these, you have to have a culture that values education and actively seeks it out.

Interestingly the Nobel Prize winners' advice was ignored in some cases: "As a result, LTCM began investing in emerging-market debt and foreign currencies. Some of the major partners, particularly Myron Scholes, had their doubts about these new investments. For example, when LTCM took a major position in the Norwegian kroner, Scholes warned that they had no "informational advantage" in this area"

Economists have no special insight into deserts, any more than philosophers. Is does not imply ought and all that.

Microeconomics on the other hand is much more a real science that helps answer boring practical questions like "How much capital should I invest in each product line? How much should I price this good at?" or my personal favorite because it is relevant to everyone, not just managers: "How elastic is the demand at firm X or in industry Y for laborers with skills like mine, and how elastic is the supply of such laborers?" Thinking about that question can really help anyone make choices about where to apply for work if you want your career to do well.

And since it happens at a small level there is lots of data so correspondingly more scientific certainty.

Reality always win.

It's just not right to ask low-income taxpayers (including those who didn't go to college) to pay off the debts of those who did go-- and have a higher earnings potential.

It's also a great dis-service to those who have paid into Social Security for decades and now face a looming shortfall. Those people actually paid in and are going to have to deal with a benefit reduction, while the student borrowers took out and may potentially have their debts funded by the same taxpayers!

1. Do not stifle the well-being of lower classes

2. Allow upwards mobility into the elite class from lower classes

Today's elite caste fails both criteria: the current elites have architected the US, if not the world, to the detriment of the working class. Upwards mobility is very low - which drives resentment and distrust. The elite tends to select for its children moreso than any hypothetical notion of "merit", which gives the feeling that they are less "the best our country has to offer" and more "space aliens that happen to run everything".

But one would hope for an elite rather like the Navy SEALs, where selection is based on the ability to handle difficult conditions, not one where selection is based on being born to the right family.

Yes, there is evidence that intelligence is at least partially hereditary, so if we assume intelligence is correlated with academic success, one would expect children of academic successes to have a slightly higher chance of academic success. Similarly, if we assume that height is correlated with success in basketball, since height is partially genetic we should expect children of basketball successes to have a slightly higher chance of success in basketball.

Still, I think an elite based on "fair" selection in the form of some set of hard-to-game test (for an unfeasible example, give everyone who wants to apply to a PhD program a 3-6 month mini-research internship, select the best ones and ignore all other criteria) would create a society where the people in charge tend to make better decisions/increase the global utility function more/produce better research in the case of academia than one where it's just rich kids aping their parents.

As an optimist, however, I believe that it doesn't have to be.

Looking back on history, slavery was the dominant method of production for several thousand years - until we industrialized.

Looking back on history, human flight was the preserve of fools - until the Wright brothers.

(As an aside, this is why blue checks on Twitter always have the worst takes.)

But that's grasping at straws — it really has no bearing on the article itself.

There are 2 pictures shown.

If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random, it would be completely common for both pictures to end up like the ones in the article.

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

Ex-wife is an English professor. Department-wide "purges" were not unheard of. She was spared, though this was probably because she was a lowly adjunct.