This study showing that US academic faculty members are 25 times more likely than Americans in general to have a parent with a PhD or Masters degree has attracted a lot of attention, and comments suggesting that this is unusual and unsatisfactory. But is it? For various reasons, I’ve interacted quite a bit with farmers, and most of them come from farm families. And historically it was very much the norm for men to follow their fathers’ trade and for women to follow their mothers in working at home.
So, I decided to look for some statistical evidence. I used Kagi’s AI Search, which, unlike lots of AI products is very useful, producing a report with links to (usually reliable) sources. That took me to a report by the Richmond Federal Reserve which had a table from a paper about political dynasties.
As you can see, there lots of trades and professions into which sons are much more likely to follow their fathers (also true of daughters and mothers). These numbers aren’t directly comparable with the Nature study which casts a much broader net (either parent with a PhD, whether or not they held an academic job). I’m not sure how best to adjust for this, since it affects both numerator and denominator in the odds ratio.
The last two numbers are interesting. I’m certainly aware of plenty of father-son pairs in economics (my own son has an Econ PhD, though not an econ academic job), but I don’t think there is anything special here. It’s simply the result of using more fine-grained classification. I’m sure scientists, humanists and so on are more likely to have parents in the same field than are second-generation academics in general.
On the other hand, the number for legislators is startlingly large, and I don’t think this is confined to the US. I haven’t had time to read the paper in detail to find explanations.
In summary, there is nothing special about academic jobs in this case. The bigger issue is that the children of high-status, high income parents are more likely to end up in high-status jobs and to have high incomes. That’s been known for a long time, as is the fact that the problem is particularly severe in the US.
{ 42 comments… read them below or add one }
marcel proust 09.01.24 at 11:34 pm
I plead guilty… as an economist son of an economist.
However, neither of my (now middle-aged) children is an economist despite having 2 parents with PhDs in the field.
The moral arc of the universe and all that. (We both strongly discouraged them from following in our footsteps)
Harry 09.02.24 at 12:15 am
I sort of followed my dad into education; the fact that I ended up in philosophy of education (after my phd) owes a lot to conversations with him and with my wife about education policy and schools. He only had a Bachelor’s degree (though later got some honorary PhDs). My daughter is doing a PhD in sociology of education and will probably end up in an academic job (ironically or not we both attended one of the big stratification conferences recently — she gave a talk, and Liz Anderson and I were the keynotes).
Is the legislator thing true in other countries? You’d expect a two party system with massive amounts of gerrymandering and in which money plays such a huge role to be unusually immune to meritocratic processes. (That said, the British Labour Party has a lot of footstep following — Hilary Benn, John Cryer (both parents were MPs), Stephen Kinnock and Lindsey Hoyle all come to mind instantly — and I think it would be way more if you were interested in actual nepos — nephews and nieces).
Harry 09.02.24 at 12:18 am
Oh, wow, this is fun!: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04809/
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown had two great uncles, a great-great uncle and a grandfather in parliament.
J-D 09.02.24 at 1:36 am
Hilary Benn is a fourth-generation MP: his father Tony was an MP, and so was Tony’s father William and William’s father John. What’s more, William, Tony and Hilary all got into Cabinet (another curious fact about those three: they were all second sons).
If there’s such an example in my own country (Australia), it has not yet come to my attention, but Larry Anthony was a third-generation MP and, unlike the Benns, all three generations represented the same district in Parliament.
J-D 09.02.24 at 1:45 am
In order to take up any occupation, you must first be aware that it exists. In the modern world, there are so many different occupations that few if any people can even be aware of all of them. Anybody can sit in a classroom, observe a schoolteacher and think ‘I wonder whether I would like doing that’ (and even among those who for whatever reason never go to school, the majority are probably aware that there is such an occupation as ‘schoolteacher’) but if you don’t even know that there is such an occupation as professional mediator (and there must be lots of people who don’t), then how is it ever going to occur to you as a possibility (no matter how well suited to it you might be)? On the other hand, the children of professional mediators must at least be aware of the possibility (even if the effect on some of them is to think ‘No way, never, not me’).
