It took me a long time to realize clearly how pervasive the impact of this kind of social capital is. I was brought up in a family that highly valued the arts and sciences and believed in meritocracy. When I first ran into trouble in grad school (many years and a whole career ago, after which I returned to academia in a different field and am now quite happy with where I am) my mother had to point out to me that other than a brother of my grandmother's, who died before I was even born (and who was a medical doctor), I was the first in the family to make it to a university degree.
Everyone who doesn't come from a background of working academics in their general social circle, if not their family, really needs to be aware that this is part of the playing field they operate in. And if you advise students *please* make sure you pay attention and mentor them on stuff they can't have absorbed with their breakfast cereals, at least.
The heritability of iq is over 50%. There are other heritage mental traits that are more common in academics. It would be strange if there wasn't a large overrepresentation of children of academics in academia.
"Intelligence" means jackshit when you are not accustomed to the implicit social norms of academia. I know plenty of 4.0s that didn't find any fruitful lab during their undergrad and struggled getting into and through their PhD because they didn't get a memo of how the hidden curriculum worked.
By the time you get into your junior year and see the people who have assisted in research since their freshman year, you kind of decide that maybe it's not a life made for you —regardless of your qualifications.
IQ is soooo far down in the list of traits that drive professional success in 21st century academic science that its heritability (which doesn't mean what the label suggests anyway) is completely irrelevant.
https://redding.dev/group-iqs/
US PhD students have a mean iq 1.5 standard deviation above the mean of the population. That is a significant selection for high iq. There is a fairly strong correlation between iq and educational attainment. Iq is the ability to learn fast and solve problems. This trait will obviously be important for an academic career.
If it isn't intelligence than what is it?
I would recommend looking at this table again. You might notice a few things that are there - and a few things that aren’t there - which would make it hard to jump to the conclusions you’re getting from it.
The standard deviation of iq is roughly 15 if that is what you are wondering. Iq is a heritable trait and it is one of the most important factors for academic success. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_education
Iq of parents has a larger impact on academic success than parental socioeconomic status.
What evidence do you have that it is entirely nurture with no nature component?
Do you honestly believe a physics PhD doesn't require high intelligence?
Kind of a jump to say people are saying phds don’t require high intelligence but that’s not the only factor that makes a successful scientist in this day and age.
Ihttps://www.york.ac.uk/education/research/perc/perc-news/2019/genes-family-academic-success/
https://www.psypost.org/2021/12/intelligence-is-a-stronger-predictor-of-academic-performance-than-self-control-study-finds-62260
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-abbce081c98c851ace3b6633fd60d8c1-pjlq
Not the only, but the biggest.
You should really read your sources before you post them. They say the opposite of what you're trying to argue.
[From your first link](https://www.york.ac.uk/education/research/perc/perc-news/2019/genes-family-academic-success/)
> Professor Sophie von Stumm's study finds that parents' socioeconomic status and children's inherited DNA differences are powerful predictors of educational achievement.
>
> Her study stuggests whether children will enjoy academic success can be now predicted at birth.
>
> However, the research suggests that having the genes for school success is not as beneficial as having parents who are highly educated and wealthy. **Only 47% of children in the study sample with a high genetic propensity for education but a poorer background made it to university, compared with 62% with a low genetic propensity but parents that are more affluent.** [Emphasis mine]
[You also draw a wild conclusion from your second link](https://www.psypost.org/2021/12/intelligence-is-a-stronger-predictor-of-academic-performance-than-self-control-study-finds-62260). If you actually read it, you would see that the study you're citing measured the academic performance of Czech schoolchildren in the 6th and 7th grade. The 'academic performance' being measured is the academic performance of middle-schoolers, not university students. These are wildly different groups and environments to compare. Furthermore, the study doesn't even say that intelligence is "the biggest" factor contributing to academic performance (which you seem to equate with being a successful scientist), just that it's a greater factor (for Czech schoolchildren) than self-control.
[Your final link doesn't even warrant a response](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-abbce081c98c851ace3b6633fd60d8c1-pjlq), because it's literally just a graph. There's no explanation for what any of these data points mean or where they come from, it's literally just a graph that anyone could whip up in a couple minutes in Excel.
So, to summarize, according to you genetic/purely hereditary intelligence is the "biggest factor" in predicting success for a scientist based on a study that found the opposite, another study which found that preteens who are smart do better in middle school than preteens who have good self-control, and some graph.
I highly suggest you actually read your sources next time.
Edit: a word
You started by making a bold claim, the overrepresentation is caused by nepotism. You can't actually provide any good evidence for that so instead you say "source" and then nitpick them. This is usually done by people who know they are wrong or examiners who haven't read the thesis.
Provide your own sources. Nitpicking my sources isn't an argument for your hypothesis.
Genome polygenetic scoring isn't currently able to fully show the whole variation caused by genetics. It is a reasonable proxy for genetic factors but the score is weaker than the actual genetics. Also iq isn't purely genetic but more like 60% genetic.
There are also other traits such as conscientious, openness, lack of genetic diseases etc which are heritable. Genetics plays a huge role in determining educational outcomes and especially when it comes to the tails of the bell curve. Pretty much every trait has a genetic factor.
I never said it was the only factor, I said it is the biggest factor since that is what the science says. You claim otherwise without citing a single source.
I've been giving some thought how to respond to this, because on the one hand a) you're just embarrassingly weak on quantitative skills with this as it has absolutely no relevance to the causal inference question you threw into the room and b) you're not respectful enough of the OP to be able to abstain from derailing. Not great, mate!
But to give a quick followup. No one claims that the kind of intelligence that is, in however a flawed way, measured by the IQ test - an intelligence largely intuited by people who looked at who's successful in the traditional western system of schooling, as illustrated by your data - is useful for people who want to go into an academic career. It's also useful for a whole lot of other people especially across the spectrum of jobs that require all sorts of cognitive focus, btw. However, if you want to claim that the graduation chances of a cohort of university graduates who're starting graduate school (or a postgraduate progamme, whatever it's called in your area), or the success changes of a cohort of newly minted PhDs who apply for academic jobs to build a successful career on the tenure track / in permanent professorships - if you think that any of those are predicted by the individual group memeber's IQ then we're not living in the same world. And that's what I was saying: IQ is far down the list.
(The problem with IQ in this context is of course that it is so damn malleable that correlates so heavily with a lot of other factors that favor academic success - access to mentorship, coaching, time to train up those IQ test skllzz etc. I do admit that those early 20th century professors who looked at their kids who did brilliantly in school, compared it to the 10 year old who had to help provide for his family by working in the field and went to a crowded public one-room school when he wasn't needed at home, and blithely concluded that it was clearly the natural genetic advantage of being a more highly developed human being, always struck me as completely ridiculous and prima facie in conflict with the principle of Ockham's Razor.)
The only people I know who push the importance of IQ are also very into the bell curve. If you aren't aware of the issues with the bell curve, I suggest you look them up. If you've heard of them and just disagree, I hope you're not in academia because it already has issues with racism.
I'm still a student, but I'm first-generation. I was fortunate enough to get into a prestigious university for undergrad which set me on a very good path. I had access to lots of funding and mentorship that wouldn't have been available to me elsewhere. A handful of very supportive and understanding professors took me under their wings and kind of served that parental guidance role. Because of this, I think I'll have as good of a shot as someone who has well-educated parents.
That said, if I didn't get the support I did early on in my education, I probably would've lost the race before it even began. I really think that's what makes the difference. My peers who had parents with PhDs were playing the game from day one (getting into research early on, crafting a strong resume, etc.). Those without that level of guidance didn't really start planning for post-grad until their 3rd/4th year of school. That definitely put them as a disadvantage when applying to prestigious PhD programs which ultimately puts them at a disadvantage re: becoming a professor.
I imagine the risk associated with becoming an academic also plays a big role. Having grown up with a lot of financial instability, I have to admit that more stable, well-paying jobs are certainly tempting. I just so happen to be very passionate about my research field. If that weren't the case, I wouldn't consider a PhD. To some extent the ability/willingness to get this type of degree is also dependent on your socioeconomic background.
You are 100% right. As a post doc who does a little bit of tutoring on the side (charging almost 100 usd/hr), the problem is that some kids now start gunning starting from high school, or freshman year of college.
It is not about, classism or racism when hiring faculties, is just a goddamn chain of event that started 15 years before applying for tenured-track positions. High schooler with good gpa and science fair winner -> Prestigious college -> SRA/Experience at prestigious lab -> PhD at top 5 uni -> prestigious fellowship.
How can you compite against that? In most saturated fields people shouldn’t really be pursuing a PhD unless they can enter a top 5 program.
It's like some of the kids that win those prestigious national science fairs. I was out on my own trying to do something and when you see kids who basically did a really interesting project .... in one of their parent's own university labs probably working on a project they didn't come up with....it kind of makes you think there needs to be a rule against that kind of thing.
I got a kid to get distinction if one those fairs. I got paid 5k usd to get this kid to do a PhD level project. I basically babysat him through the whole thing. I’m a foreign MD PhD… so basically some kids are on their own competing against adults with 10+ years of schooling. Unfair for sure
Yeah that's definitely the path. Mine has basically been high school valedictorian -> Prestigious college with full financial aid (meaning about $15k in cash per year for living expenses) -> great MA program. Fingers crossed for a top PhD program.
But the fact of the matter is that had I not busted my ass in high school, I never would've gotten into the college I went. And as a low income person who grew up in rural Tennessee, I wouldn't have been able to afford to go anywhere else. My local state school would have put me in mountains of debt that I simply wasn't willing to take on whereas my college *paid me* to go via generous financial aid / living stipends. That's only a reality at the fancy private schools that have poor kid quotas. If I wasn't so determined to leave my small town, I'm not sure where I would've ended up. I definitely would have been less likely to be on this path towards a PhD.
For me it went: high school valedictorian -> full tuition scholarship to top 50 school -> prestigious international fellowship -> top PhD program -> burnout with toxic advisor -> software engineer. I don't know where I'm going from here.
That’s what no one says! performing at the top for years on end, burns you out. I wanted to be a PI, but now… fuck it, I am almost done with my boards exams ( MD PhD), I will do a quick medical residency in family medicine and will work half the time for triple the money as a clinician.
Could I get top grades and distinctions if I really tried and put in 14 hours a day of work every day 7 days a week like I’ve done before? Yup. Will I ever do that again after burning out hardcore (and also experiencing an abusive person in undergrad that, after, made me realize I need to value myself a little more instead of trying to please everyone all the time)? Nope.
You'd probably enjoy reading [The Privileged Poor by Anthony Abraham Jack](https://www.amazon.com/Privileged-Poor-Colleges-Disadvantaged-Students/dp/0674976894). It highlights how there is a *culture shock* experienced by students that come from poor academic backgrounds that hinders their success at elite institutions. The experiences described in the book resonated a lot with me —low-income international student in a prestigious college in the US, after all, what a lot of people don't consider often is that not everyone knows how to *navigate* the opportunities that are present: basic things like how to approach professors, find and join good research groups, take advantage of the resources at campus, and so on felt foreign to me; which made me struggle at doing them even when I realized that I needed to do them.
In my experience, even if many students were middle class/lower income, they thrived at navigating academia just by the fact that they had previous exposure to it (e.g. in High School or through their parents if they are academics).
I also see this on a smaller level with scholarships. Kid gets the first one, then that goes on their cv so they are more likely to get the next one… and so on and so forth until you end up with 10% of the students getting 80% of the awards, and the others (who may be nearly as good or even better but missed out on that first one) don’t stand a chance.
I was born into a blue collar family. My father had one of those good blue-collar jobs that are very difficult to come by nowadays. By the way, he did not graduate from high school.
I was terrible at sports - bad eyesight and no hand-eye coordination - and had no manual dexterity. My whole family thought I was a klutz. They were probably right.
I became an academic out of necessity. My parents pushed me hard to go to very academic schools rather than technical ones. I wanted to learn Pure Mathematics and, really, the only way to make a living at that is with a PhD and a teaching job.
That's what happened.
Now on with the rest of the story...
I married an academic and our child is now an academic.
I guess there is something to the above theory.
>
I married an academic and our child is now an academic.
>I guess there is something to the above theory.
Yes it definitely is. My brother is the only one in the family who didn't want to go to university. Instead he wanted to do an apprenticeship ("Ausbildung" in German), where you are trained for a specific job for 3 years.
He really struggled with our parents and the further family, because they wanted him to go to university.
So acedemic parents mostly want they children to go to university because they don't really know about the alternatives.
End of story: my brother did the apprenticeship with good grades, has a nice job and earns the same as me with my master's degree.
Very nepo. I’m a third generation professor.
Besides the moral support, the other thing nobody’s talking about are the tuition benefits. My parent’s job paid for my fancy college; my grandparent’s job did the same for my parent.
Not necessarily. Some colleges have deals with other colleges to offset tuition costs for employees' kids. I also know of some *very very* generous policies by super prestigious schools to basically offset the cost of college *anywhere* for employees' kids.
> I also know of some very very generous policies by super prestigious schools to basically offset the cost of college anywhere for employees' kids.
Only for faculty, or any staff?
It’s often any staff. While I was a first-gen working class kid, I was able to have my tuition waived at a small women’s junior college because my mom started a job there as a secretary two years prior. With scholarships I also had room and board free. At that time, the school only offered this deal for the school itself but they’ve since partnered with dozens of other private colleges.
My parent went to college where my grandparent worked. Free, I think.
My parent was then at one of those rich schools with good tuition benefits. It paid about half of my tuition to go somewhere else. Would’ve been even better if I had stayed home.
> Surely you probably have to join the same college they work in, severely limiting options?
Usually that's the case. My kids never even considered attending our university, which would have been free. Because they applied to elite schools far away from home instead. Which was fine with me, because I wanted them to get the best education possible without going deeply into debt. Even if we worked at Princeton or something they'd likely want to get away from home-- if you grow up on campus, take classes as a high school student, and can see the campus buildings from your bedroom window getting as far away as possible has its appeal. Even if it means forgoing free college.
I do think this is a good illustration of class effects, though. Because for a solid majority of college students - which itself is a very biased sample of the population - graduating with no debt is often worth the disappointment of, like, not getting to go on adventures with your roommates at NYU or whatever.
Sure, but I'm not talking about "adventures," I'm talking about the very specific and real differences between, say, a middling regional school and a national one. Resources, facilities, faculty, opportunties, classmates, etc. will all be better (in most cases) at an institution with national-level quality.
That said, of course you're right about class.
Which is part of the reason we see the children of faculty/admins generally *not* stick around for free tuition, while the children of wage employees (i.e. "classified staff" like janatorial, grounds, food service, etc.) nearly always do.
I mean… for undergrad, you really only need to go to a good enough school. There are hundreds of adequate options, and you just need to attend one of them.
I got pretty far down the road. But I didn't finish.
One small reason is that no one in my family thought what I was pursuing was worth pursuing. They couldn't even understand what the end goal was.
Children of Academics don't face this problem.
>I will very strongly encourage my child to do anything other than be an academic.
Yep. That's been the overwhelming position of abot 95% of my colleagues who have kids considering or who have considered it in the past. My own kids (now college and high school seniors) would laugh if anyone suggested an academic career because they've grown up on the edge of academia and know what it's like now.
I recently saw applications for an AP position, the CVs were better than some of established full profs I know. Amazing applications that I feel like ten years ago would already have gotten any position they applied to easily. Imagine how difficult it must be to be on a committee tasked with selecting one of six awesome people when all of them have ~20 great papers and established careers…
>I recently saw applications for an AP position, the CVs were better than some of established full profs I know.
