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SCSU Stories and Resources

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We are proud to have a large and vibrant first-generation community here at Southern. And that doesn't just include students -- there are a number of alumni, faculty and staff who also share pride in having pursued a college degree before their parents, and are looking to connect with individuals and families who share that experience.

Our Stories

Here at Southern, we are proud to have a large and vibrant first generation community. And that doesn't involve just current students -- there are a variety of alumni, faculty and staff who also share pride in having pursued a college degree before their parents, and are looking to connect with individuals and families who share that experience.

Part of creating that community is opening up to one another and sharing our stories. Please consider reflecting on your experience, and contributing your personal or professional journey -- the challenges and advantages, the barriers and benefits, the lows and the highs. Help us show the collective meaning of what it means/has meant to be a first-generation college student.

Our Stories Tell Us Your Story

Am I a first-gen student?

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We are proud to have a large and vibrant first-generation community here at Southern. And that doesn't just include students -- there are a number of alumni, faculty and staff who also share pride in having pursued a college degree before their parents, and are looking to connect with individuals and families who share that experience.

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New York Times. (SCSU community members can sign up for a NYT subscription for free!)

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Credit... Edmon de Haro

Trying to help a high school senior get into his dream school, Laurie Kopp Weingarten called the college to emphasize that the boy should be able to lay claim to the latest, and fuzziest, of all admissions hooks: being a first-generation student.

The student's mother had never enrolled in college; his father had a degree but had died when his son was a toddler. The student had grown up in a household with little money and where college had never been discussed. Surely, Ms. Weingarten assumed, the boy could be counted as a first-generation college applicant, deserving of an admissions bump for being disadvantaged.

But after describing the situation, she was given a firm no, recalled Ms. Weingarten, the director of One-Stop College Counseling in Marlboro, N.J., who had been hired by the student's worried grandfather. The school considered a student first generation only if neither parent had a bachelor's degree. "I was just shocked," said Ms. Weingarten, who would identify the college only as a prominent engineering school. "To me, that boy was first gen all the way. He wasn't raised by his father."

In fact, the boy was first gen, at least according to the Higher Education Act, which says that, for federal programs, only the education level of parents who regularly live with a student should be counted. There's ample reason for confusion, though. The Department of Education interprets first-gen status in at least three different ways: the legislative definition (no parent in the household has a bachelor's degree) and the two used for research (no education after high school; no degree after high school). Still other definitions are often used by colleges and educational associations.

With so many variations on what constitutes higher education and even more assortments of family structures, it's no wonder there are lots of ways to slice and dice the label. Using data from a longitudinal study begun in 2002, Robert K. Toutkoushian, a University of Georgia education professor, analyzed eight different definitions of the term and found that the number of students who could be called first gen in a 7,300 sample ranged from 22 percent to 77 percent.

Policymakers have begun to wrangle with the definition of "first generation," which, according to Maureen Hoyler, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, entered the legislative lexicon in 1980 as a better way to identify disadvantaged students without referring to race or ethnicity.

Whether used as code for "low income" or "underprivileged" or as a proxy for affirmative action, the label comes with assumptions: that the student's parents have little or no experience navigating the academic, financial and cultural barriers to higher education, including an application process that stymies even the most savvy parent. Filling out financial aid forms can be a nightmare, especially when parents don't speak English, Ms. Weingarten said.

"First gen" may be the latest buzz phrase in higher education but its import is not just academic. Colleges have always viewed their mission as promoting social mobility, but given rising income inequality and the skills needed to get high-paying jobs, they have intensified their efforts to enroll and lift disadvantaged students.

Nearly 60 percent of admissions directors said they were likely to increase their recruiting of first-generation students this year, according to a survey by Inside Higher Education in September. Many colleges will give admissions preference to these students for overcoming obstacles, or use the status to mitigate poor test scores.

They also try to make degrees more affordable. Both Bowdoin and Trinity colleges, for example, waive application fees for first-gen students; Pitzer College has a few endowed scholarships. The University of Wisconsin just began offering free tuition for first-gen transfer students, while Duke last year created one of the most generous, comprehensive programs of all. It will select 240 first gens to attend for free all four years; they will receive a computer, books and travel between semesters at no cost.