Alex SL 09.02.24 at 3:57 am
It seems unsurprising and also totally fine to me that people would take after their parents to some degree, both in terms of talents and in terms of interests. The problem is inheritance of money and power. A farm or corner shop being in the same family for four generations is one thing; the privilege that comes from a trust fund fortune being inherited is a very different and much more socially destructive issue. Somebody being a fourth generation academic of some kind is one thing, at least if they aren’t fourth generation at the same university department; somebody being a fourth generation member of parliament is incestuous to a stunning degree and reveals something broken about the political system.
Peter Dorman 09.02.24 at 4:39 am
This thread has testimonials from academics who were raised by similar parents. I’m on the opposite end, but my experience confirms the OP. My father had only a HS diploma (sold insurance); my mom had a BA but, until late in life, never held a professional job of any sort. I can say that I always felt socially out of place whenever informal conversations among academics drifted into family backgrounds.
John Q 09.02.24 at 4:53 am
J-D I thought Tony Benn was originally a hereditary peer, but maybe not
Alan White 09.02.24 at 5:28 am
Neither of my parents even got to high school. 40 years an academic now retired full professor from a state university. Just one data point.
David in Tokyo 09.02.24 at 6:18 am
I guess I’m guity as well.
Father: Electrical engineer and compter nerd.
Me: Ditto.
Father: Learned Chinese for the fun of it
Me: Japanese
Father: Repaired violins on the side
Me: Not so much, but got fed up and did a complete resetup of the guitar I’m curently using. Also figured out what I need to do to fix my other two main guitars.
(There are differences, of course: father grew up poor in NYC as an immigrant’s kid, I grew up a rich kid on Beacon Hill.)
Also. Hey! Are you shure that table isn’t for Japan??? Japan’s PM (the most unpopular one in history) finally resigned, and one of the twats running to replace him is a fourth generation politician. Sheesh.
Harry 09.02.24 at 8:20 am
Being a second son Tony Benn didn’t expect to inherit a peerage. His elder brother predeceased their father so he became a peer on their father’s death, and was immediately disqualified from office; until he successfully campaigned to get the law changed to allow him to rebound certain the peerage. His son is, indeed fourth generation and has a niece who is also likely to end up in the commons at some point.
Chris Armstrong 09.02.24 at 9:47 am
I’d be interested to see more fine-grained data on different academic disciplines. Hypothesis: that humanities and social sciences are likely to be greater reservoirs of intergenerational privilege, because the ability to talk the talk at interview, and build the right kinds of social connections, is more important than in technical disciplines (even if those things are still important there).
I’m a bit like Alan White: my parents and siblings all left school at 16 without a full set of GCSEs (like leaving without a high school certificate, I guess?). Now I’m a prof too. So I’ve done well. But since success breeds success, I occasionally wonder how things would have gone if I’d had some kind of support network. I turned up to my Cambridge interview with no idea at all of how to approach it (a better way of saying that might be that they had no idea how to approach someone like me: smart, but from a bad school and bad home life, and really introverted). On the other hand, my son went to his Cambridge interview having spent his whole life chatting to a professor, and he knocked it out of the park. But then maybe he would have done so anyway.
John Q 09.02.24 at 11:14 am
J-D Three generations of Downers, and Georgina has made repeated attempts to bring the number to four. Sadly, she is a real downer for voters, who keep choosing someone else.
oldster 09.02.24 at 11:55 am
Sociologists have a name for the phenomenon whereby academics have children who become academics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty
Right wing governments around the world, eager to improve lives,, have launched a broad campaign to stamp out the breeding grounds of this kind of poverty, by destroying universities altogether.