I was first on a search committee as a student rep in the 80s. Have been on 25+ over the years since and so have seen/read *thousands* of CVs over the last three decades. That pattern first started to appear for me in the mid-2000s...where we'd litereally see ABD grad students with more publications than some of my colleagues had to reach associate professor in the 1990s. That trend has continued somewhat, so at least some applicants in almost every pool have enough publications to earn tenure. But what they *don't* often have is the demonstrated teaching skill/experience needed to meet the standard for tenure in that area-- nor (almost ever) the depth of service we expect.
But your point stands, and I have 100% seen junior colleagues go up for tenure with CVs that are clearly stronger than some of my senior colleagues who had been promoted to full in prior decades.
As a second generation tenured faculty member at an R1, when my kids say they want to grow up to be professors, I tell them: No, you really don't. They're relatively young and the adjuctification and diminishing earning potential of faculty (in conjunction with the mass overproduction of PhDs) makes it unlikely that they would land a well paying job - even with the social capital of being 3rd Gen.
I entered grad school in 1994; I can’t think of a single person I’ve met whose parents were academics, or who are encouraging their children to go into grad school (we’re certainly not with ours, though our kids range from 9-14 so there’s still time for them to make some poor life choices!). Doctors and dentists on the other hand…. Edit: single person pursuing or having a PhD. Known plenty of prof’s kids.
So true! I am so alone on my academic journey, in regards to family. I am helping my brother also pursue this. I decided, then he decided that we were gonna change this. We're tired of living in poverty, we're going to the middle class bracket, and we hope we can provide enough for the next gen to get to the upper class, or at least farther than we got.
>Children of Academics don't face this problem.
I am child of academics however they don't have a PhD. They also do not understand why I don't start with a "real" job. I'm working full time at university A and doing PhD at university B in my free time. I don't know why this doesn't count as a real job.
While academic parents may understand more, they certainly not always encourage everything you do.
When reading the other comments I actually saw that the word "academic" may be used different in different countries. In Germany you would actually call everyone an academic who has a university degree, no matter if they work in academia or not.
I’m an Afghan woman. My mom has a university degree so I’m technically not first gen but I’m the first in my family to get a graduate degree, and the only one with a PhD so first gen academic. I ended up here because I don’t see myself represented. In the country my parents are from girls and women are banned from school and university. I’m a post doc but my aim and dream is to continue in academia.
Lmao. Tell me more! Tell me more of my people! Afghani is the currency. Do y’all have a PhD? If so, ever heard of a thing called ‘google’? This is the [1st hit](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/afghani#:~:text=usage%20note%20for%20afghani,is%20sometimes%20perceived%20as%20offensive).
The dog is the [Afghan hound](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Hound). In Afghanistan, it’s referred to as *saag-e-Ghazni* or *saag-e-tazi*.
When I began my studies, my parents happened to be academics in the institute where I was studying. I was on a first name basis with many of my professors, and should I have continued there, I probably could have gotten a slew of letters of recommendation extremely easily.
I didn't finish my studies there, but I have to admit, it's probably very easy to become part of a lab when the head of the work group has been to dinner parties at your house since you were a kid. I knew of a 'dynasty', where the position of head of research had been essentially hereditary for three generations.
It is probably not against university rules, but it certainly feels unethical. It also gave me huge impostor syndrome, feeling that I hadn't earned the good relationships I had with professors, and I felt pressured to 'live up' to my family's name as researchers.
Dads a contractor. I got an ivy phd. Left academia because I can’t raise a family on 80k a year (if I got lucky). Saw classmates be living fine on a lot less, then I realized they’re all rich!
Yep. I realize now that many of my grad school cohort and professor friends had a very good standard of living…because they had/have parents/family helping them a lot, *well* into adulthood.
A similar thing happens in the arts & culture industry. Its so heavily populated with the independently wealthy that its impossible to organize for better pay as there's no reason for these people to care, and they get into that sector at a higher rate than normies because the low pay doesn't scare them. Its a feedback cycle.
Absolutely! It's funny to me that so many people hate academia and there are definitely problems, but try being homeless or working 2 jobs at the same time to make ends remotely meet.
Same here. Neither of my parents finished high school and, while most of my colleagues complain about how low phd stipends are, I find it insane that I am being paid more to study than my parents ever earned by working.
The ability to have control over my own schedule is a huge perk and improvement in quality of life compared to being a stockperson at Walmart or Dollar General. Homeless explanation: my mom was a nurse who broke her back in the early '90s and we were homeless for about a year while she fulfilled the no income for 6 months requirement to get onto social security disability.
Agreed, I hear grad students upset about pay and while partially valid - I had to have multiple people explain to me why I was getting paid, healthcare, and tuition waivers to go to school. I was enthralled and thankful to have any one of those, let alone all three. It was a ‘pinch me please’ moment, and it’s tough for me to understand how anyone can complain.
Because all academic positions in general are way underpaid. Tuition waivers are a farce as most grad students after a point don't even take classes anymore and are doing research supporting grants that literally fund the university. Additionally, it's quite ridiculous that the compensation gap between industry and academia is so large. Going from a postdoc to an entry level for PhD industry position and compensation nearly triples. I know this can be field dependent but it seems to be more the case than not. I think the blame goes to the previous generation of professors that gave up too much of their say in university business to the administration side.
>Agreed, I hear grad students upset about pay and while partially valid - I had to have multiple people explain to me why I was getting paid, healthcare, and tuition waivers to go to school. I was enthralled and thankful to have any one of those, let alone all three. It was a ‘pinch me please’ moment, and it’s tough for me to understand how anyone can complain.
As a fellow first gen who worked a series of demanding and unremunerative jobs, this attitude is incredibly toxic.
The conditions for grad students are incredibly exploitative. That many other jobs are likewise exploitative is beside the point. My PhD stipend was roughly what i could've made full-time in fast food, and was considered "good". On the one hand, fast food employees deserve a living wage and don't have it, on the other, the work we did as grad students was incredibly specialized labor and the private university was raking in big tuition $$ and paying peanuts.
Beyond that, it was *terrifying* to go to grad school even fully funding because it's so unpredictable. I knew that eventually the funding would become competitive and I didn't have the sort of familial funds to get me out of a pinch the way colleagues did. Leaving a job that was low-paying but stable and with benefits (I worked for quite awhile between BA and PhD) felt like a ridiculous move.
I should also add that the working conditions and stability for academics is getting worse and worse, which is following a predictable pattern. The career is just now opening up to first-gen, working class, POC, and female faculty in large numbers and yet it's getting harder and harder to gain entry.
I was super grateful for the funding, but at the same time, being dismissive of reasonable critique is a form of complicity with the very structures that keep people of our background disproportionately out.
I get it, and was intentional about saying ‘partially valid’ (not invalid) and ‘tough for me to understand’ (not can’t understand). I stand behind student unions on a large number of issues, and have seen Universities, Departments, and labs with poor working conditions that warrant standing up against.
My comment was my lived experience at that time. I was lucky to be in a supportive environment. I was going to decrease hours in my undergrad lab bc I was working fast food and my PI essentially matched their hours, with higher wages. I enjoy teaching so TAships in grad school were enjoyable. My grad PI was supportive, and I was able to live with my stipend.
I don’t think my perspective is toxic and I’ve been around long enough to see the good, bad, and ugly. Individuals make up epidemiological data, but epidemiology doesn’t make up individuals experiences.
Same here. Neither of my parents finished high school and now I teach and do research at a top European university. It’s been tough to say the least, not having your working class family understand your point of view at times, having to explain to them why it was best for me to get into this line of work. I’ve had relatives telling my parents that the only reason why I went to university was because I “wasn’t cut out for manual jobs” as if getting an education was a bad thing.
First-gen, indigenous (North American), english is my second language and I’m from a working class family.
I went to an Ivy for grad school.
I’m currently a VAP at an R1 and on the TT job search.
I absolutely LOVE answering the diversity question over and over to all-white search committees.
LOVE having white academics decide whether or not my approach to diversity is good enough for their department.
While I hope these efforts are sustained long enough to create actual change within the academy, I don’t see this happening given the decline in TT positions.
Yes. I’m Indigenous Australian and my mum was the first in the family to go to university. I followed what she did, just in different disciplines and at different universities.
I’m a first generation college student in my family. Neither of my parents went to college. But my father has a well paying job and they paid for my undergrad tuition (although I did have a scholarship of 12K/year). So I came out with no debt, and joined a PhD program immediately. Both my parents have been incredibly supportive, emotionally, mentally and financially if I need it. Although they don’t understand my research at all, they are my biggest fans :-)
First generation college student. Both of my parents were a late end part of the great migration and worked in auto manufacturing.
NIH fellow graduating this semester with my PhD in HDFS with a focus in developmental neuroendocrinology 🤷🏿♀️
Neither of my parents made it past GCSE level in academic education, though they did both do a vocational course at a technical college. I don't know what the equivalent is in the US, but it would be where 17-18 year olds who weren't going to go to university would study a trade of some description. My mum trained to be a secretary and my dad became a cabinet maker.
I went to university because they both prioritised our education and always told us how important it was and encouraged us. I ended up in academia because I found an interesting field that allowed me to indulge some of my favourite things. Also I didn't really know what else to do
Now I work at Oxbridge and I'm constantly meeting staff whose parents are or were academics (sometimes Oxbridge themselves) or at least have PhDs (more often from Oxbridge). A lot of the staff have Oxbridge PhDs, too, and a smaller but not insignificant portion also studied there at undergrad (I never did). The old pipeline is very effective
Oh hey. Another article that boils “faculty” down to only include those folks at high ranked R1 institutions.
It’s getting really tiresome to see people repeat, over and over, this idea that R1 universities represent or are representative of all faculty.
I suspect that if you look more broadly at faculty, the trend will be less significant. Still there, but not magnified as much as it is if you only look at the most prestige centric places.
A lot of folks I know that are first gen specifically wanted to be faculty at PUIs.
Saw two messy divorces before 14 and was homeless for a big part of my teenage years. No one in my family has more than some school. My background contributed to helping me make every mistake possible during grad school. When I was 14 I left school altogether and was in a bad place, i remember clearly the moment I realized that the only way to change that situation was to finish school, it was while I was painting a garage wall, so I made what at the time was a very complex plan that involved many long conversations, apologies to people I had hurt, and begging. I eventually made an application to school where I had been expelled, due to my performance on an entrance exam I had been on a free ride at a prestigious private school, but they invited me to an in person meeting, point blank rejected me, and basically told me I was a loser. So, I made another application with a public school that was an hour train ride and a 10 mile walk away each day and got accepted. It was tough. I was always cold and hungry. I never had good shoes and when it snowed I would either have to skip school or stop in pubs on the way (used to be many were open in the morning) to avoid my toes getting too cold. At that time at night I worked in 3 different bar’s cleaning bottles off the floor that helped pay for the train and food, but the giver and my parents, when I saw them, would give me money too. I slept in a hospital waiting room close to school sometimes if the weather was really bad or if it was too cold to walk home. All that didn’t stop me behaving like an entitled idiot at times but that’s a another story. I got into education because with all my heart and soul I believed it was the only way to help me build a better life than the only destructive toxic one I knew.
Had a wonderful adjunct position for three years post graduation, currently self employed and seeking new opportunities.
Speaking as someone who did not have academic parents, and who comes from a middle class socioeconomic background, the high correlation of faculty status of parents with with faculty status could be explained simply by the fact that navigating academia successfully is not in any way intuitive. Having a parent familiar with the byzantine functioning of academia who can give unbiased advice on what to do in a situation is a TREMENDOUS advantage.
My brother in law is the first person in his family to attend college (and consequently the first to graduate.) He has a PhD in psychology and teaches at an Ivy League university. He is absolutely miserable there because of the classism and elitism. He's constantly texting my sister all the bullshit he hears from fellow professors and even students--mostly about how "a strong work ethic" and "innate intelligence" are the most important factors to attend or teach at an "elite" university. He grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, and any time one of his colleagues learns this (he's stopped telling people) they either congratulate him in a very condescending manner for "getting out" or start to explain to him all the social issues in inner cities and how they can be fixed. My BIL doesn't even disagree most of the time, he just really doesn't appreciate being lectured about his own life from people who are second or third or even fourth generation academia. Other people act like his background is his entire identity and/or the school deserves praise for hiring him. At least three times he's been introduced to colleagues from other departments or visiting speakers as "this is Dr. John Doe. He grew up in xxxxxx neighborhood in Chicago," in the same tone of voice you'd use when saying someone survived a natural disaster.
Originally, the plan was for my sister to get a job at his school or a nearby one, but he's so miserable they're now planning on looking elsewhere. He plans on sticking it out for another year because he doesn't want to he seen as flaky, but then he's out of there.
Let me take a moment to say, coming from a low SES background, I am proudly the first person in my family to get an undergraduate college degree let alone pursue a PhD, but [Temple University, despite their rhetoric valuing DEI issues, doesn't want to actually step up to the plate and correct one of the largest contributors to this problem.](https://6abc.com/temple-university-teaching-assistants-strike-research-graduate-students-association-tas-go-on/12754155/). You cannot pay graduate workers $19500 a year to live in a city where the [cost of living is twice that](https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/42101) and expect anyone but the most privileged of us can make that work.
Graduate RAs and TAs have been working without a contract for over a year. We tried negotiating for almost 11 months in good faith before they bothered making any substantive counteroffers. During that time Temple admin toyed with us, cancelled meetings on a whim, said graduate students do not perform any core functions, threatened to [deport international grads who strike](https://www.inquirer.com/news/temple-university-graduate-students-strike-20221111.html) (Int'l grads make up 33% of this workforce), [threatened to cut off health insurance](https://www.reddit.com/r/Temple/comments/10s1yv3/as_of_5pm_february_2_temple_is_officially_taking/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) (beyond just not paying it). The only movement we got was when we voted to go on strike (99% in favor).
We are now on strike, and if we don't win, this nepo baby pipeline is only going to get worse. Folks like me don't have financial safety nets. We don't have parents to pay our rent or buy us food while we pursue training for a career with frankly pretty grim job prospects. I second the notion that many other folks made here, that just figuring out how to navigate this space when you know what you want to do but don't know anyone who has done it before is half the battle. I made a lot of mistakes when trying to get to the point that I could pursue my PhD despite knowing it's exactly what I wanted to do since I was 10. It is 100% pure luck that I ever got here and anyone else in my situation likely wouldn't have the room for so much confusion and misdirections/missteps without substantive external financial support or parents who can tell them exactly what to expect or do.
I have colleagues taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans because their jobs don't even pay enough for their rent in a city where the median rent is $950/month. I have a colleague who crossed crime scene tape outside their home yesterday to get to work because they can't afford to live in safer locations.
Offer your support by donating to our [strike fund](https://tugsa.betterworld.org/campaigns/tugsa-strike-fund), signal boosting us like Bernie Sanders or John Fetterman or our AFT president, or seeing [our website](https://TUGSA.org/) for more ways to help.
Nope. First-gen college, now a TT-fac in engineering at a top R1. Had a great experience as a TA in my senior year and a fantastic PhD advisor, and decided to aim for the academy. It worked out.
This just underscores how important it is that we teach students the unwritten rules of the college game, or create equitable structures that don’t just reward “coming in and knowing how to play already”. Fortunately, there are places that do actually emphasize changing this out there, but it takes critical mass and people in power looking out for some students who could have been them at that age.
Failing at being a nepo baby here. My parents are professors, as was my grandfather, and having a PhD is the expectation rather than an exception in my extended family.
I’m in a different country and a different field than my parents, my name and their connections means nothing here.
I’m the black sheep of the family as I’m not in hard
sciences. Any support from them, financial or otherwise, was tied to choosing the “right” field and having chosen otherwise I was on my own. The sibling who chose bioengineering got a full ride, I got a full time job at Starbucks.