Student Loans: Key Things to Know

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Colleges can identify first gens on the Common Application, which asks for parents' education history. Along with the application, the organization sends a customized summary of candidates' attributes, including, since 2013-14, first-generation status. When this is combined with the entry that shows that the application fee was waived for financial reasons, it's apparent who is both low income and first gen. But the Common Application definition is different from the legislative one. It's the same as the one used by the engineering school that Ms. Weingarten called - neither parent can have a bachelor's, even if they didn't raise the child.

It may seem like hairsplitting. But in the frenzied competition for admission to selective schools, where counselors have seen students get their DNA tested to see if they qualify as minorities, it's an important distinction. Several said they advise their first-gen clients to highlight their status, either in essays or interviews. When Ms. Weingarten meets new clients, one of her first questions concerns their parents' education level. "This process is so difficult, if you have an honest advantage, you should use it," she said.

Certainly there are affluent parents who never went to college, punching holes in the idea that first gens are by definition disadvantaged. One college counselor told of a first-gen student on the East Coast who arrived at her counseling appointment in a Porsche. She wrapped herself in the first-gen mantle, bringing it up whenever she could and was admitted to several selective schools.

Conceivably, one can be both first gen and legacy. One first-generation student in Minnesota is applying to her grandmother's alma mater. "I definitely don't fit the stereotype for a first-generation student," she said. "I'm a middle-class white girl." Her mother owns a small business and her father works as a middle manager in information technology at a Fortune 500 company.

To be sure, most first-generation students come from families with low incomes and minimal exposure to college. Only 12.5 percent of all students whose parents didn't get a bachelor's degree come from families with incomes exceeding $106,000, according to an analysis of federal data by Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University. Many education experts even use the terms "first gen" and "low income" interchangeably. Officials who practice "holistic" admissions - examining family background, recommendations and essays in addition to grades and test scores - say they can figure out who is truly disadvantaged by looking at how candidates overcome obstacles, whatever those may be.

How much first-gen status really matters for college admissions is unclear. At Harvard, it's "one of 50 factors" under consideration, said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid. "This is not a mechanical process." Some counselors view it as a "tipping factor" for students who are tied with others in the admissions pool; others insist that it is much more important.

"It's something that colleges love to brag about," said Brian Taylor, managing director of Ivy Coach, a New York counseling company, noting that many colleges list their first-gen statistics in their brochures.

Many students turn to online communities like College Confidential and Reddit to question whether they fit the definition. One student, raised by his stepfather, wondered if he'd be disqualified because his biological father had a degree; another student worried about her mother's online education from Kaplan University. A lively discussion followed a post by a student applying to Columbia who wanted to omit degrees her parents earned abroad.

Colleges don't typically check information. But consultants urge their clients not to lie. Cyndy McDonald, a consultant in Visalia, Calif., encourages students to write essays about their first-generation backgrounds, even if they don't meet a college's definition.

"These students have unique experiences," she said. "They don't have the legacy card to drop."

The most disadvantaged students don't usually write essays about those experiences, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. They may think their backgrounds would be held against them or they may not even have heard of the first-gen label. Some assume they don't qualify because they have siblings who have gone to college.

Anthony A. Jack, a Harvard education professor who researches the experiences of lower-income students, said a student once asked if he could join a support group even though his father had a master's degree. The boy had been raised by extended family who had not gone to college, and the father, who had an arrest record, had not been part of his son's life. "That's not a parental influence," Dr. Jack said.

Some support groups and scholarship organizations define the term broadly to be more inclusive. To underscore economic issues, the University of Pennsylvania has created an F.G.L.I. program for "first-generation and/or low-income students." Brown opened its First-Generation College and Low-Income Student Center last year.

Some public policy experts believe the definition should be narrowed for admissions and financial aid. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a Harvard law professor, argues that only those most in need should receive special admissions considerations. She wants both parental education and income taken into account, limiting the definition to those whose parents never attended college and are eligible for Pell grants. That means an income below $50,000. "Universities must attack disadvantage at its roots," she wrote in a University of Chicago Law Review article.

The Institute for Higher Education Policy last year released a report, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, similarly calling for the definition to be narrowed so that students whose parents had an associate degree could no longer be counted as first gen.

The institute's analysis of education statistics helps explain its reasoning. If students who attended a four-year college had parents with no education after high school, only 50 percent graduated within six years. If at least one parent had some college but no degree, the graduation rate was 57 percent. But if at least one parent had an associate degree or higher, the rate jumped to 72 percent.