J-D 09.02.24 at 11:58 am
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Enlarging on that response:
Tony Benn’s father William, who up to that point was an MP, was raised to a (hereditary) peerage in 1942, in order to increase the number of Labour members of the House of Lords, at a time when life peerages didn’t exist (except for special ones to allow for judges to sit on the highest court of appeal, which at that time the House of Lords theoretically was; it was a change to the law in 1958 which allowed for the creation of the kind of life peers who now make up most of the House of Lords). William knew at the time that Tony was interested in pursuing a parliamentary career, but the expectation was that the peerage would not be an obstacle because it was Tony’s older brother Michael who was in line to inherit it; Michael’s career plan was to enter the priesthood and he had no objection to becoming a peer. Then Michael was killed on active service in 1944, leaving Tony as the heir apparent to the peerage. He succeeded in getting elected to the House of Commons in 1950, and campaigned for the law to be changed so that he could avoid being forced out of the House of Commons by inheriting the peerage when his father died. He did not succeed in this campaign before his father died in 1960, on which he automatically inherited the peerage and so was automatically disqualified from the House of Commons, resulting in a vacancy in his seat. He stood as a candidate in the resulting by-election, despite being disqualified! and won! after which an election court ruled that as he was disqualified, the runner-up had won the seat! He continued his campaign for a change in the law, and in 1963 such change finally came about, specifically allowing for a hereditary peerage to be ‘disclaimed’. Tony Benn then disclaimed his peerage and thus was able to be elected again to the House of Commons.
Disclaimer of a peerage is effective for life; when Tony Benn died in 2014, his oldest son Stephen succeeded to the peerage (with no effect on Hilary, Tony’s second son). In the meantime, the law had been changed again, abolishing the automatic right of hereditary peers to membership of the House of Lords; however, in 2021 Stephen Benn (as the 3rd Viscount Stansgate) was elected as one of the representatives in the House of Lords of the Labour hereditary peers. Since hereditary peers are no longer automatically entitled to membership of the House of Lords, hereditary peerages are no longer a disqualification for membership of the House of Commons. Since then there has only been one disclaimer of a hereditary peerage, which was also uniquely the only time the same peerage had been disclaimed twice. Lewis Silkin was raised to a (hereditary) peerage in 1950; after he died in 1972, his oldest son Arthur disclaimed the peerage; after he died in 2001, the next heir, Lewis’s grandson and Arthur’s nephew, also disclaimed the peerage. Since this was no longer a necessity for maintaining eligibility for election to the House of Commons, I must suppose that for him this was a matter of principle. Good for him!
Adam Roberts 09.02.24 at 12:00 pm
My parents were both, in Neil Kinnock’s resonant phrase, the first in their respective families for a thousand generations to go to university. They both qualified as doctors in the early 1960s. I’m am academic, but there’s no history of that in my family (my younger sister went into medicine, like our parents). Now, obviously I can see the social-class aspect by which two parents who, though themselves born into working-class environments (on my Mum’s side, all Welsh miners, with a couple of hill farmers; on my Dad’s side, rivermen in NW England and North Wales) were able to move up into thoroughly and, after Thatcher, increasingly lucrative middle-class professions, have passed-on middle-class professional career type pathways to their kids. Which sort of speaks to the OP. But I’d also say this: academia is not the “profession” it was in the 1950s/60s. It is, really, barely a profession at all nowadays: a plurality of the people working in universities are on short-term, zero-hours, VT contracts, scrabbling money. I’m a professor, full-time, and better off than many but—taking my now very elderly Dad to his hospital appointment a couple of weeks ago, and chatting with him in the waiting room, I discovered his pension is more than my salary. Academia is high-stress, full-on, low-pay gruntwork now. My 16yo is not doing A-levels, but instead doing a BTech, with a view to going in to the fire service, and good luck to him.
Monte Davis 09.02.24 at 1:41 pm
Both parents were first in their families to attend college, in both cases truncated to serve as USMC/USWMC combat correspondents in WWII. Both went on to careers in journalism and then corporate communications, as did both their sons. Third generation: 3 out of 4 in related fields plus a lone engineer.
steven t johnson 09.02.24 at 2:16 pm
Looking at the table, electrician, carpenter, plumber are all jobs with a tradition of craft unions, where the career path meant getting accepted as an apprentice. Physician and lawyer are something superficially similar, guilds where the members help their small businesses by regulating the production of new members (AMA and ABA.) A moderate amount of nepotism here is hardly surprising, I think.