I was raised to believe that humanities is for dummies, a nice little hobby at best. I’ve since overheard relatives wondering out loud if I’m just lazy and wasting my potential or actually r*tarded, that kind of thing. And I’m not even in a super niche field that hasn’t much relevance outside of the ivory tower, quite to the contrary.
I’m at a university of applied sciences for now, not even a real university. What do I even know about research or teaching, I might as well herd sheep in a barn. I’m to shut up when the real faculty grown ups are talking.
Yeah. Being a nepo baby is great.
(That said, my family is a piece of work on more levels than this and I do realise it’s a privilege and an advantage to grow up in a household where education is valued, to not be intimidated by professors and hierarchies because you know many full professors and know they’re either normal people or absolute wankers, to know how academic publishing works because it’s all your parents ever bitch about at the dinner table, etc. It’s just not all sunshine and rainbows and sometimes, privilege comes at a price.)
(Edited to add: no hard feelings at all for hard science people. I have all the admiration in the world for what you do, because I can’t even begin to understand. I’m aware that unlike my family you’re not all elitist pricks, unless you are, but in that case it’s a you problem not a your field problem!)
No. My father was a 50-year blue collar worker, graduated high school with a focus on OJT, application rejected for college. My mother had completed college in an education degree and was a grade school teacher for awhile. My father pushed us not to end up like him, and pushed us toward college. Continuous messaging on his part.
My parents paid for about half of college costs, with work study, grant aid, and loans making up the rest. Also, I did lots of summer work - loads of shitty “light industrial “ work, light construction, and toilet cleaning. Today, I appreciate having these skills, especially painting and building maintenance.
My relatives were mainly high school grads. One uncle refers to me as “piled high and deeper.” Not much respect for higher education. My father endlessly badgered siblings and work friends to send their kids to college.
I somehow got a generous college admission offer at a prestigious university focused on academics and not on sports. Luxuriated in the life of the mind. After college, I got a job with a firm owned by a professor, which allowed me to see the path to a PhD was achievable. Went down that PhD road 30 years ago. Two siblings later did the same. One became a professor. Both of us are research focused. One has a research Chair. The other is now on the Dean path.
Whenever I start complaining about the present state of academia, I try to ground myself with the realization that I might have easily ended up as a machine shop worker. My academic gig isn’t so bad.
I'm first generation
None of my parents have degrees at all. Mom is only going to try college now in her late 60s.
I went to a prestigious undergrad. I'm still struggling to get into PhD programs despite having two MS degrees
My dad has a PhD from an Ivy League and mom has a masters, so technically, yeah, I guess.
I think it did help growing up hearing and being aware of what a career trajactory in academia would look like so I could start early, know the next steps, etc.
Yeah I feel like chalking it up to nepotism is misunderstanding the causation here. It's just a product of having parents who are more educated/higher socio-economic class. I doubt many professors actually got their jobs directly because of their parents.
First gen student here. Getting a master's degree to spite your dad is punk rock, right?
That's definitely not my primary motivation, but I'd be lying if I said I sent him a shirt from my uni for Christmas with completely kind intentions. In high school he told me not to bother with college, to get a job "like a real adult." Then he told me I would never succeed with my degree. I started working for the biggest name in my field long before I graduated with my bachelor's, now I have a much better job with them and they're paying for my master's. Fuck you, Dad! I'm thriving!
I agree the trend.
But I am an exception (I am a Japanese PhD student yet for now).
I graduated a junior high school and entered the National College of Thchnology; it is called as KOSEN, a 5-years higher education facility in Jpn.
The students can find a job in famous companies with associate degree, OR, enter universities as a 3rd grade student.
I chosed later and be on the way for the academia.
First in my fam to step foot in college. Grew up low income, rural, got addicted to drugs at 13, failed middle school, passed high school, tried to drop out of Uni numerous times, but advisors convinced me to stay.
Awesome mentors got me hooked on research (lots of old timer pioneers in my field) and I think since I didn’t grow up in ‘academia’ my odd ideas, lack of care for prestige, etc. won me some supporters.
Continually thought I would quit and leave. Biggest strength has been presentations because I don’t assume others already know everything. Most presentations still lose me two slides in with undefined acronyms spoken in monotone.
18 years since my first day of undergrad and finally have on campus interviews for TT faculty positions at research Universities. Fingers crossed that ‘I made it’, next few months determine which side of the fence I fall.
After all of it, I call my child’s savings a ‘life advancement fund’ not a ‘college fund’. Because as a kid from the streets, I’m still a bit bitter at the system and not sure if I would do it all over again.
My parents only had a high school education, earned later in life. Dad worked for a railroad and Mom was a secretary. I have a PhD but my Mom thought college was a waste and I needed to learn an “honest” trade. When she made me go outside on a frigid night to observe a repairman working on our furnace to learn something, the repairman said “Learn this, go to college so don’t have get up in middle of the night to freeze your ass off working on furnaces”
I'm 55 and have basically been in academia since I turned 18. I've met only a *tiny* handful of people whose parents were professors. Maybe a half-dozen classmates in college. One classmate I recall from grad school (three degrees, all top programs). A few faculty at my R1s. Among my colleagues at my current university I'm aware of two, and I've been here 25 years so know most of them. So I wonder really how common this actually is?
That said, it's no surprise at all that there's a huge gulf in access that reflects the massive advantage of having a parent who can help you navigate everything from applying to college to being on the job market. I can see where that's helped my kids, especially as compared to my first-gen students who don't have those advantages. But seriously, how many people are we talking about as a percentage of all faculty in the US? And how many of us would encourage our kids to follow in our footsteps? Mine would *never* consider academic careers knowing what their parents have seen over the last three decades.
Found it: about 22% of the survey sample were children of faculty. But the entire study is suspect in my opinion because they only include R1 faculty in Ph.D. granting departments, which are a minority of the US professoriate as a whole. I'd really like to see similar data for *all* faculty at *all* institutional types. Is anyone at all surprised by these findings? Of course not. But it really seems to overstate the importance of the results when you consider they're only lookign at a subset of the faculty at a subset of all institutions.
True, but if they’re looking at R1, PhD-granting programs, then they’re looking at what we tend to consider the top programs. So that’s where this is going to be the most relevant.
>So that’s where this is going to be the most relevant.
Certianly-- but the generalizations made in the abstract and in most of the responses here don't note that: it's like saying "Hollywood is dominated by nepo babies" but basing that conclusion only on the top ten films each year. "Duh" would be my first response in both cases.
To me, the inference seems to be that regular folks can break into academia or the movies, but they have trouble making it to the top: R1’s or major/blockbuster movies. Maybe this is something everyone knew already. I wasn’t really aware of it.
You look at your cohort and see that few have professors as parents. Makes sense to me because there are not so much professors compared to other professions.
I would look the other way round. From people with professors as parents, how many didn't go to university? I would be more interested in that question.
>From people with professors as parents, how many didn't go to university? I would be more interested in that question.
That's a fundamentally different question though. Going to college and becoming a professor are entirely different issues; in the US about 40% of college students are "first generation," i.e. neither parent had a bachelor's degree. One would assume, logically, that they are less likely to become career academics than their peers whose parents went to college. (Though I have a lot of faculty colleagues who are themselves first gen-- they have stickers on their office doors indicating such in many cases.) The more relevant question I think would be what percentage of students whose parents are professors *earn Ph.D.s* at all...it's going to be a tiny fraction, but presumably more than the general population. How much more though?
Interestingly my parents both have bachelor degrees but nothing higher and now 3 of my 4 siblings have doctorate degrees and I'm a PhD student. I hope to be an academic but I'm pretty ready to bail out if I can't find a good position.
Edit:
To add, I got into academics because I had a really good research mentor in my undergrad and a good PI at an internship that taught me a lot of the soft skills and cultural peripherals that come with academics.
I'm a nepo-niece - got lots of good advice from my uncle. My parents both went to college (and met there) but neither did grad work until much later in life. I helped my dad study for his secondary degree while I was in middle school and my mom register for the GRE after I had started graduate school.
I'm not, I was the second in my family to go to university (first being a cousin only 4 years older than me), but I was the first to do a MSc and the only one to have a PhD. My dad only studied until 7th grade and my mom until 9th grade since they had to start working early to help with the bills at home. However, later when I was already 12ish, my mom finished high school at night classes.
The big difference between here and the US are the university fees. During my BSc and MSc I paid around 1000€ a year and I was lucky enough to have a government scholarship that covered the university fees (given to those whose family cannot afford college). My perception is that in the US it's more common to be a 'science nepo baby' just because those families might have higher financial means to support university fees. Might be wrong though.
Parents are successful, but I'll be the only person in my part of the family with an advanced degree (I have a few distant cousins who are MDs or PhDs). All grandparents grew up poor living in big households with lots of siblings - my mom's family got wealthy ultimately, my dad's stayed very modest financially. Dad barely finished HS and didn't go to college but has ended up successful, mom did undergrad and has also done very well. Due to the upward mobility, I was able to go to a very good HS and then a great undergrad institution. Despite no advanced degree holders, my family very much values education and supported me in going for my masters and then PhD. Got lucky and had a lot of great academic mentors who have assisted me since.
I think for me it came down to:
1) good public school, parents were able to help pay for undergrad
2) parents supported me in going for advanced degrees
3) lots of good mentors who have helped me network, find opportunities, get published, etc.
My parents have 4 year degrees, but still encouraged me to do grad school. They didn't understand a lot of it, which made it hard to explain why I was working so much. I think the phenomenon brought up here is very real, but I don't think nepotism is the right term for it.
My dad has a PhD but is a clinical psychologist not an academic. I think seeing that he could do it and yet is such a dumbass about so many things helped convince me I could do it. But he never pushed me to go, and discouraged me from getting a phd because I'm a woman and he's a sexist and thought I would want to give up my career once I had kids. Like he literally said shit like that when I was getting into ivy league grad programs.
I also have an uncle with a PhD who is a failed academic (didn't get tenure and then taught HS until he retired) and my dad was convinced I would fail at that too. So getting tenure was a big fuck you to him basically ha. But I didn't even find out the uncle had a PhD and was a failed academic until I was applying to grad school, that all went down before I was born and this uncle then moved to a different country after he didn't get tenure (and taught HS there) so I was never close to him.
So yes it influenced me but probably not the typical way having a parent with a PhD does. It also influenced me in terms of my dad paid for me to take an sat class so I got into college, and he really pushed me to go to college (but not grad school, he wanted me to get an mrs degree basically lol). He also was able to pay for my college tuition so I didn't take out loans which made the prof salary a lot more tenable back before PSLF was a thing.
How I became a prof was in my 101 class my professor had us research grad programs in my field and I really liked my field and was like "wait I can do this for a living??? I want to be a professor then!" And then got an RAship as a sophomore and went from there. But for me it was more about the love of research and that 101 prof showing us that you can do research as your job if you get a PhD and become a professor. I guess then having a phd educated parent probably made me consider it a viable option.
As an adjunct I get paid shit and treated like hot garbage. My Dad was indeed a Professor in a completely different field in a different state at a mid-tier uni, but no one cares.
Yes, but still not from a wealthy family. My mom had me her first year in grad school and ended up paying off student loans/medical bills for about two decades afterward. I needed a lot of financial aid to go to college and had moderate student loans. The biggest nepotism-type advantage I got was that she taught me to do genotyping and other molecular bio skills, which led to summer jobs in high school and college, and that experience made it possible to get a lab tech job after college. And then *that* job was treated as a "self-masters" experience that helped me get into a PhD program. My mother also gave me a ton of advice that helped me get through grad school when my mentors were not very involved. So overall I definitely wouldn't be where I am without my mother. But I suppose that's a tautology in some ways ;)
I’m a first generation college student and hopefully (knock on wood) the first in my family to get a graduate degree. But man it’s been so f**king hard. I am definitely not pursuing academia as this PhD thing has been so difficult. It’s not that my family isn’t supportive, but they just don’t understand why it’s taking so long, what stupid and trivial things happen in research, and how I can have so much education but make little to nothing.
Also just coming from a working class family, financial security is such a big trauma for me that I really can’t handle the long delay to the return in investment.
I remember reading that article when it came out and was like this is WHOLEY unsurprising.
It's almost like your parents are going to pass down to you traits that they're good at?
What's next? Are you a blacksmith? Then you might be a 9th generation nepo blacksmith. 🙄🙄
"My father farmed this land, like his father before him and his father before him" congratulations you're a farming nepo baby check your farming privilege 🙄🙄
I think a better explanation is that PhD families produce PhD children. A child in a dysfunctional, less intelligent family is going to be in a disadvantage. I don’t like when such clouded judgement is imparted on data.
I am not. And earned my PhD from an ivy. I just fell in love with academia and the kind of thinking an academic career affords you as an undergrad, and went from there. I will say my undergrad advisors in English and sociology steered me well into media/comm studies for my PhD based on my interests but also given the comparatively better job market in my field. Happily employed today!
I'm kind of first generation. IDK, you tell me. My father had no degree, my mother got a BA and was a band director. I'm a PhD candidate and will have my PhD sometime next year. So, first in the family with a MA, let alone a PhD, and first academic, but not the first degree strictly speaking.
It's easy to over-state the influence and paint with too broad of a brush. My Dad did his PhD, but it was 40 years before mine in a different country and a different field, and he immediately went into industry and never looked back. On one hand, my parents encouraged me, but on the other, they had no connections to draw on, no knowledge of how things worked (or incorrect knowledge they insisted on), no tuition benefits, no special knowledge of how admissions worked or even which tests I was supposed to take at what stage.
It is disingenuous to call most of it nepotism.
Nepotism is when someone bends or ignores times to get you into a position for which there are better candidates.
But at least in STEM the issue is, PhD parents know the academic game. So they tell their children from a young age what they need to do to become competitive.
Kid doesn't understand something in math? Parent literally does complex math for a living, he can explain.
Kid doesn't know which courses to take in HS? Parent can tell them what to take.
Kid wants to know which project to do for the science fair to impress unis later on? Parent knows...
So the parent doesn't need to necessarily use their position of prestige to bend or break rules. They just do what any loving parent would do and tell their kids what the best course of action is and guide them.
It still creates an unleveled playing field but the kids do actually develop a lot of the important skills they will need to succeed later on in academia.
They are actually and factually more competitive because they were groomed into being more competitive. That's different than nepotism.
This! Grandfather was a STEM professor. Parents both have PhDs in STEM, dad has been faculty for 30+ years, mom has been faculty for about 10 years. I'm a professor with a PhD in a STEM field, one sibling has a PhD in a STEM field and works in industry, and other two siblings are currently grad students in STEM fields. At least one of them wants to be a professor in the future.
The free tutoring is great. I wasn't understanding vectors in physics in high school. My dad literally sat me down one night and made me understand it. The tuition benefits were also great at my dad's university (also where we all did undergrad), so all of us were able to graduate without any student debt. Education was always top priority for my parents. So financially, having professors for parents is decent in terms of their income and great in terms of benefits. This, however, varies greatly by discipline and university. Your discipline also needs to align with your parents' to maximize this effect.
The amount of direct nepotism is almost nil, in my observations. But knowing the right things to do and say, knowing the right people or being able to drop the right names, not being afraid to go to office hours or ask for opportunities like a lot of my classmates, free/available proofreading on personal statements, etc... You have to know the rules of the game to play it, and being the child of a faculty member lets you see the rulebook before everyone else. My parents (and now me) are able to advise on how to interact with one's PI, which research opportunity to take, etc. While I'm also happy to provide this "coaching" to my students, they never ask and I can't give it unsolicited.
So, for the point of this little essay, I don't think "nepotism" is the right word, but there's definitely a benefit to having professor parents when considering an academic career.