Dr. Jack, who is serving on an American Sociological Association task force to tackle the issue, says he wants to focus on how people use the term. It evokes images of a Horatio Alger character striving for success, he said, which is far better than language that stigmatizes students for being at risk. For some people, "this is affirmative action that won't ruffle any feathers. It's more palatable." But, he said, supporting first-generation students is no substitute for admissions that considers race.

To figure out what first generation really means, he said, it's important to step back and examine the goals of higher education. "What," he asked, "are we trying to do with the definition?"

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Are You First Gen? Depends on Who's Asking (Published 2017)

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Trying to help a high school senior get into his dream school, Laurie Kopp Weingarten called the college to emphasize that the boy should be able to lay claim to the latest, and fuzziest, of all admissions hooks: being a first-generation student.

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Center for First-generation Student Success, an initiative of NASPA and The Suder Foundation (website)

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While the term "first-generation" may seem self-explanatory, the nuance of the identity does require examination.

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The Hechinger Report (higher education news)

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Robert Aranda knew it was coming. For years, his daughter Alexis had been telling him that she wanted to go far away for college. Since Aranda had never attended college himself and his oldest daughter had gone to a local school while living at home, he wasn't sure what to expect.

"I was concerned and afraid of what might happen to her, but you cannot cut their wings," said Aranda, an operations manager for a talent supply chain company. When Alexis accepted an offer from St. Mary's University in San Antonio - a four-hour drive from their home in McAllen, Texas - one of his main concerns was for her safety. He asked school officials for information about the frequency of rape on campus, but says they couldn't give him the assurances he desired.

Eventually, Aranda accepted that there would always be a certain amount of risk in letting his daughter go off on her own. And he found other ways to assure himself that she'd be OK: He and his wife scrutinized the campus when they dropped her off, and have been visiting monthly. He talks to Alexis nearly every day.

Aranda is also part of a Facebook group with other parents of first-generation college students, whom he met through a federal government program called Gear Up. Besides safety, a frequent topic for the group is how to stay on top of financial aid. Parents exchange tips on identifying grants and scholarships, refiling the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and completing income verification forms with the IRS. They can also text an adviser at Gear Up with questions like these, which are exactly the sorts of issues that can trip up their children on the road to graduation.

About a third of students whose parents didn't attend college drop out, compared with 26 percent of students whose parents attended some college and 14 percent of those whose parents hold bachelor's degrees.

Students who are first in their families to attend college contend with unique challenges. They are more likely to come from poor-performing high schools, low-income backgrounds and households where English isn't spoken. And without the benefit of parents' college-going experience, they have fewer tools to navigate college bureaucracies and day-to-day campus life. These factors combine to depress first-generation student graduation rates, say higher education experts. According to one study, a third of first-generation college students drop out within three years.

In recent years, colleges have been trying to slow that exodus by creating offices devoted to first-generation students, organizing peer groups and connecting students with tutoring and extra support. Now some institutions are coming to realize that programming for first-generation students isn't enough to get them across the finish line - they also need to target their parents. Gear Up, which has long supported low-income families with college prep and applications, recently extended its model through the first year of college. And a handful of colleges and universities are designing outreach efforts for parents of first-generation students, and finding new ways to engage them in campus events.

"It's necessary for us as institutions to engage those parents and families of first-generation students and help them understand the college process, so they can also be supportive in that way," said Amy Baldwin, who oversees the Department of Student Transitions at the University of Central Arkansas and is an adviser to the Center for First-Generation Student Success. She said that more institutions may try to find ways to include parents and families in their children's higher education in the coming years.
Related: How first-generation students are helping each other through college
Today, about a third of students enrolled in higher education are the first in their families to attend college. Research suggests that having even one parent who has attended some college can boost student success. In a study last year, the Department of Education found that about a third of students whose parents didn't attend college dropped out, compared with 26 percent of students whose parents attended some college and 14 percent of those whose parents hold bachelor's degrees. In an earlier study, researchers found that first-generation students were most likely to drop out between their freshman and sophomore years.

At Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, which reports that more than a third of its students are first generation, administrators have zeroed in on that first year as a key part of their strategy to retain students, according to Celestino Limas, the school's vice president for student life. Limas piloted a 7-week interactive online video course last fall for parents of freshmen students, which he described as an "extension" of the school's freshman orientation. He and student government representatives talked about what to expect from campus life and how parents can to talk to their children about their studies, financial situations and social lives, which are sensitive subjects for both sides.