Given the popularity in other places of theories about the Professional Managerial Class (and its cousin the Deep State) the news that the conspiracy for capitalism isn’t more effective in perpetuating itself suggests that either the class-ness of the bureaucracy or its hegemony over the civil society are somewhat exaggerated.
To me, the much greater degree of “nepotism” in professional economists is provocative. There are no official organizations of economists with the powers of the ABA and AMA to regulate who gets to be practicing entrepreneurs in their fields. There certainly is no official skilled trades union tradition. It seems to me that there is an informal apprenticeship requirement that children of economists are more qualified to meet than children of other parents who also know how to run the cursus honorum to the doctorate/consulate. Likely it is more a social requirement relatively unique to economics.
Being me, the first thought coming to mind is that it is an ideological screening process (which is also a class screening process.) It’s not entirely that the prospective economics student need be committed to a finished ideology, but start with an acceptable set of premises for the understanding of the world. Or at least, the social skills to keep unwelcome thoughts either private or properly organized for collegial relations with the serious people.
And of course the very high heritability of political office also requires a social skill, so to speak: Hereditary membership in the ruling class or the family retainers thereof. (Retainers have permanent employment in principle, making them very different in many key ways from the rest of us.) Personally I think that is the system, not the brokenness of the system. It’s when the nobodies off the street start taking over and using their mandates from mere elections to shove the serious people around that is the truly broken.
John Q 09.02.24 at 7:07 pm
Oldster wins the thread
William S Berry 09.02.24 at 10:13 pm
Agree about the “following in parents/ family footsteps”, and I’m guessing it plays out that way in many other in-group milieux, as well.
“Nepo” bullshit has been over-exposed to the point of “OK, fine. Nepotism is a thing. Just stop boring me to fucking tears with it”.
William S Berry 09.02.24 at 10:42 pm
A big factor might be what sort of relationship one has with one’s parents. You might admire them and want to emulate them.
My dad was a rightwing, fire-breathing fundajelical preacher who really wanted me to follow in his footsteps. Needless to say, and to my dad’s disappointment, I didn’t admire that and had no desire to emulate him. I was actually rather repulsed by it all, and considered that I was an atheist (or something) by the time I was ten or so.
That’s how you grow a “communist” union activist and rabble rouser!
I hardly miss a day without breathing a sigh of relief that I escaped that crap.
Hasn’t made me “happy”, but I do have my own mind (to the extent this is possible in an iron-bound and deterministic world).
I’m OK with that. (I’d just as well be, as I had no “choice “ in the matter! Shit happens, someone once said.
J-D 09.03.24 at 8:59 am
As I observed above, one of the several natural reactions possible to awareness of a parent’s career is ‘No way, never, not me’. But when I was growing up I had no awareness that ‘right-wing fire-breathing preacher’ existed as a career option. I don’t mean that I personally would have been interested in it if I had been aware, but I bet the simple fact of greater awareness of the option contributes to a higher rate of pursuing it among children of such preachers than among the rest of the population.
‘I have determined to do this’ and ‘I have chosen to do this’ are synonymous, or nearly so, as Raymond Smullyan first made me aware.
superdestroyer 09.03.24 at 1:38 pm
If one wants to look at civil servants, then one has to look at mothers as much as fathers. The Civil Service has been much more female dominated for decades. In addition, in the U.S. the barrier to getting an entry level job in federal civil service means that one needs help just getting through the bureaucracy in addition to having insiders help select someone.
The 7% number strikes me as very low after working with many civil servants and finding that having relatives in the civil service was almost universal.
superdestroyer 09.03.24 at 1:43 pm
Oldster,
I was an audience member one time at a discussion on opportunity hoarding by the elite. The main speaker kept talking about the success of college professors and mentioned several private universities that had medical centers attached. During Q&A time, I questioned some of the speaker assumptions by pointing out that nurse anesthetist at every teach medical center were probably making more money than 90% of the tenured track professors, let alone all of the research faculty.