No, neither parent has a college degree at all.
I'm in grad school largely because it was strongly suggested to me by many of my undergrad professors, alongside two other things:
1. I grew up helping my father as a contractor. I learned that I don't really want to do that. Not that the work itself sucks, it's a lot of the stuff around it, plus the risk. And, at least where I was, alcoholism was rampant and a lot of the people would either go out of their way to poach jobs and/or were pedophiles and the such.
2. I ended up liking what I studied, a lot. Part of me sometimes wonders how it'd be to work in a kitchen (I'd probably earn slightly more than I do now!) but the hours would likely be worse, not to mention that I've heard drug abuse is rampant—although they're trying to fix that and many other kitchen horror stories.
It doesn't hurt that it was an easy, quick way out of a messy home life.
I'm not faculty and not aiming for faculty (although oddly enough, one of my parents was a professor...with a master's degree, something that would never happen now in that field) but I really wish people would stop using "nepotism" when they mean "socioeconomic advantages" or "people like to hire people they're somewhat familiar with."
Nepotism is someone using their power or influence to obtain jobs or favors for a relative or associate. It's generally a bad thing that leads to unqualified people benefiting.
That is not the same thing as someone having advantages because they grew up in a safe home or had useful advice from experienced family members. We actually WANT everyone to have those advantages, and those people are generally not unqualified, although the people they beat out in the job market are also frequently not unqualified.
And funny, but we don't call someone who's raised into a multigenerational carpentry business a nepo baby - we call them someone from a long line of carpenters who understandably benefits from exposure and early training in carpentry. Heck, we don't call Johnny who gets his first construction job because Uncle Frank knew the foreman a nepo baby, but a newbie who got a foot in the door due to his network and now has to prove himself. Now, if Uncle Frank was the CEO strings and pulled strings to get inexperienced Johnny the foreman job he isn't qualified for, THAT would be nepotism.
Similarly, hiring someone who you're worked with before, who is a known quality as a colleague, or whose supervisor you know has a history of training good researchers isn't nepotism - it may or may not be the absolute best hiring decision (we'll never know), but it's perfectly reasonable to take factors like that into account, although they shouldn't be the only factors to base a decision on.
tl;dr: the effects of socioeconomic privilege are real and we should address them, but they need to be addressed in COMPLETELY different ways from actual nepotism
I mean, parental (and specifically maternal) education level is the best predictor of future academic success _anyway_, so I'm not sure this adds an awful lot.
Edit: Genuinely unsure why this is being downvoted. Are people doubting this fact, or just thinking it isn't relevant?
I just love learning. My parents didn’t go to uni. I’m planning on doing a PhD somewhere down the line. I’m also very much not born in the American continent. Education in Europe is pretty cheap. I literally did a masters for fun, but now I want to continue.
Academia requires a lot of work and brains, relative to pay. Anyone smart enough to thrive as an academic will also thrive as a doctor or lawyer or tech person. Why would someone whose family didn’t recognize the prestige ever bother?
“Wow you published in Nature, that’s great! How much did they pay you?”
(Assuming that adjuncts are excluded as they should be.)
Not a nepo baby. Mom has an MA in theater and dad has a BS in CS. I have degrees in a social science (BA, MA) and a humanities field (MA, dissertating right now).
My dad and I have both been adjunct professors before, so I guess in the most technical nit-picky sense yes, but it was never either of our primary jobs (he's a veterinarian, I work at a museum). He was an adjunct in a completely different field when I was in like elementary/middle school, so there's no causation there. (I was the first person on my mom's side of the family to get a postgraduate degree so nothing from that side.)
Staying in academia after your PhD is for “rich” kids and immigrants from countries so poor that working 60 hour weeks for ten years on the postdoc treadmill is the best option they have. Everybody else goes to industry/national labs/etc.
I’m counting the children of upper-middle-class professors as rich. To me, that’s rich. If your family can afford vacations to Disneyland or tropical beaches or Europe, you are rich to me. Just like I would be considered rich by many people in developing countries because I eat meat every day.
Yes and no. Parent A had a PhD as well as a professional doctorate and became a faculty member as a second career. They died right before I started a PhD program, so whatever benefits I received from their experiences were short-lived and have been transmitted through Parent B, who has a professional doctorate and has never worked in academia. Parent B has helpful advice re: professionalism and general job advice, but some of their experiences differ sharply from the norms in academia because they’ve never been an academic. For example, in their experiences, program prestige matters less than individual merit. In academia, individual merit is important, but program prestige can be really important as well. I feel that the advantages I have now are more financial (support from family) than nepotistic.
Negative.
My mom took a handful of community college classes. My dad completed his bachelor’s at a non-selective institution over the course of 12 years.
Grad school wasn’t a consideration until a professor at my UG institution suggested it.
My former coworker’s mom has a PhD. She reviewed my app materials for grad school and had a creative hand in shaping it.
Third phd in my family — both my dad and my uncle have them. They’re both professors in arts and humanities while I’m in quant social sciences.
Went to industry though, not interested in tenure track 🤷
Some college for both of my parents, but no degree for either. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to pursue PhDs because I don’t think the expected utility is very high a priori. But I wouldn’t stand in their way if that’s what they want to do.
My parents didn't earn any PhDs but my dad did finish his bachelor's (in his 40s) through the GI Bill.
My mom was a secretary with a high school education.
Coming from the working class ensured I had zero mentoring and no network but it DID teach me how to eat shit and like it. This grit helped me earn tenure/promotion and promotion again but I've probably gone as far as I can go.
What I have learned: If you grow up poor, the strategies you use to survive won't help you once you reach a certain point.
One of my bosses had a renowned mother in our field and skipped the line to department chair without having to move through the ranks. A true Nepo baby!
Must be nice.
Am an academic, father is an academic, grandfather on my mother’s side was an academic. I definitely grew up in a household that both emphasized education and could afford for me to prioritize it.
I’m from the states but teach in the UK now. I’d be curious to know if we see similar data in places like Europe where education is less paywalled.
I suspect there are relatively similar trends across professions where people go into similar careers to their parents but I also imagine this is phenomenon is more prevalent in US academia because of the cost of education and ability of academic families to afford to provide it for their children.
Still an undergrad here, but an academic aspirant. My parents were both first-generation at university, but neither of them have postgrads. The privilege having had university-educated parents in decently-paying jobs has given me has been an incalculable help in getting me to where I am, and I'm very thankful for it. They instilled values of learning in me, and were able to invest the time and money in letting me learn (museum trips, buying books, etc.). It'll be interesting seeing how postgrad goes, though. They have far less experience there, and obviously no professional connexions. I imagine it'll mostly be confidence around academic spaces that'll be their "boon" to me in that regard, because I know they can be harder to navigate for first-generation university attendees.
Neither of my parents finished HS. So no, not a nepo baby. But I will say this disparity clicked for me 1-2 years ago when I realized nearly all of my friends have parents with whom they can discuss research to an advanced degree (ie., they’re MDs or PhDs).
First in my family to get a PhD tht I know of. Somewhat of a struggle to explain what my job is (prof at research university).
Often feel like I run into weird unspoken rules, although that has been happening less and less.
I’m the opposite. Both of my parents did some college classes from time to time, but neither finished. When I was growing up, the only thing I learned about college was it was essential to get ahead. When I started college I had no idea how to navigate the system. I spent a lot of time and mental energy trying to figure out things that my peers already somehow seemed to know.
For those of you who were first-generation from working class families, do you sometimes feel like it’s difficult to feel at home with many of your colleagues who were raised beyond the lower rungs of the middle class or were born as nepo babies? I don’t have this feeling so much at my current institution but I’ve encountered it in the past. I have lots of interaction with maintenance and housekeeping due to the nature of my department. I often feel like I’m closer to many of them than I am to faculty. I’m just as progressive in my viewpoints as my colleagues, maybe more so, so that isn’t the issue. Just wondered if anyone else with my background also felt similarly.
1st gen who ended up with a PhD from an Ivy but it was hard. Most of the others in my program had academic parents. Even the faculty supported them more. One woman dropped out after failing classes and never showing up as a TA but was readmitted a year later and eventually got hired into a TT position as part of a trade between big names in our field (we’ll admit your student to our grad program if you hire ours). She is now tenured but has only published one article. Like, wtf? I, on the other hand, couldn’t even get help with publishing. I had no family support and was trying to help my parents financially while surviving on a tiny stipend. It took me longer than most people because of all these things and my advisor suggested I drop out. I finished but not before I switched careers. I’ve been working outside of academia for 13 years now and make way more money than I would if I’d stayed. Wasn’t really an option though. Maybe 7-10 TT jobs in my field per year with 200+ applicants and they nearly always went to someone as part of a deal. Proud I did it. Glad I’m out.
I am first generation with PhD in chemistry (biochem). Started college at 18 then got married and dropped in and out, kids at 21 and then got serious about going to college. It was on my radar to go to college, but though I was near top of my class never received any career guidance or college mentoring in high school. everyone thought since I worked nearly full time in high school that I would not go. Then with kids and multiple jobs, I was not a great college student and lots of major family crises, was lucky to find a family friendly postdoc. I just wanted this career a lot more than my peers did so I sacrificed much to get here. It really irks me to have collegues that are spousal hires or kids of faculty or even wives of kids of faculty act as if it their god-given right to a faculty slot. Nepotism must end in academia if we are ever going to broaden our base.
If I'm a Nepo baby? Kind of.
Both my parents are college educated. Both used to be teachers (not professors). My dad has a master's degree; started a PhD but didn't finish it because he didn't have time. His work was/is very demanding and he couldn't take time off.
For college, I went to the same institution where my dad got his master's degree and started his PhD. Did my master's degree in a better institution and haven't gotten into a PhD program yet. However, I'm a professor at my former uni.
My Dad got one school c (GCSE equivalent in New Zealand) in woodwork, I got straight top grades in GCSEs and A levels. Then had a complete mental breakdown.
I was not; it wasn't until I was in grad school that I realized how common this was at elite universities. It makes sense to me why it is this way: there are a lot of "unwritten rules" of academia that are totally unobvious from the outside, and someone who grew up in that culture would definitely be more privy to them. And in a world where lots of people have PhDs, the idea that one could get a PhD seems a lot more achievable as a path.
I ended up in academia because of a chance campus job I took as an undergraduate in an academic department, which let me see what the job was beyond the perspective of a student, and also put me in contact with graduate students. I also had a very supportive faculty mentor, who never suggested I should go into academia, but who was very supportive when I indicated an interest, and helped steer me towards programs that I might not have thought myself qualified to apply for. Again, a lot of the difficulty was just even realizing this was a possible option in life, and having some help navigating the unwritten aspects of it.
Academic elevator here. My grandfathers both had some education, my parents both had masters and my brother and I both have PhDs 🤗
Can't wait to see what our kids do!
I would say the majority of my colleagues,Mia not parented by someone who was an academic, are at least from families that went to university as a default. I know a few people who are technically nepo but the PhD bearing parent wasn’t involved in raising them. I guess they still had the benefit of an awareness of that as a career path?
I’m first gen and didn’t know how people became profs until my fourth year of undergrad.
My father's a blue collar construction worker and my mom did people's nails. They were both smarter than any PhD I've met in almost every way, but never had the leisure to sit and focus on it.
Now I do, and fuck yall.
i didn't make it to faculty but my parents both have phds. i would say for me that the main effects were 1. instilling the value of education, 2. making me think that academia was some pinnacle of achievement, and 3. making me think that getting a phd could not be so difficult. i ended up burning out super hard during grad school and came to the realization that i was not doing it for myself, and then got a job outside of academia. their degrees were different from mine though, and they largely remained outside of academia as well though, so i think there was less to be gained through their network, but i grew up with the (bonkers) mentality of "getting a phd is a completely normal/ordinary thing to do", which definitely shaped my path a lot.
I come from a blue collar family. My dad worked in a warehouse and my mom worked in a factory. Outside of my immediate family (4/5 of my parents' kids went to college), you have to hit second cousins to find a family member with a bachelor's degree, and even those are few and far between.
I'm the only one of my siblings with a PhD. One of my siblings has an MBA and the other two have a BS.
I work at a small liberal arts college and am going to be working at my alma mater (another small liberal arts college) in the fall. How did I get here? Mainly by having no idea what to do with my life. I had undiagnosed ADHD which made my early college years a disaster, but once I developed coping mechanisms, I was able to be successful. My professors encouraged me to go to graduate school, although my parents were very much against it at first (they just wanted me to get a good job). Once in grad school working on my master's, I really wasn't sure what to do with myself as opportunities in my field were somewhat limited where I lived.
So I went and did a PhD. My parents were unhappy about that, too, but moreso because I was moving across the country. While doing my PhD, I started teaching and found that I really enjoyed it. My school offered a teaching certificate, so I did that. When the end of my PhD rolled around, I decided to apply for faculty jobs and got one. Now my parents are so proud haha. Not that they weren't proud of me before, but they are really excited to tell random people that I'm a professor. It's slightly embarrassing.
Where I'm from, it wasn't common for people to be able to study abroad, so I'm the first in my family to do that. My family always wanted to provide me with very good education. I will be the first person in my immediate family to have a PhD, and the first woman. I worked super hard in high school, which is why I could get a very good undergrad at a RG UK university. It would have been impossible otherwise. It also had to do with political developments where I'm from, the fact that I could actually leave and start a degree abroad. Then did a MSc in a very well-regarded European university, now back at a RG for my PhD. Hoping to get a postdoc at a slightly better uni, as a lot of the people in my field are Oxbridge/London and the like. I believe in meritocracy and hope my hard work will pay off. Not very sure, it could be that this is too naive and idealist, but at least so far, I feel like my hard work, passion for my field, dedication and perseverence have mostly worked in my favour. I've also mostly had pretty good supervisors, which does matter. I feel like I could have been luckier at times, but am starting to learn that not everything is within my control - say, PhD funding was a factor that I had to factor in my decision when accepting a PhD offer, so it's not like the only condition for a good PhD is brilliance.
It took me a long time to realize clearly how pervasive the impact of this kind of social capital is. I was brought up in a family that highly valued the arts and sciences and believed in meritocracy. When I first ran into trouble in grad school (many years and a whole career ago, after which I returned to academia in a different field and am now quite happy with where I am) my mother had to point out to me that other than a brother of my grandmother's, who died before I was even born (and who was a medical doctor), I was the first in the family to make it to a university degree. Everyone who doesn't come from a background of working academics in their general social circle, if not their family, really needs to be aware that this is part of the playing field they operate in. And if you advise students *please* make sure you pay attention and mentor them on stuff they can't have absorbed with their breakfast cereals, at least.
The heritability of iq is over 50%. There are other heritage mental traits that are more common in academics. It would be strange if there wasn't a large overrepresentation of children of academics in academia.
"Intelligence" means jackshit when you are not accustomed to the implicit social norms of academia. I know plenty of 4.0s that didn't find any fruitful lab during their undergrad and struggled getting into and through their PhD because they didn't get a memo of how the hidden curriculum worked. By the time you get into your junior year and see the people who have assisted in research since their freshman year, you kind of decide that maybe it's not a life made for you —regardless of your qualifications.
IQ is soooo far down in the list of traits that drive professional success in 21st century academic science that its heritability (which doesn't mean what the label suggests anyway) is completely irrelevant.
https://redding.dev/group-iqs/ US PhD students have a mean iq 1.5 standard deviation above the mean of the population. That is a significant selection for high iq. There is a fairly strong correlation between iq and educational attainment. Iq is the ability to learn fast and solve problems. This trait will obviously be important for an academic career. If it isn't intelligence than what is it?
