Where do professors come from?

 A news article in Nature summarizes two research articles into the makeup of the American professoriate.  Professors tend to have gotten their PhDs from prestigious American universities, and to have grown up in families with college educated parents, some with advanced degrees.

Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities  by Anna Nowogrodzki

"One in eight US-trained tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison."

...

"This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).

...

"Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis. Fields with the least ‘upward mobility’ included classics and economics, whereas those with the most included animal science and pharmacology."

Sources:

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention by K. Hunter Wapman, Sam Zhang, Aaron Clauset & Daniel B. Larremore  Nature (2022)

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty by Allison C. Morgan, Nicholas LaBerge, Daniel B. Larremore, Mirta Galesic, Jennie E. Brand & Aaron Clauset ,Nature Human Behaviour (2022)