CJColucci 09.03.24 at 2:04 pm
People often go ito the family business. Film at 11:00.
someone who broke family tradition and is now paid slightly more 09.03.24 at 4:17 pm
firm agreement with @CJColucci at #25. To @superdestroyer’s point at #23 i think there are certain “women’s work” jobs which could fruitfully be examined here. i think of my family’s long line of teachers – not “professors at elite schools”, god keep them (far away from us), but community college instructors, high school and elementary school teachers, church school instructors, etc. i wonder if there are family traditions of nurses, or families that work in the fashion industry in various capacities…we also might look at this question again in 20 years when the majority of working doctors, lawyers and judges will be women.
PT 09.04.24 at 10:50 pm
That a large number of academics have parents in academia is not, as demonstrated, unusual among professions. It does, however, pose challenges for efforts to recruit and retain the diverse faculty that many institutions claim to wish to have.
As a “first generation academic” I spend the first decade+ of my academic appointment wondering if I belonged. I felt surrounded by a large number of fellow faculty members who clearly knew the system and culture in ways far deeper than I could imagine. It took me a long time to figure out that many of them had academic parent(s), and thus had a significant head start in learning to navigate academia.
Just as we strive to be aware of the “hidden curriculum” for first generation students, it would probably be beneficial for Deans and Provosts and Department Chairs to be more aware of, and strive to shed light upon, the many hidden rules of the academy.
Belle Waring 09.05.24 at 8:01 am
We are heading for the third generation of PhDs in our family, but hopefully mechano-biology will be useful even outside the hallowed halls etc. The US Armed Forces have been actively and heavily recruiting said biologist, which I don’t understand. Why should they go through basic training, just have the NIH give a call. Particularly the Marines, I mean, what do they need biologists for, they’re all meant to be eating crayons. The second PhD we don’t know about yet, but since everyone assumes you get one I suppose we’ll see. Grad school is also the only way to meet your future spouse that I’ve ever heard of; I suppose some people meet in undergrad.
Alan 09.05.24 at 8:40 am
Would someone please explain “percentage of fathers in that occupation”. What is the numerator and what is the denominator? This is not a snarky criticism: I can’t parse that sentence in a way that I can understand.
John Q 09.05.24 at 8:48 am
Alan @29 The survey asks respondents “What is your occupation” and “What was your fathers occupation”. The number you asked about is just the percentage of respondents who nominated (say) electrician as their father’s occupation. So, for example, 1.07 per cent of all male respondents said “my father was an electrician”, while 10.18 per cent of male electricians gave that response.
They also asked about mothers’ occupation, but the big changes in women’s role in the workforce complicate that side of the story
Alan 09.05.24 at 9:15 am
Thank you John. That makes it clear.
novakant 09.05.24 at 10:51 am
They should have included “actor” in their categories, lol.
I grant you, the sample size is rather small, but still:
https://collider.com/acting-families-movies-prolific/
https://people.com/movies/famous-hollywood-families-who-act/
oldster 09.05.24 at 12:05 pm
Which is the more relevant conditional probability:
Given that your parent was an X, what are the odds you become an X?
or
Given that you became an X, what are the odds that your parent was an X?
Maybe these are equivalent, but their equivalence is not obvious to me. And if they are distinct, then I would think the first is what we want to know, not the second.
J, not that one 09.05.24 at 1:35 pm
“ As a “first generation academic” I spend the first decade+ of my academic appointment wondering if I belonged.”
As a first generation suburbanite I find myself wondering the same thing. We don’t see much examination of this.
roger gathmann 09.05.24 at 3:50 pm
Interesting to think of the profession in terms of a type of life style. My old man could not stand to be bossed by anyone, although he always failed, eventually, to make it on his own. My family – five sibs – certainly absorbed that. Both of my brothers and one of my sisters is independent – they have their own enterprises. Myself, I also hate to be bossed, Unlike my brothers, who followed in my dad’s mechanical engineering path, I was always attracted to more academic areas: philosophy, lit. Yet I hated the emotions and stress of academia, the sort of implicit way one was supposed to be. So I gave that up for freelance work, academic editing mostly. Which sucks, paywise, but is emotionally freeing, at least to me. The way one wants to be comes, sometimes, with great connections and helps, but as my father’s connections were with other hvac men and my mom’s with the elementary school teachers she knew (she was a school secretary), I did not get a lot of my client base via family. I did, though, get patience from my mom and the need to be free from dad, so I guess I got a sort of program for what to be.