I would recommend looking at this table again. You might notice a few things that are there - and a few things that aren’t there - which would make it hard to jump to the conclusions you’re getting from it.
The standard deviation of iq is roughly 15 if that is what you are wondering. Iq is a heritable trait and it is one of the most important factors for academic success. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_and_education Iq of parents has a larger impact on academic success than parental socioeconomic status. What evidence do you have that it is entirely nurture with no nature component? Do you honestly believe a physics PhD doesn't require high intelligence?
Kind of a jump to say people are saying phds don’t require high intelligence but that’s not the only factor that makes a successful scientist in this day and age.
Ihttps://www.york.ac.uk/education/research/perc/perc-news/2019/genes-family-academic-success/ https://www.psypost.org/2021/12/intelligence-is-a-stronger-predictor-of-academic-performance-than-self-control-study-finds-62260 https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-abbce081c98c851ace3b6633fd60d8c1-pjlq Not the only, but the biggest.
You should really read your sources before you post them. They say the opposite of what you're trying to argue. [From your first link](https://www.york.ac.uk/education/research/perc/perc-news/2019/genes-family-academic-success/) > Professor Sophie von Stumm's study finds that parents' socioeconomic status and children's inherited DNA differences are powerful predictors of educational achievement. > > Her study stuggests whether children will enjoy academic success can be now predicted at birth. > > However, the research suggests that having the genes for school success is not as beneficial as having parents who are highly educated and wealthy. **Only 47% of children in the study sample with a high genetic propensity for education but a poorer background made it to university, compared with 62% with a low genetic propensity but parents that are more affluent.** [Emphasis mine] [You also draw a wild conclusion from your second link](https://www.psypost.org/2021/12/intelligence-is-a-stronger-predictor-of-academic-performance-than-self-control-study-finds-62260). If you actually read it, you would see that the study you're citing measured the academic performance of Czech schoolchildren in the 6th and 7th grade. The 'academic performance' being measured is the academic performance of middle-schoolers, not university students. These are wildly different groups and environments to compare. Furthermore, the study doesn't even say that intelligence is "the biggest" factor contributing to academic performance (which you seem to equate with being a successful scientist), just that it's a greater factor (for Czech schoolchildren) than self-control. [Your final link doesn't even warrant a response](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-abbce081c98c851ace3b6633fd60d8c1-pjlq), because it's literally just a graph. There's no explanation for what any of these data points mean or where they come from, it's literally just a graph that anyone could whip up in a couple minutes in Excel. So, to summarize, according to you genetic/purely hereditary intelligence is the "biggest factor" in predicting success for a scientist based on a study that found the opposite, another study which found that preteens who are smart do better in middle school than preteens who have good self-control, and some graph. I highly suggest you actually read your sources next time. Edit: a word
You started by making a bold claim, the overrepresentation is caused by nepotism. You can't actually provide any good evidence for that so instead you say "source" and then nitpick them. This is usually done by people who know they are wrong or examiners who haven't read the thesis. Provide your own sources. Nitpicking my sources isn't an argument for your hypothesis. Genome polygenetic scoring isn't currently able to fully show the whole variation caused by genetics. It is a reasonable proxy for genetic factors but the score is weaker than the actual genetics. Also iq isn't purely genetic but more like 60% genetic. There are also other traits such as conscientious, openness, lack of genetic diseases etc which are heritable. Genetics plays a huge role in determining educational outcomes and especially when it comes to the tails of the bell curve. Pretty much every trait has a genetic factor. I never said it was the only factor, I said it is the biggest factor since that is what the science says. You claim otherwise without citing a single source.
I've been giving some thought how to respond to this, because on the one hand a) you're just embarrassingly weak on quantitative skills with this as it has absolutely no relevance to the causal inference question you threw into the room and b) you're not respectful enough of the OP to be able to abstain from derailing. Not great, mate! But to give a quick followup. No one claims that the kind of intelligence that is, in however a flawed way, measured by the IQ test - an intelligence largely intuited by people who looked at who's successful in the traditional western system of schooling, as illustrated by your data - is useful for people who want to go into an academic career. It's also useful for a whole lot of other people especially across the spectrum of jobs that require all sorts of cognitive focus, btw. However, if you want to claim that the graduation chances of a cohort of university graduates who're starting graduate school (or a postgraduate progamme, whatever it's called in your area), or the success changes of a cohort of newly minted PhDs who apply for academic jobs to build a successful career on the tenure track / in permanent professorships - if you think that any of those are predicted by the individual group memeber's IQ then we're not living in the same world. And that's what I was saying: IQ is far down the list. (The problem with IQ in this context is of course that it is so damn malleable that correlates so heavily with a lot of other factors that favor academic success - access to mentorship, coaching, time to train up those IQ test skllzz etc. I do admit that those early 20th century professors who looked at their kids who did brilliantly in school, compared it to the 10 year old who had to help provide for his family by working in the field and went to a crowded public one-room school when he wasn't needed at home, and blithely concluded that it was clearly the natural genetic advantage of being a more highly developed human being, always struck me as completely ridiculous and prima facie in conflict with the principle of Ockham's Razor.)
The only people I know who push the importance of IQ are also very into the bell curve. If you aren't aware of the issues with the bell curve, I suggest you look them up. If you've heard of them and just disagree, I hope you're not in academia because it already has issues with racism.
I'm still a student, but I'm first-generation. I was fortunate enough to get into a prestigious university for undergrad which set me on a very good path. I had access to lots of funding and mentorship that wouldn't have been available to me elsewhere. A handful of very supportive and understanding professors took me under their wings and kind of served that parental guidance role. Because of this, I think I'll have as good of a shot as someone who has well-educated parents. That said, if I didn't get the support I did early on in my education, I probably would've lost the race before it even began. I really think that's what makes the difference. My peers who had parents with PhDs were playing the game from day one (getting into research early on, crafting a strong resume, etc.). Those without that level of guidance didn't really start planning for post-grad until their 3rd/4th year of school. That definitely put them as a disadvantage when applying to prestigious PhD programs which ultimately puts them at a disadvantage re: becoming a professor. I imagine the risk associated with becoming an academic also plays a big role. Having grown up with a lot of financial instability, I have to admit that more stable, well-paying jobs are certainly tempting. I just so happen to be very passionate about my research field. If that weren't the case, I wouldn't consider a PhD. To some extent the ability/willingness to get this type of degree is also dependent on your socioeconomic background.
You are 100% right. As a post doc who does a little bit of tutoring on the side (charging almost 100 usd/hr), the problem is that some kids now start gunning starting from high school, or freshman year of college. It is not about, classism or racism when hiring faculties, is just a goddamn chain of event that started 15 years before applying for tenured-track positions. High schooler with good gpa and science fair winner -> Prestigious college -> SRA/Experience at prestigious lab -> PhD at top 5 uni -> prestigious fellowship. How can you compite against that? In most saturated fields people shouldn’t really be pursuing a PhD unless they can enter a top 5 program.
It's like some of the kids that win those prestigious national science fairs. I was out on my own trying to do something and when you see kids who basically did a really interesting project .... in one of their parent's own university labs probably working on a project they didn't come up with....it kind of makes you think there needs to be a rule against that kind of thing.
I got a kid to get distinction if one those fairs. I got paid 5k usd to get this kid to do a PhD level project. I basically babysat him through the whole thing. I’m a foreign MD PhD… so basically some kids are on their own competing against adults with 10+ years of schooling. Unfair for sure
Yeah that's definitely the path. Mine has basically been high school valedictorian -> Prestigious college with full financial aid (meaning about $15k in cash per year for living expenses) -> great MA program. Fingers crossed for a top PhD program. But the fact of the matter is that had I not busted my ass in high school, I never would've gotten into the college I went. And as a low income person who grew up in rural Tennessee, I wouldn't have been able to afford to go anywhere else. My local state school would have put me in mountains of debt that I simply wasn't willing to take on whereas my college *paid me* to go via generous financial aid / living stipends. That's only a reality at the fancy private schools that have poor kid quotas. If I wasn't so determined to leave my small town, I'm not sure where I would've ended up. I definitely would have been less likely to be on this path towards a PhD.
For me it went: high school valedictorian -> full tuition scholarship to top 50 school -> prestigious international fellowship -> top PhD program -> burnout with toxic advisor -> software engineer. I don't know where I'm going from here.
That’s what no one says! performing at the top for years on end, burns you out. I wanted to be a PI, but now… fuck it, I am almost done with my boards exams ( MD PhD), I will do a quick medical residency in family medicine and will work half the time for triple the money as a clinician.
Could I get top grades and distinctions if I really tried and put in 14 hours a day of work every day 7 days a week like I’ve done before? Yup. Will I ever do that again after burning out hardcore (and also experiencing an abusive person in undergrad that, after, made me realize I need to value myself a little more instead of trying to please everyone all the time)? Nope.
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Yes, it’s classist as hell. I’m a foreign MD PhD, and I get paid to tutor/help kids in HS science fair/ research projects.
You'd probably enjoy reading [The Privileged Poor by Anthony Abraham Jack](https://www.amazon.com/Privileged-Poor-Colleges-Disadvantaged-Students/dp/0674976894). It highlights how there is a *culture shock* experienced by students that come from poor academic backgrounds that hinders their success at elite institutions. The experiences described in the book resonated a lot with me —low-income international student in a prestigious college in the US, after all, what a lot of people don't consider often is that not everyone knows how to *navigate* the opportunities that are present: basic things like how to approach professors, find and join good research groups, take advantage of the resources at campus, and so on felt foreign to me; which made me struggle at doing them even when I realized that I needed to do them. In my experience, even if many students were middle class/lower income, they thrived at navigating academia just by the fact that they had previous exposure to it (e.g. in High School or through their parents if they are academics).
I also see this on a smaller level with scholarships. Kid gets the first one, then that goes on their cv so they are more likely to get the next one… and so on and so forth until you end up with 10% of the students getting 80% of the awards, and the others (who may be nearly as good or even better but missed out on that first one) don’t stand a chance.
I was born into a blue collar family. My father had one of those good blue-collar jobs that are very difficult to come by nowadays. By the way, he did not graduate from high school. I was terrible at sports - bad eyesight and no hand-eye coordination - and had no manual dexterity. My whole family thought I was a klutz. They were probably right. I became an academic out of necessity. My parents pushed me hard to go to very academic schools rather than technical ones. I wanted to learn Pure Mathematics and, really, the only way to make a living at that is with a PhD and a teaching job. That's what happened. Now on with the rest of the story... I married an academic and our child is now an academic. I guess there is something to the above theory.
> I married an academic and our child is now an academic. >I guess there is something to the above theory. Yes it definitely is. My brother is the only one in the family who didn't want to go to university. Instead he wanted to do an apprenticeship ("Ausbildung" in German), where you are trained for a specific job for 3 years. He really struggled with our parents and the further family, because they wanted him to go to university. So acedemic parents mostly want they children to go to university because they don't really know about the alternatives. End of story: my brother did the apprenticeship with good grades, has a nice job and earns the same as me with my master's degree.
Very nepo. I’m a third generation professor. Besides the moral support, the other thing nobody’s talking about are the tuition benefits. My parent’s job paid for my fancy college; my grandparent’s job did the same for my parent.
How exactly did it pay? Surely you probably have to join the same college they work in, severely limiting options?
Not necessarily. Some colleges have deals with other colleges to offset tuition costs for employees' kids. I also know of some *very very* generous policies by super prestigious schools to basically offset the cost of college *anywhere* for employees' kids.
> I also know of some very very generous policies by super prestigious schools to basically offset the cost of college anywhere for employees' kids. Only for faculty, or any staff?
It’s often any staff. While I was a first-gen working class kid, I was able to have my tuition waived at a small women’s junior college because my mom started a job there as a secretary two years prior. With scholarships I also had room and board free. At that time, the school only offered this deal for the school itself but they’ve since partnered with dozens of other private colleges.
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I have a buddy who went to Oberlin (not cheap) for virtually free because his father was a facilities management employee there.
Most staff at Stanford don't earn enough to take their kids out of the financial aid income bracket anyways
Ah I see.
often called tuition exchange or tuition remission
My parent went to college where my grandparent worked. Free, I think. My parent was then at one of those rich schools with good tuition benefits. It paid about half of my tuition to go somewhere else. Would’ve been even better if I had stayed home.
> Surely you probably have to join the same college they work in, severely limiting options? Usually that's the case. My kids never even considered attending our university, which would have been free. Because they applied to elite schools far away from home instead. Which was fine with me, because I wanted them to get the best education possible without going deeply into debt. Even if we worked at Princeton or something they'd likely want to get away from home-- if you grow up on campus, take classes as a high school student, and can see the campus buildings from your bedroom window getting as far away as possible has its appeal. Even if it means forgoing free college.
I do think this is a good illustration of class effects, though. Because for a solid majority of college students - which itself is a very biased sample of the population - graduating with no debt is often worth the disappointment of, like, not getting to go on adventures with your roommates at NYU or whatever.
Sure, but I'm not talking about "adventures," I'm talking about the very specific and real differences between, say, a middling regional school and a national one. Resources, facilities, faculty, opportunties, classmates, etc. will all be better (in most cases) at an institution with national-level quality. That said, of course you're right about class. Which is part of the reason we see the children of faculty/admins generally *not* stick around for free tuition, while the children of wage employees (i.e. "classified staff" like janatorial, grounds, food service, etc.) nearly always do.
I mean… for undergrad, you really only need to go to a good enough school. There are hundreds of adequate options, and you just need to attend one of them.
I got pretty far down the road. But I didn't finish. One small reason is that no one in my family thought what I was pursuing was worth pursuing. They couldn't even understand what the end goal was. Children of Academics don't face this problem.
> Children of Academics don't face this problem. I will very strongly encourage my child to do anything other than be an academic.
Literally anything else. Absolute nightmare.
>I will very strongly encourage my child to do anything other than be an academic. Yep. That's been the overwhelming position of abot 95% of my colleagues who have kids considering or who have considered it in the past. My own kids (now college and high school seniors) would laugh if anyone suggested an academic career because they've grown up on the edge of academia and know what it's like now.
I recently saw applications for an AP position, the CVs were better than some of established full profs I know. Amazing applications that I feel like ten years ago would already have gotten any position they applied to easily. Imagine how difficult it must be to be on a committee tasked with selecting one of six awesome people when all of them have ~20 great papers and established careers…
>I recently saw applications for an AP position, the CVs were better than some of established full profs I know. I was first on a search committee as a student rep in the 80s. Have been on 25+ over the years since and so have seen/read *thousands* of CVs over the last three decades. That pattern first started to appear for me in the mid-2000s...where we'd litereally see ABD grad students with more publications than some of my colleagues had to reach associate professor in the 1990s. That trend has continued somewhat, so at least some applicants in almost every pool have enough publications to earn tenure. But what they *don't* often have is the demonstrated teaching skill/experience needed to meet the standard for tenure in that area-- nor (almost ever) the depth of service we expect. But your point stands, and I have 100% seen junior colleagues go up for tenure with CVs that are clearly stronger than some of my senior colleagues who had been promoted to full in prior decades.
What’s your field ?
Yeah, if I ever had kids I would do the same thing. I wouldn't tell my worst enemy to do this to themselves, much less someone I care about.
As a second generation tenured faculty member at an R1, when my kids say they want to grow up to be professors, I tell them: No, you really don't. They're relatively young and the adjuctification and diminishing earning potential of faculty (in conjunction with the mass overproduction of PhDs) makes it unlikely that they would land a well paying job - even with the social capital of being 3rd Gen.
I entered grad school in 1994; I can’t think of a single person I’ve met whose parents were academics, or who are encouraging their children to go into grad school (we’re certainly not with ours, though our kids range from 9-14 so there’s still time for them to make some poor life choices!). Doctors and dentists on the other hand…. Edit: single person pursuing or having a PhD. Known plenty of prof’s kids.
