Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Inputs to academic productivity, Part 1: Socioeconomic background (by Abramitzky et al.)

 Linking many data sources, Abramitzky et al. tell us about how family background predicts who become academics, what they study and how productive they are.

Climbing the Ivory Tower: How Socio-Economic Background Shapes Academia by Ran Abramitzky, Lena Greska, Santiago PĂ©rez, Joseph Price, Carlo Schwarz & Fabian Waldinger , NBER Working Paper 33289, DOI 10.3386/w33289, December 2024

Abstract: "We explore how socio-economic background shapes academia, collecting the largest dataset of U.S. academics’ backgrounds and research output. Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely underrepresented for seven decades, especially in humanities and elite universities. Father’s occupation predicts professors’ discipline choice and, thus, the direction of research. While we find no differences in the average number of publications, academics from poorer backgrounds are both more likely to not publish and to have outstanding publication records. Academics from poorer backgrounds introduce more novel scientific concepts, but are less likely to receive recognition, as measured by citations, Nobel Prize nominations, and awards."


"Our measure of socio-economic background is the percentile rank of their father’s predicted income when the future academics were growing up. ... we link academics in six scientific disciplines – medicine, biology, biochemistry, chemistry, physics, and mathematics to their publication and citation records using data from the Clarivate Web of Science. Overall, our data enable us to measure the socio-economic backgrounds of 46,139 academics (for 15,521 of whom we also have publication and citation data) across 1,026 universities over nearly seven decades

...

"We find a stark underrepresentation of individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds: those born to parents in the bottom quintile of the parental income distribution account for less than 5% of all  academics. In contrast, around half of U.S. academics come from the top quintile of the income rank distribution. Children born to the highest-earning fathers are particularly overrepresented, with those born to fathers in the 100th percentile having a 56% higher chance of becoming an academic than those born to fathers in the 99th percentile. The underrepresentation of low socio-economic status  ndividuals in academia is greater than in other occupations that require specialized training, such as medicine and law. 

...

"We find that scientists whose fathers were at the 75th percentile of the income rank are around 0.6 percentage points (or 50%) more likely to be nominated for a Nobel Prize than scientists with fathers at the 25th percentile. They are also 50% more likely to be awarded a Nobel Prize. These differences persist even if we control for scientists’ publication and citation records. 

...

"representation from the bottom quintile of the parental SES rank distribution is especially low in academia: only 5% of academics come from the bottom quintile, while 7% of lawyers, and 9% of doctors come from the bottom quintile.  Teachers, in contrast, exhibit a much weaker degree of selection based on socio-economic background." 


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