John Q 09.05.24 at 6:40 pm
Oldster @33 The two are related by Bayes Law (formatting tricky, so I suggest looking it up). In this case, we are looking at the odds ratio – how much more likely is it that you will become X, given that your father was X, compared to the case when your father was not X
notGoodenough 09.05.24 at 7:57 pm
I was the first in my family to go into higher education, and the first to receive a PhD – mostly motivated by notions that education was a powerful tool of emancipation, and that I could undertake research work which would be both socially beneficial and personally gratifying (well, coughs, yes and quite, but in my defence I was young, naïve, and – as the first in my family to really engage with higher education at all – somewhat unaware of the more prosaic reality). However, while both parents had an interest in science, technology, engineering, and such, neither worked in any related field.
I may be somewhat off base, but I suspect that “following in familial footsteps” only really crossed the line into “condemnable nepotism” when (a) familial connections make an impact, (b) the work is desirable, and (c) other people cannot reasonably compete (particularly where such other people could do the work as well as or better than the “fortunate one”). Which leads to the thought, “in a hypothetical future where all unpleasant and unwanted labour were automated, with plentiful and equal access to resources, people engaging in work not out of need but out of interest, etc.” would this be problematic – or, more memefically, would nepotism meaningfully exist under Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism? Thank you for coming to my TED talk, etc.
Moz of Yarramulla 09.06.24 at 11:16 am
Somewhat amusingly both my PhD uncles advised against academia and were not especially in favour of post-grad study quickly following undergrad, they thought non-academic experience was important. Family history is typical post-war/boomer stuff, lots of “first in the family to attend university” with the smart boys on one side being pushed into PhDs because their parents both had post-school qualifications. The other side were just astonished that someone from their working class English background could go to university at all.
Which ties back to the cultural capital idea, where ‘first university’ people have to learn a great deal of radical new information very quickly just to avoid dropping out in their first year of university. I’ve seen that up close with a partner who was in that situation. I suspect that having me around helped, and having them lead the way definitely helped their younger siblings.
I got the generic “career advice” process at high school, but since my father was determined that I would study engineering (he dropped out and became an accountant) it was more a question of which engineering than whether.
I can’t think of anyone in my family who’s in a career matching their parent, but I have a grandmother and a sister who are/were nurses. And three aunt-generation who are teachers, but I suspect that’s from clever girls in the 1960’s being offered the choice between teaching and nursing.
engels 09.08.24 at 8:22 pm
It’s called opportunity hoarding as yes it’s a bad thing (and it’s also a bad thing for doctors, lawyers, etc—for less overpaid gigs it doesn’t really matter).
James 09.13.24 at 6:13 am
Agree with Engels above. Of course this is a bad thing and surprised to see CT defending it.
MisterMr 09.13.24 at 9:19 pm
I’d say that “opportunity hoarding” is a bad thing in general as a social phenomenon, but the behaviour of the opportunity hoarders is not morally reprehensible (unless you want a super rigid morality where parents don’t care for the wellbeings of their kids), hence the ambiguity.
somebody who remembers the ar-15s at pta meetings this year 09.14.24 at 8:31 pm
A trenchant observation by engels and James at #39-40. perhaps this is why nobody minds when a mother is a schoolteacher and she raises a daughter who also decides to become a schoolteacher – unlike Professors At Elite Universities (god keep them – far away from us!), being a public schoolteacher of the nation’s youth isn’t considered an “opportunity” that can be “hoarded”. even when classrooms were at their most-funded, public school teaching was not a limited enough opportunity resource to be considered “hoarded”. there was always a need for more, so nobody was (it is perceived) denied the opportunity to teach eighth graders about books, (or to be screamed at by parents waving a handgun that teaching their eighth grader about books is making them gay.)