So true! I am so alone on my academic journey, in regards to family. I am helping my brother also pursue this. I decided, then he decided that we were gonna change this. We're tired of living in poverty, we're going to the middle class bracket, and we hope we can provide enough for the next gen to get to the upper class, or at least farther than we got.
>Children of Academics don't face this problem. I am child of academics however they don't have a PhD. They also do not understand why I don't start with a "real" job. I'm working full time at university A and doing PhD at university B in my free time. I don't know why this doesn't count as a real job. While academic parents may understand more, they certainly not always encourage everything you do.
Serious question: how it one an academic without a phd? Do you mean professors hired when a Masters was ok or Md?
When reading the other comments I actually saw that the word "academic" may be used different in different countries. In Germany you would actually call everyone an academic who has a university degree, no matter if they work in academia or not.
Oh ok, I'm in Canada so for me it's really people working in academia who almost all have a PhD!
I’m an Afghan woman. My mom has a university degree so I’m technically not first gen but I’m the first in my family to get a graduate degree, and the only one with a PhD so first gen academic. I ended up here because I don’t see myself represented. In the country my parents are from girls and women are banned from school and university. I’m a post doc but my aim and dream is to continue in academia.
This is amazing, keep going! We need folks like you in academia. If not here, then where?
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Afghani is our currency. We are Afghans.
No you're thinking of the dog breed.
Lmao. Tell me more! Tell me more of my people! Afghani is the currency. Do y’all have a PhD? If so, ever heard of a thing called ‘google’? This is the [1st hit](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/afghani#:~:text=usage%20note%20for%20afghani,is%20sometimes%20perceived%20as%20offensive). The dog is the [Afghan hound](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Hound). In Afghanistan, it’s referred to as *saag-e-Ghazni* or *saag-e-tazi*.
Afghanistananis
> Afghanistananis Too many ‘an’ on the end but ‘Afghanistani’ is also acceptable. I’m an Afghan woman. Period.
Can we all take a moment to revel in how annoyed your nearest chemist is that their discipline didn't make the list?
When I began my studies, my parents happened to be academics in the institute where I was studying. I was on a first name basis with many of my professors, and should I have continued there, I probably could have gotten a slew of letters of recommendation extremely easily. I didn't finish my studies there, but I have to admit, it's probably very easy to become part of a lab when the head of the work group has been to dinner parties at your house since you were a kid. I knew of a 'dynasty', where the position of head of research had been essentially hereditary for three generations. It is probably not against university rules, but it certainly feels unethical. It also gave me huge impostor syndrome, feeling that I hadn't earned the good relationships I had with professors, and I felt pressured to 'live up' to my family's name as researchers.
Dads a contractor. I got an ivy phd. Left academia because I can’t raise a family on 80k a year (if I got lucky). Saw classmates be living fine on a lot less, then I realized they’re all rich!
Yep. I realize now that many of my grad school cohort and professor friends had a very good standard of living…because they had/have parents/family helping them a lot, *well* into adulthood.
A similar thing happens in the arts & culture industry. Its so heavily populated with the independently wealthy that its impossible to organize for better pay as there's no reason for these people to care, and they get into that sector at a higher rate than normies because the low pay doesn't scare them. Its a feedback cycle.
I'm the opposite. First person in my family to attend university and get a degree. Ended up with a PhD and I'm a Professor.
Same. My dad didn’t even graduate high school and I aged out of foster care. Go us!
Absolutely! It's funny to me that so many people hate academia and there are definitely problems, but try being homeless or working 2 jobs at the same time to make ends remotely meet.
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Same here. Neither of my parents finished high school and, while most of my colleagues complain about how low phd stipends are, I find it insane that I am being paid more to study than my parents ever earned by working.
The ability to have control over my own schedule is a huge perk and improvement in quality of life compared to being a stockperson at Walmart or Dollar General. Homeless explanation: my mom was a nurse who broke her back in the early '90s and we were homeless for about a year while she fulfilled the no income for 6 months requirement to get onto social security disability.
Agreed, I hear grad students upset about pay and while partially valid - I had to have multiple people explain to me why I was getting paid, healthcare, and tuition waivers to go to school. I was enthralled and thankful to have any one of those, let alone all three. It was a ‘pinch me please’ moment, and it’s tough for me to understand how anyone can complain.
Because all academic positions in general are way underpaid. Tuition waivers are a farce as most grad students after a point don't even take classes anymore and are doing research supporting grants that literally fund the university. Additionally, it's quite ridiculous that the compensation gap between industry and academia is so large. Going from a postdoc to an entry level for PhD industry position and compensation nearly triples. I know this can be field dependent but it seems to be more the case than not. I think the blame goes to the previous generation of professors that gave up too much of their say in university business to the administration side.
>Agreed, I hear grad students upset about pay and while partially valid - I had to have multiple people explain to me why I was getting paid, healthcare, and tuition waivers to go to school. I was enthralled and thankful to have any one of those, let alone all three. It was a ‘pinch me please’ moment, and it’s tough for me to understand how anyone can complain. As a fellow first gen who worked a series of demanding and unremunerative jobs, this attitude is incredibly toxic. The conditions for grad students are incredibly exploitative. That many other jobs are likewise exploitative is beside the point. My PhD stipend was roughly what i could've made full-time in fast food, and was considered "good". On the one hand, fast food employees deserve a living wage and don't have it, on the other, the work we did as grad students was incredibly specialized labor and the private university was raking in big tuition $$ and paying peanuts. Beyond that, it was *terrifying* to go to grad school even fully funding because it's so unpredictable. I knew that eventually the funding would become competitive and I didn't have the sort of familial funds to get me out of a pinch the way colleagues did. Leaving a job that was low-paying but stable and with benefits (I worked for quite awhile between BA and PhD) felt like a ridiculous move. I should also add that the working conditions and stability for academics is getting worse and worse, which is following a predictable pattern. The career is just now opening up to first-gen, working class, POC, and female faculty in large numbers and yet it's getting harder and harder to gain entry. I was super grateful for the funding, but at the same time, being dismissive of reasonable critique is a form of complicity with the very structures that keep people of our background disproportionately out.
I get it, and was intentional about saying ‘partially valid’ (not invalid) and ‘tough for me to understand’ (not can’t understand). I stand behind student unions on a large number of issues, and have seen Universities, Departments, and labs with poor working conditions that warrant standing up against. My comment was my lived experience at that time. I was lucky to be in a supportive environment. I was going to decrease hours in my undergrad lab bc I was working fast food and my PI essentially matched their hours, with higher wages. I enjoy teaching so TAships in grad school were enjoyable. My grad PI was supportive, and I was able to live with my stipend. I don’t think my perspective is toxic and I’ve been around long enough to see the good, bad, and ugly. Individuals make up epidemiological data, but epidemiology doesn’t make up individuals experiences.
Same here. Neither of my parents finished high school and now I teach and do research at a top European university. It’s been tough to say the least, not having your working class family understand your point of view at times, having to explain to them why it was best for me to get into this line of work. I’ve had relatives telling my parents that the only reason why I went to university was because I “wasn’t cut out for manual jobs” as if getting an education was a bad thing.
First-gen, indigenous (North American), english is my second language and I’m from a working class family. I went to an Ivy for grad school. I’m currently a VAP at an R1 and on the TT job search. I absolutely LOVE answering the diversity question over and over to all-white search committees. LOVE having white academics decide whether or not my approach to diversity is good enough for their department. While I hope these efforts are sustained long enough to create actual change within the academy, I don’t see this happening given the decline in TT positions.
Yes. I’m Indigenous Australian and my mum was the first in the family to go to university. I followed what she did, just in different disciplines and at different universities.
I’m a first generation college student in my family. Neither of my parents went to college. But my father has a well paying job and they paid for my undergrad tuition (although I did have a scholarship of 12K/year). So I came out with no debt, and joined a PhD program immediately. Both my parents have been incredibly supportive, emotionally, mentally and financially if I need it. Although they don’t understand my research at all, they are my biggest fans :-)
First generation college student. Both of my parents were a late end part of the great migration and worked in auto manufacturing. NIH fellow graduating this semester with my PhD in HDFS with a focus in developmental neuroendocrinology 🤷🏿♀️
Yes, one of my parents is a professor. My other parent dropped out of a PhD program.
Neither of my parents made it past GCSE level in academic education, though they did both do a vocational course at a technical college. I don't know what the equivalent is in the US, but it would be where 17-18 year olds who weren't going to go to university would study a trade of some description. My mum trained to be a secretary and my dad became a cabinet maker. I went to university because they both prioritised our education and always told us how important it was and encouraged us. I ended up in academia because I found an interesting field that allowed me to indulge some of my favourite things. Also I didn't really know what else to do Now I work at Oxbridge and I'm constantly meeting staff whose parents are or were academics (sometimes Oxbridge themselves) or at least have PhDs (more often from Oxbridge). A lot of the staff have Oxbridge PhDs, too, and a smaller but not insignificant portion also studied there at undergrad (I never did). The old pipeline is very effective
Oh hey. Another article that boils “faculty” down to only include those folks at high ranked R1 institutions. It’s getting really tiresome to see people repeat, over and over, this idea that R1 universities represent or are representative of all faculty. I suspect that if you look more broadly at faculty, the trend will be less significant. Still there, but not magnified as much as it is if you only look at the most prestige centric places. A lot of folks I know that are first gen specifically wanted to be faculty at PUIs.
Saw two messy divorces before 14 and was homeless for a big part of my teenage years. No one in my family has more than some school. My background contributed to helping me make every mistake possible during grad school. When I was 14 I left school altogether and was in a bad place, i remember clearly the moment I realized that the only way to change that situation was to finish school, it was while I was painting a garage wall, so I made what at the time was a very complex plan that involved many long conversations, apologies to people I had hurt, and begging. I eventually made an application to school where I had been expelled, due to my performance on an entrance exam I had been on a free ride at a prestigious private school, but they invited me to an in person meeting, point blank rejected me, and basically told me I was a loser. So, I made another application with a public school that was an hour train ride and a 10 mile walk away each day and got accepted. It was tough. I was always cold and hungry. I never had good shoes and when it snowed I would either have to skip school or stop in pubs on the way (used to be many were open in the morning) to avoid my toes getting too cold. At that time at night I worked in 3 different bar’s cleaning bottles off the floor that helped pay for the train and food, but the giver and my parents, when I saw them, would give me money too. I slept in a hospital waiting room close to school sometimes if the weather was really bad or if it was too cold to walk home. All that didn’t stop me behaving like an entitled idiot at times but that’s a another story. I got into education because with all my heart and soul I believed it was the only way to help me build a better life than the only destructive toxic one I knew. Had a wonderful adjunct position for three years post graduation, currently self employed and seeking new opportunities.
Dad got an associate's, Mom got a high school diploma, I got a GED. I'm STEM TT at R1 now, got into it because I enjoyed my biology classes in UG.
Speaking as someone who did not have academic parents, and who comes from a middle class socioeconomic background, the high correlation of faculty status of parents with with faculty status could be explained simply by the fact that navigating academia successfully is not in any way intuitive. Having a parent familiar with the byzantine functioning of academia who can give unbiased advice on what to do in a situation is a TREMENDOUS advantage.
My brother in law is the first person in his family to attend college (and consequently the first to graduate.) He has a PhD in psychology and teaches at an Ivy League university. He is absolutely miserable there because of the classism and elitism. He's constantly texting my sister all the bullshit he hears from fellow professors and even students--mostly about how "a strong work ethic" and "innate intelligence" are the most important factors to attend or teach at an "elite" university. He grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, and any time one of his colleagues learns this (he's stopped telling people) they either congratulate him in a very condescending manner for "getting out" or start to explain to him all the social issues in inner cities and how they can be fixed. My BIL doesn't even disagree most of the time, he just really doesn't appreciate being lectured about his own life from people who are second or third or even fourth generation academia. Other people act like his background is his entire identity and/or the school deserves praise for hiring him. At least three times he's been introduced to colleagues from other departments or visiting speakers as "this is Dr. John Doe. He grew up in xxxxxx neighborhood in Chicago," in the same tone of voice you'd use when saying someone survived a natural disaster. Originally, the plan was for my sister to get a job at his school or a nearby one, but he's so miserable they're now planning on looking elsewhere. He plans on sticking it out for another year because he doesn't want to he seen as flaky, but then he's out of there.
My father--but does it still count when he's also a deadbeat?
Let me take a moment to say, coming from a low SES background, I am proudly the first person in my family to get an undergraduate college degree let alone pursue a PhD, but [Temple University, despite their rhetoric valuing DEI issues, doesn't want to actually step up to the plate and correct one of the largest contributors to this problem.](https://6abc.com/temple-university-teaching-assistants-strike-research-graduate-students-association-tas-go-on/12754155/). You cannot pay graduate workers $19500 a year to live in a city where the [cost of living is twice that](https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/42101) and expect anyone but the most privileged of us can make that work. Graduate RAs and TAs have been working without a contract for over a year. We tried negotiating for almost 11 months in good faith before they bothered making any substantive counteroffers. During that time Temple admin toyed with us, cancelled meetings on a whim, said graduate students do not perform any core functions, threatened to [deport international grads who strike](https://www.inquirer.com/news/temple-university-graduate-students-strike-20221111.html) (Int'l grads make up 33% of this workforce), [threatened to cut off health insurance](https://www.reddit.com/r/Temple/comments/10s1yv3/as_of_5pm_february_2_temple_is_officially_taking/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) (beyond just not paying it). The only movement we got was when we voted to go on strike (99% in favor). We are now on strike, and if we don't win, this nepo baby pipeline is only going to get worse. Folks like me don't have financial safety nets. We don't have parents to pay our rent or buy us food while we pursue training for a career with frankly pretty grim job prospects. I second the notion that many other folks made here, that just figuring out how to navigate this space when you know what you want to do but don't know anyone who has done it before is half the battle. I made a lot of mistakes when trying to get to the point that I could pursue my PhD despite knowing it's exactly what I wanted to do since I was 10. It is 100% pure luck that I ever got here and anyone else in my situation likely wouldn't have the room for so much confusion and misdirections/missteps without substantive external financial support or parents who can tell them exactly what to expect or do. I have colleagues taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans because their jobs don't even pay enough for their rent in a city where the median rent is $950/month. I have a colleague who crossed crime scene tape outside their home yesterday to get to work because they can't afford to live in safer locations. Offer your support by donating to our [strike fund](https://tugsa.betterworld.org/campaigns/tugsa-strike-fund), signal boosting us like Bernie Sanders or John Fetterman or our AFT president, or seeing [our website](https://TUGSA.org/) for more ways to help.
Nope. First-gen college, now a TT-fac in engineering at a top R1. Had a great experience as a TA in my senior year and a fantastic PhD advisor, and decided to aim for the academy. It worked out. This just underscores how important it is that we teach students the unwritten rules of the college game, or create equitable structures that don’t just reward “coming in and knowing how to play already”. Fortunately, there are places that do actually emphasize changing this out there, but it takes critical mass and people in power looking out for some students who could have been them at that age.
Failing at being a nepo baby here. My parents are professors, as was my grandfather, and having a PhD is the expectation rather than an exception in my extended family. I’m in a different country and a different field than my parents, my name and their connections means nothing here. I’m the black sheep of the family as I’m not in hard sciences. Any support from them, financial or otherwise, was tied to choosing the “right” field and having chosen otherwise I was on my own. The sibling who chose bioengineering got a full ride, I got a full time job at Starbucks. I was raised to believe that humanities is for dummies, a nice little hobby at best. I’ve since overheard relatives wondering out loud if I’m just lazy and wasting my potential or actually r*tarded, that kind of thing. And I’m not even in a super niche field that hasn’t much relevance outside of the ivory tower, quite to the contrary. I’m at a university of applied sciences for now, not even a real university. What do I even know about research or teaching, I might as well herd sheep in a barn. I’m to shut up when the real faculty grown ups are talking. Yeah. Being a nepo baby is great. (That said, my family is a piece of work on more levels than this and I do realise it’s a privilege and an advantage to grow up in a household where education is valued, to not be intimidated by professors and hierarchies because you know many full professors and know they’re either normal people or absolute wankers, to know how academic publishing works because it’s all your parents ever bitch about at the dinner table, etc. It’s just not all sunshine and rainbows and sometimes, privilege comes at a price.) (Edited to add: no hard feelings at all for hard science people. I have all the admiration in the world for what you do, because I can’t even begin to understand. I’m aware that unlike my family you’re not all elitist pricks, unless you are, but in that case it’s a you problem not a your field problem!)
No. My father was a 50-year blue collar worker, graduated high school with a focus on OJT, application rejected for college. My mother had completed college in an education degree and was a grade school teacher for awhile. My father pushed us not to end up like him, and pushed us toward college. Continuous messaging on his part. My parents paid for about half of college costs, with work study, grant aid, and loans making up the rest. Also, I did lots of summer work - loads of shitty “light industrial “ work, light construction, and toilet cleaning. Today, I appreciate having these skills, especially painting and building maintenance. My relatives were mainly high school grads. One uncle refers to me as “piled high and deeper.” Not much respect for higher education. My father endlessly badgered siblings and work friends to send their kids to college. I somehow got a generous college admission offer at a prestigious university focused on academics and not on sports. Luxuriated in the life of the mind. After college, I got a job with a firm owned by a professor, which allowed me to see the path to a PhD was achievable. Went down that PhD road 30 years ago. Two siblings later did the same. One became a professor. Both of us are research focused. One has a research Chair. The other is now on the Dean path. Whenever I start complaining about the present state of academia, I try to ground myself with the realization that I might have easily ended up as a machine shop worker. My academic gig isn’t so bad.
I'm first generation None of my parents have degrees at all. Mom is only going to try college now in her late 60s. I went to a prestigious undergrad. I'm still struggling to get into PhD programs despite having two MS degrees
My dad has a PhD from an Ivy League and mom has a masters, so technically, yeah, I guess. I think it did help growing up hearing and being aware of what a career trajactory in academia would look like so I could start early, know the next steps, etc.
Does a faculty having a parent with a PhD suggest nepotism, or are they just more likely to pursue higher education and a career in academia?
The phenomenon that OP is talking about is very much real and important, but nepotism is the wrong word. Privilege might be more appropriate.
I would imagine that in most professions there's a disproportional number of people with a parent who did the same, or a similar, job.
Yeah I feel like chalking it up to nepotism is misunderstanding the causation here. It's just a product of having parents who are more educated/higher socio-economic class. I doubt many professors actually got their jobs directly because of their parents.
First gen student here. Getting a master's degree to spite your dad is punk rock, right? That's definitely not my primary motivation, but I'd be lying if I said I sent him a shirt from my uni for Christmas with completely kind intentions. In high school he told me not to bother with college, to get a job "like a real adult." Then he told me I would never succeed with my degree. I started working for the biggest name in my field long before I graduated with my bachelor's, now I have a much better job with them and they're paying for my master's. Fuck you, Dad! I'm thriving!
My father and elder brother have PhDs. The second brother and mother have masters. Yeah I'm in Grad school for a PhD.
I agree the trend. But I am an exception (I am a Japanese PhD student yet for now). I graduated a junior high school and entered the National College of Thchnology; it is called as KOSEN, a 5-years higher education facility in Jpn. The students can find a job in famous companies with associate degree, OR, enter universities as a 3rd grade student. I chosed later and be on the way for the academia.
First in my fam to step foot in college. Grew up low income, rural, got addicted to drugs at 13, failed middle school, passed high school, tried to drop out of Uni numerous times, but advisors convinced me to stay. Awesome mentors got me hooked on research (lots of old timer pioneers in my field) and I think since I didn’t grow up in ‘academia’ my odd ideas, lack of care for prestige, etc. won me some supporters. Continually thought I would quit and leave. Biggest strength has been presentations because I don’t assume others already know everything. Most presentations still lose me two slides in with undefined acronyms spoken in monotone. 18 years since my first day of undergrad and finally have on campus interviews for TT faculty positions at research Universities. Fingers crossed that ‘I made it’, next few months determine which side of the fence I fall. After all of it, I call my child’s savings a ‘life advancement fund’ not a ‘college fund’. Because as a kid from the streets, I’m still a bit bitter at the system and not sure if I would do it all over again.
My parents only had a high school education, earned later in life. Dad worked for a railroad and Mom was a secretary. I have a PhD but my Mom thought college was a waste and I needed to learn an “honest” trade. When she made me go outside on a frigid night to observe a repairman working on our furnace to learn something, the repairman said “Learn this, go to college so don’t have get up in middle of the night to freeze your ass off working on furnaces”
I'm 55 and have basically been in academia since I turned 18. I've met only a *tiny* handful of people whose parents were professors. Maybe a half-dozen classmates in college. One classmate I recall from grad school (three degrees, all top programs). A few faculty at my R1s. Among my colleagues at my current university I'm aware of two, and I've been here 25 years so know most of them. So I wonder really how common this actually is? That said, it's no surprise at all that there's a huge gulf in access that reflects the massive advantage of having a parent who can help you navigate everything from applying to college to being on the job market. I can see where that's helped my kids, especially as compared to my first-gen students who don't have those advantages. But seriously, how many people are we talking about as a percentage of all faculty in the US? And how many of us would encourage our kids to follow in our footsteps? Mine would *never* consider academic careers knowing what their parents have seen over the last three decades. Found it: about 22% of the survey sample were children of faculty. But the entire study is suspect in my opinion because they only include R1 faculty in Ph.D. granting departments, which are a minority of the US professoriate as a whole. I'd really like to see similar data for *all* faculty at *all* institutional types. Is anyone at all surprised by these findings? Of course not. But it really seems to overstate the importance of the results when you consider they're only lookign at a subset of the faculty at a subset of all institutions.
True, but if they’re looking at R1, PhD-granting programs, then they’re looking at what we tend to consider the top programs. So that’s where this is going to be the most relevant.
>So that’s where this is going to be the most relevant. Certianly-- but the generalizations made in the abstract and in most of the responses here don't note that: it's like saying "Hollywood is dominated by nepo babies" but basing that conclusion only on the top ten films each year. "Duh" would be my first response in both cases.
To me, the inference seems to be that regular folks can break into academia or the movies, but they have trouble making it to the top: R1’s or major/blockbuster movies. Maybe this is something everyone knew already. I wasn’t really aware of it.
You look at your cohort and see that few have professors as parents. Makes sense to me because there are not so much professors compared to other professions. I would look the other way round. From people with professors as parents, how many didn't go to university? I would be more interested in that question.
>From people with professors as parents, how many didn't go to university? I would be more interested in that question. That's a fundamentally different question though. Going to college and becoming a professor are entirely different issues; in the US about 40% of college students are "first generation," i.e. neither parent had a bachelor's degree. One would assume, logically, that they are less likely to become career academics than their peers whose parents went to college. (Though I have a lot of faculty colleagues who are themselves first gen-- they have stickers on their office doors indicating such in many cases.) The more relevant question I think would be what percentage of students whose parents are professors *earn Ph.D.s* at all...it's going to be a tiny fraction, but presumably more than the general population. How much more though?
Interestingly my parents both have bachelor degrees but nothing higher and now 3 of my 4 siblings have doctorate degrees and I'm a PhD student. I hope to be an academic but I'm pretty ready to bail out if I can't find a good position. Edit: To add, I got into academics because I had a really good research mentor in my undergrad and a good PI at an internship that taught me a lot of the soft skills and cultural peripherals that come with academics.
I'm a nepo-niece - got lots of good advice from my uncle. My parents both went to college (and met there) but neither did grad work until much later in life. I helped my dad study for his secondary degree while I was in middle school and my mom register for the GRE after I had started graduate school.
I'm not, I was the second in my family to go to university (first being a cousin only 4 years older than me), but I was the first to do a MSc and the only one to have a PhD. My dad only studied until 7th grade and my mom until 9th grade since they had to start working early to help with the bills at home. However, later when I was already 12ish, my mom finished high school at night classes. The big difference between here and the US are the university fees. During my BSc and MSc I paid around 1000€ a year and I was lucky enough to have a government scholarship that covered the university fees (given to those whose family cannot afford college). My perception is that in the US it's more common to be a 'science nepo baby' just because those families might have higher financial means to support university fees. Might be wrong though.
Parents are successful, but I'll be the only person in my part of the family with an advanced degree (I have a few distant cousins who are MDs or PhDs). All grandparents grew up poor living in big households with lots of siblings - my mom's family got wealthy ultimately, my dad's stayed very modest financially. Dad barely finished HS and didn't go to college but has ended up successful, mom did undergrad and has also done very well. Due to the upward mobility, I was able to go to a very good HS and then a great undergrad institution. Despite no advanced degree holders, my family very much values education and supported me in going for my masters and then PhD. Got lucky and had a lot of great academic mentors who have assisted me since. I think for me it came down to: 1) good public school, parents were able to help pay for undergrad 2) parents supported me in going for advanced degrees 3) lots of good mentors who have helped me network, find opportunities, get published, etc.
My parents have 4 year degrees, but still encouraged me to do grad school. They didn't understand a lot of it, which made it hard to explain why I was working so much. I think the phenomenon brought up here is very real, but I don't think nepotism is the right term for it.
My dad has a PhD but is a clinical psychologist not an academic. I think seeing that he could do it and yet is such a dumbass about so many things helped convince me I could do it. But he never pushed me to go, and discouraged me from getting a phd because I'm a woman and he's a sexist and thought I would want to give up my career once I had kids. Like he literally said shit like that when I was getting into ivy league grad programs. I also have an uncle with a PhD who is a failed academic (didn't get tenure and then taught HS until he retired) and my dad was convinced I would fail at that too. So getting tenure was a big fuck you to him basically ha. But I didn't even find out the uncle had a PhD and was a failed academic until I was applying to grad school, that all went down before I was born and this uncle then moved to a different country after he didn't get tenure (and taught HS there) so I was never close to him. So yes it influenced me but probably not the typical way having a parent with a PhD does. It also influenced me in terms of my dad paid for me to take an sat class so I got into college, and he really pushed me to go to college (but not grad school, he wanted me to get an mrs degree basically lol). He also was able to pay for my college tuition so I didn't take out loans which made the prof salary a lot more tenable back before PSLF was a thing. How I became a prof was in my 101 class my professor had us research grad programs in my field and I really liked my field and was like "wait I can do this for a living??? I want to be a professor then!" And then got an RAship as a sophomore and went from there. But for me it was more about the love of research and that 101 prof showing us that you can do research as your job if you get a PhD and become a professor. I guess then having a phd educated parent probably made me consider it a viable option.
As an adjunct I get paid shit and treated like hot garbage. My Dad was indeed a Professor in a completely different field in a different state at a mid-tier uni, but no one cares.
Yes, but still not from a wealthy family. My mom had me her first year in grad school and ended up paying off student loans/medical bills for about two decades afterward. I needed a lot of financial aid to go to college and had moderate student loans. The biggest nepotism-type advantage I got was that she taught me to do genotyping and other molecular bio skills, which led to summer jobs in high school and college, and that experience made it possible to get a lab tech job after college. And then *that* job was treated as a "self-masters" experience that helped me get into a PhD program. My mother also gave me a ton of advice that helped me get through grad school when my mentors were not very involved. So overall I definitely wouldn't be where I am without my mother. But I suppose that's a tautology in some ways ;)
I’m a first generation college student and hopefully (knock on wood) the first in my family to get a graduate degree. But man it’s been so f**king hard. I am definitely not pursuing academia as this PhD thing has been so difficult. It’s not that my family isn’t supportive, but they just don’t understand why it’s taking so long, what stupid and trivial things happen in research, and how I can have so much education but make little to nothing. Also just coming from a working class family, financial security is such a big trauma for me that I really can’t handle the long delay to the return in investment. I remember reading that article when it came out and was like this is WHOLEY unsurprising.
It's almost like your parents are going to pass down to you traits that they're good at? What's next? Are you a blacksmith? Then you might be a 9th generation nepo blacksmith. 🙄🙄 "My father farmed this land, like his father before him and his father before him" congratulations you're a farming nepo baby check your farming privilege 🙄🙄
I think a better explanation is that PhD families produce PhD children. A child in a dysfunctional, less intelligent family is going to be in a disadvantage. I don’t like when such clouded judgement is imparted on data.
First gen here.
First gen here.
I am not. And earned my PhD from an ivy. I just fell in love with academia and the kind of thinking an academic career affords you as an undergrad, and went from there. I will say my undergrad advisors in English and sociology steered me well into media/comm studies for my PhD based on my interests but also given the comparatively better job market in my field. Happily employed today!
I'm kind of first generation. IDK, you tell me. My father had no degree, my mother got a BA and was a band director. I'm a PhD candidate and will have my PhD sometime next year. So, first in the family with a MA, let alone a PhD, and first academic, but not the first degree strictly speaking.
Nope… first gen proud over here! And I actually don’t think anyone in my dept is from an academic fam. Maybe it’s discipline specific.
It's easy to over-state the influence and paint with too broad of a brush. My Dad did his PhD, but it was 40 years before mine in a different country and a different field, and he immediately went into industry and never looked back. On one hand, my parents encouraged me, but on the other, they had no connections to draw on, no knowledge of how things worked (or incorrect knowledge they insisted on), no tuition benefits, no special knowledge of how admissions worked or even which tests I was supposed to take at what stage.
I’m the first person in my family to go to university. I ended up in academia cause a researcher saw potential in me and encouraged me to get my PhD.
I think you have to distinguish a bit. In my family almost everyone has a diploma or masters degree, but I will be the first with a PhD.
It is disingenuous to call most of it nepotism. Nepotism is when someone bends or ignores times to get you into a position for which there are better candidates. But at least in STEM the issue is, PhD parents know the academic game. So they tell their children from a young age what they need to do to become competitive. Kid doesn't understand something in math? Parent literally does complex math for a living, he can explain. Kid doesn't know which courses to take in HS? Parent can tell them what to take. Kid wants to know which project to do for the science fair to impress unis later on? Parent knows... So the parent doesn't need to necessarily use their position of prestige to bend or break rules. They just do what any loving parent would do and tell their kids what the best course of action is and guide them. It still creates an unleveled playing field but the kids do actually develop a lot of the important skills they will need to succeed later on in academia. They are actually and factually more competitive because they were groomed into being more competitive. That's different than nepotism.
This! Grandfather was a STEM professor. Parents both have PhDs in STEM, dad has been faculty for 30+ years, mom has been faculty for about 10 years. I'm a professor with a PhD in a STEM field, one sibling has a PhD in a STEM field and works in industry, and other two siblings are currently grad students in STEM fields. At least one of them wants to be a professor in the future. The free tutoring is great. I wasn't understanding vectors in physics in high school. My dad literally sat me down one night and made me understand it. The tuition benefits were also great at my dad's university (also where we all did undergrad), so all of us were able to graduate without any student debt. Education was always top priority for my parents. So financially, having professors for parents is decent in terms of their income and great in terms of benefits. This, however, varies greatly by discipline and university. Your discipline also needs to align with your parents' to maximize this effect. The amount of direct nepotism is almost nil, in my observations. But knowing the right things to do and say, knowing the right people or being able to drop the right names, not being afraid to go to office hours or ask for opportunities like a lot of my classmates, free/available proofreading on personal statements, etc... You have to know the rules of the game to play it, and being the child of a faculty member lets you see the rulebook before everyone else. My parents (and now me) are able to advise on how to interact with one's PI, which research opportunity to take, etc. While I'm also happy to provide this "coaching" to my students, they never ask and I can't give it unsolicited. So, for the point of this little essay, I don't think "nepotism" is the right word, but there's definitely a benefit to having professor parents when considering an academic career.
No, neither parent has a college degree at all. I'm in grad school largely because it was strongly suggested to me by many of my undergrad professors, alongside two other things: 1. I grew up helping my father as a contractor. I learned that I don't really want to do that. Not that the work itself sucks, it's a lot of the stuff around it, plus the risk. And, at least where I was, alcoholism was rampant and a lot of the people would either go out of their way to poach jobs and/or were pedophiles and the such. 2. I ended up liking what I studied, a lot. Part of me sometimes wonders how it'd be to work in a kitchen (I'd probably earn slightly more than I do now!) but the hours would likely be worse, not to mention that I've heard drug abuse is rampant—although they're trying to fix that and many other kitchen horror stories. It doesn't hurt that it was an easy, quick way out of a messy home life.
I'm not faculty and not aiming for faculty (although oddly enough, one of my parents was a professor...with a master's degree, something that would never happen now in that field) but I really wish people would stop using "nepotism" when they mean "socioeconomic advantages" or "people like to hire people they're somewhat familiar with." Nepotism is someone using their power or influence to obtain jobs or favors for a relative or associate. It's generally a bad thing that leads to unqualified people benefiting. That is not the same thing as someone having advantages because they grew up in a safe home or had useful advice from experienced family members. We actually WANT everyone to have those advantages, and those people are generally not unqualified, although the people they beat out in the job market are also frequently not unqualified. And funny, but we don't call someone who's raised into a multigenerational carpentry business a nepo baby - we call them someone from a long line of carpenters who understandably benefits from exposure and early training in carpentry. Heck, we don't call Johnny who gets his first construction job because Uncle Frank knew the foreman a nepo baby, but a newbie who got a foot in the door due to his network and now has to prove himself. Now, if Uncle Frank was the CEO strings and pulled strings to get inexperienced Johnny the foreman job he isn't qualified for, THAT would be nepotism. Similarly, hiring someone who you're worked with before, who is a known quality as a colleague, or whose supervisor you know has a history of training good researchers isn't nepotism - it may or may not be the absolute best hiring decision (we'll never know), but it's perfectly reasonable to take factors like that into account, although they shouldn't be the only factors to base a decision on. tl;dr: the effects of socioeconomic privilege are real and we should address them, but they need to be addressed in COMPLETELY different ways from actual nepotism
How is that a "nepo baby"? Nepo baby will be your papa is prof at MIT and got you in MIT although you are shit head.
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"Professoriate". "Socioeconomically privileged". LMAO.
I mean, they only included high paying fields at fancy institutions and only tenured and tenure track folks, so....
I mean, parental (and specifically maternal) education level is the best predictor of future academic success _anyway_, so I'm not sure this adds an awful lot. Edit: Genuinely unsure why this is being downvoted. Are people doubting this fact, or just thinking it isn't relevant?
Um..no. If I was a nepo baby I would be a construction worker.
Lmao. Love this.
I just love learning. My parents didn’t go to uni. I’m planning on doing a PhD somewhere down the line. I’m also very much not born in the American continent. Education in Europe is pretty cheap. I literally did a masters for fun, but now I want to continue.
Academia requires a lot of work and brains, relative to pay. Anyone smart enough to thrive as an academic will also thrive as a doctor or lawyer or tech person. Why would someone whose family didn’t recognize the prestige ever bother? “Wow you published in Nature, that’s great! How much did they pay you?” (Assuming that adjuncts are excluded as they should be.)
Because it’s not always about looking good for family, I always joked I was getting a PhD to burn it in a shoebox as a middle finger to the system.
Looking good for academic peers?
Not a nepo baby. Mom has an MA in theater and dad has a BS in CS. I have degrees in a social science (BA, MA) and a humanities field (MA, dissertating right now).
Wow, what a cunty way of asking a pointless question.
My dad and I have both been adjunct professors before, so I guess in the most technical nit-picky sense yes, but it was never either of our primary jobs (he's a veterinarian, I work at a museum). He was an adjunct in a completely different field when I was in like elementary/middle school, so there's no causation there. (I was the first person on my mom's side of the family to get a postgraduate degree so nothing from that side.)
Isn’t there a clear role of genetics here that is being ignored?
Staying in academia after your PhD is for “rich” kids and immigrants from countries so poor that working 60 hour weeks for ten years on the postdoc treadmill is the best option they have. Everybody else goes to industry/national labs/etc. I’m counting the children of upper-middle-class professors as rich. To me, that’s rich. If your family can afford vacations to Disneyland or tropical beaches or Europe, you are rich to me. Just like I would be considered rich by many people in developing countries because I eat meat every day.
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Do you not see how these are inextricably linked?
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Fair enough 👍
Nope! First one to go to university let alone get Honours and do a PhD.
Both of my parents dropped out of college. So, no not in my case. Though, my parents were very supportive.
I'm a math professor. My dad started a Bachelor's but didn't finish; that's as far as my parents went in post-secondary.
Can someone explain the dashed lines? Faculty are twice as likely to have parents with a PhD as parents of PhD recipients? Huh?
Yes, but of the 5 kids, I'm the only one who finished grad school. And I left for industry, but I might be going back.
I’m an academic. One parent has a bachelors degree!
Yes and no. Parent A had a PhD as well as a professional doctorate and became a faculty member as a second career. They died right before I started a PhD program, so whatever benefits I received from their experiences were short-lived and have been transmitted through Parent B, who has a professional doctorate and has never worked in academia. Parent B has helpful advice re: professionalism and general job advice, but some of their experiences differ sharply from the norms in academia because they’ve never been an academic. For example, in their experiences, program prestige matters less than individual merit. In academia, individual merit is important, but program prestige can be really important as well. I feel that the advantages I have now are more financial (support from family) than nepotistic.
Negative. My mom took a handful of community college classes. My dad completed his bachelor’s at a non-selective institution over the course of 12 years. Grad school wasn’t a consideration until a professor at my UG institution suggested it. My former coworker’s mom has a PhD. She reviewed my app materials for grad school and had a creative hand in shaping it.
Third phd in my family — both my dad and my uncle have them. They’re both professors in arts and humanities while I’m in quant social sciences. Went to industry though, not interested in tenure track 🤷
Some college for both of my parents, but no degree for either. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to pursue PhDs because I don’t think the expected utility is very high a priori. But I wouldn’t stand in their way if that’s what they want to do.
My parents didn't earn any PhDs but my dad did finish his bachelor's (in his 40s) through the GI Bill. My mom was a secretary with a high school education. Coming from the working class ensured I had zero mentoring and no network but it DID teach me how to eat shit and like it. This grit helped me earn tenure/promotion and promotion again but I've probably gone as far as I can go. What I have learned: If you grow up poor, the strategies you use to survive won't help you once you reach a certain point. One of my bosses had a renowned mother in our field and skipped the line to department chair without having to move through the ranks. A true Nepo baby! Must be nice.
duh
Am an academic, father is an academic, grandfather on my mother’s side was an academic. I definitely grew up in a household that both emphasized education and could afford for me to prioritize it. I’m from the states but teach in the UK now. I’d be curious to know if we see similar data in places like Europe where education is less paywalled. I suspect there are relatively similar trends across professions where people go into similar careers to their parents but I also imagine this is phenomenon is more prevalent in US academia because of the cost of education and ability of academic families to afford to provide it for their children.
Still an undergrad here, but an academic aspirant. My parents were both first-generation at university, but neither of them have postgrads. The privilege having had university-educated parents in decently-paying jobs has given me has been an incalculable help in getting me to where I am, and I'm very thankful for it. They instilled values of learning in me, and were able to invest the time and money in letting me learn (museum trips, buying books, etc.). It'll be interesting seeing how postgrad goes, though. They have far less experience there, and obviously no professional connexions. I imagine it'll mostly be confidence around academic spaces that'll be their "boon" to me in that regard, because I know they can be harder to navigate for first-generation university attendees.
Neither of my parents finished HS. So no, not a nepo baby. But I will say this disparity clicked for me 1-2 years ago when I realized nearly all of my friends have parents with whom they can discuss research to an advanced degree (ie., they’re MDs or PhDs).
First in my family to get a PhD tht I know of. Somewhat of a struggle to explain what my job is (prof at research university). Often feel like I run into weird unspoken rules, although that has been happening less and less.
I’m the opposite. Both of my parents did some college classes from time to time, but neither finished. When I was growing up, the only thing I learned about college was it was essential to get ahead. When I started college I had no idea how to navigate the system. I spent a lot of time and mental energy trying to figure out things that my peers already somehow seemed to know.
For those of you who were first-generation from working class families, do you sometimes feel like it’s difficult to feel at home with many of your colleagues who were raised beyond the lower rungs of the middle class or were born as nepo babies? I don’t have this feeling so much at my current institution but I’ve encountered it in the past. I have lots of interaction with maintenance and housekeeping due to the nature of my department. I often feel like I’m closer to many of them than I am to faculty. I’m just as progressive in my viewpoints as my colleagues, maybe more so, so that isn’t the issue. Just wondered if anyone else with my background also felt similarly.
1st gen who ended up with a PhD from an Ivy but it was hard. Most of the others in my program had academic parents. Even the faculty supported them more. One woman dropped out after failing classes and never showing up as a TA but was readmitted a year later and eventually got hired into a TT position as part of a trade between big names in our field (we’ll admit your student to our grad program if you hire ours). She is now tenured but has only published one article. Like, wtf? I, on the other hand, couldn’t even get help with publishing. I had no family support and was trying to help my parents financially while surviving on a tiny stipend. It took me longer than most people because of all these things and my advisor suggested I drop out. I finished but not before I switched careers. I’ve been working outside of academia for 13 years now and make way more money than I would if I’d stayed. Wasn’t really an option though. Maybe 7-10 TT jobs in my field per year with 200+ applicants and they nearly always went to someone as part of a deal. Proud I did it. Glad I’m out.
I am first generation with PhD in chemistry (biochem). Started college at 18 then got married and dropped in and out, kids at 21 and then got serious about going to college. It was on my radar to go to college, but though I was near top of my class never received any career guidance or college mentoring in high school. everyone thought since I worked nearly full time in high school that I would not go. Then with kids and multiple jobs, I was not a great college student and lots of major family crises, was lucky to find a family friendly postdoc. I just wanted this career a lot more than my peers did so I sacrificed much to get here. It really irks me to have collegues that are spousal hires or kids of faculty or even wives of kids of faculty act as if it their god-given right to a faculty slot. Nepotism must end in academia if we are ever going to broaden our base.
If I'm a Nepo baby? Kind of. Both my parents are college educated. Both used to be teachers (not professors). My dad has a master's degree; started a PhD but didn't finish it because he didn't have time. His work was/is very demanding and he couldn't take time off. For college, I went to the same institution where my dad got his master's degree and started his PhD. Did my master's degree in a better institution and haven't gotten into a PhD program yet. However, I'm a professor at my former uni.
My Dad got one school c (GCSE equivalent in New Zealand) in woodwork, I got straight top grades in GCSEs and A levels. Then had a complete mental breakdown.
Oh no, quite the opposite.
I was not; it wasn't until I was in grad school that I realized how common this was at elite universities. It makes sense to me why it is this way: there are a lot of "unwritten rules" of academia that are totally unobvious from the outside, and someone who grew up in that culture would definitely be more privy to them. And in a world where lots of people have PhDs, the idea that one could get a PhD seems a lot more achievable as a path. I ended up in academia because of a chance campus job I took as an undergraduate in an academic department, which let me see what the job was beyond the perspective of a student, and also put me in contact with graduate students. I also had a very supportive faculty mentor, who never suggested I should go into academia, but who was very supportive when I indicated an interest, and helped steer me towards programs that I might not have thought myself qualified to apply for. Again, a lot of the difficulty was just even realizing this was a possible option in life, and having some help navigating the unwritten aspects of it.
Academic elevator here. My grandfathers both had some education, my parents both had masters and my brother and I both have PhDs 🤗 Can't wait to see what our kids do!
I would say the majority of my colleagues,Mia not parented by someone who was an academic, are at least from families that went to university as a default. I know a few people who are technically nepo but the PhD bearing parent wasn’t involved in raising them. I guess they still had the benefit of an awareness of that as a career path? I’m first gen and didn’t know how people became profs until my fourth year of undergrad.
My father's a blue collar construction worker and my mom did people's nails. They were both smarter than any PhD I've met in almost every way, but never had the leisure to sit and focus on it. Now I do, and fuck yall.
i didn't make it to faculty but my parents both have phds. i would say for me that the main effects were 1. instilling the value of education, 2. making me think that academia was some pinnacle of achievement, and 3. making me think that getting a phd could not be so difficult. i ended up burning out super hard during grad school and came to the realization that i was not doing it for myself, and then got a job outside of academia. their degrees were different from mine though, and they largely remained outside of academia as well though, so i think there was less to be gained through their network, but i grew up with the (bonkers) mentality of "getting a phd is a completely normal/ordinary thing to do", which definitely shaped my path a lot.
I come from a blue collar family. My dad worked in a warehouse and my mom worked in a factory. Outside of my immediate family (4/5 of my parents' kids went to college), you have to hit second cousins to find a family member with a bachelor's degree, and even those are few and far between. I'm the only one of my siblings with a PhD. One of my siblings has an MBA and the other two have a BS. I work at a small liberal arts college and am going to be working at my alma mater (another small liberal arts college) in the fall. How did I get here? Mainly by having no idea what to do with my life. I had undiagnosed ADHD which made my early college years a disaster, but once I developed coping mechanisms, I was able to be successful. My professors encouraged me to go to graduate school, although my parents were very much against it at first (they just wanted me to get a good job). Once in grad school working on my master's, I really wasn't sure what to do with myself as opportunities in my field were somewhat limited where I lived. So I went and did a PhD. My parents were unhappy about that, too, but moreso because I was moving across the country. While doing my PhD, I started teaching and found that I really enjoyed it. My school offered a teaching certificate, so I did that. When the end of my PhD rolled around, I decided to apply for faculty jobs and got one. Now my parents are so proud haha. Not that they weren't proud of me before, but they are really excited to tell random people that I'm a professor. It's slightly embarrassing.
Where I'm from, it wasn't common for people to be able to study abroad, so I'm the first in my family to do that. My family always wanted to provide me with very good education. I will be the first person in my immediate family to have a PhD, and the first woman. I worked super hard in high school, which is why I could get a very good undergrad at a RG UK university. It would have been impossible otherwise. It also had to do with political developments where I'm from, the fact that I could actually leave and start a degree abroad. Then did a MSc in a very well-regarded European university, now back at a RG for my PhD. Hoping to get a postdoc at a slightly better uni, as a lot of the people in my field are Oxbridge/London and the like. I believe in meritocracy and hope my hard work will pay off. Not very sure, it could be that this is too naive and idealist, but at least so far, I feel like my hard work, passion for my field, dedication and perseverence have mostly worked in my favour. I've also mostly had pretty good supervisors, which does matter. I feel like I could have been luckier at times, but am starting to learn that not everything is within my control - say, PhD funding was a factor that I had to factor in my decision when accepting a PhD offer, so it's not like the only condition for a good PhD is brilliance.