"Often, parents want to know how to ask certain questions to their students, or how to talk to their kids about relationships [on campus]," Limas said, noting that more than 200 parents enrolled in the course.

The topics of the videos, which remain available to parents online, range from discussions about tuition changes and campus services to milestones such as midterms and finals, when students might be under extra stress.

In one of the videos, separation anxiety and financial concerns were common themes. One parent typed in to ask whether a child's scholarship would be affected by the school's plan to reduce tuition the following year, while another wanted to know if the campus featured social events for students every weekend. Learning how to effectively manage college's abundance of free time - which can be a shock for many students who are accustomed to a structured schedule in high school - was also a focus of questions.

Time management posed a particular challenge for first-generation student Kylar Harvey.* After arriving at Elizabethtown in fall 2016, he had trouble juggling her classwork while also dedicating three hours a day to the swim team. A car accident that winter left him even more overwhelmed by schoolwork and the responsibilities of living on his own, he said. Instead of alleviating stress, communication with his parents back home in Easton, Pennsylvania, exacerbated it.

"My family put a lot of pressure on me because I'm the last chance [for someone in my family] to get a good education and a good job," said Harvey, now a rising senior. "I felt like I needed to lie to my parents and [say] that I was doing well in college."

Eventually, Harvey said, he confided in his mother, and lifted his grades with the help of a campus program that provides intensive academic counseling for first-generation students. But the pressure he felt from her family, as if he were carrying all their dreams on his shoulders, captures how the transition to college can be especially difficult for first-generation students, say people who work in higher education.

"My family put a lot of pressure on me because I'm the last chance [for someone in my family] to get a good education and a good job. I felt like I needed to lie to my parents and [say] that I was doing well in college."

Administrators at Virginia Commonwealth University had in mind experiences like Harvey's when they began to develop outreach programs to families of first-generation students, said Daphne Rankin, the associate vice provost. Since 2014, the university has offered online video courses similar to those at Elizabethtown, but starting this fall, it will also host meetings over Zoom exclusively for first-generation parents, she said.

The needs of these parents "are very different at times than the rest of the parent cohorts," said Rankin, who serves as an adviser to the Center for First-Generation Student Success. "Many can't imagine not having students at home and what life will be like, so they make the transition for students even harder without realizing it."

Some colleges are trying to bridge the divides between their programs for parents and those for students. At UCLA, for example, the school's office for first-generation students has started to work more closely with its office of parent and family programs, said La'Tonya Rease Miles, director of first year experience and strategic initiatives at UCLA and a national expert on the subject.

One example of that coordination, Miles said, came after the school opened a new residential floor specifically for first-generation students. When students move in, their parents are now invited to attend a reception, where translators are available to answer questions they have.
Related: How educational opportunity programs graduate first-generation college students
"We want to make sure [first-generation parents'] experiences here are more meaningful, and happen earlier and more often," Miles said. "We want them to be part of the welcoming, to stay for a moment and come see your student move in and not feel rushed to leave campus."

St. Mary's, where Aranda's daughter is going to college, doesn't offer explicit programs for parents of first-generation students, he said, though officials there have been responsive to his many questions. A spokesperson for St. Mary's told The Hechinger Report that the school offers parent-focused sessions for incoming and current freshmen students during orientation events and also has a mentoring program for first-generation students in their first year.

Aranda instead turns to Gear Up, whose advisers work with cohorts of students before they enroll in any specific college. After helping students and their families navigate high school and the college admissions process, Gear Up stays in contact as the students head off to their respective schools both near and far.

"Parents have to be part of any education program, or else you're not going to be successful," said Margaret Boyter-Escalona, who started working for Gear Up in 1999 and now serves as the associate director of the program's Chicago office. When she started, she was hearing from parents who felt patronized by administrators at their children's schools.

" 'They don't listen to us, they talk at us, they tell us what we should think,' " Boyter-Escalona recalled hearing from parents. She and her Gear Up staff took the opposite approach, presuming parents were experts in raising their children. A dissertation that looked at the first 10 years of Gear Up's results found that students in the program whose parents took an active interest in their education had better GPAs and a greater commitment to attending college.

"Institutions are finally understanding, especially for first-generation college families, the family goes together. The student is the one who takes the classes, but it's a family event."

A few years ago, in response to growing concerns that participating students were making it to college but not finishing, Gear Up applied for funds to support families even after their children had left home.

"The first year is tough for everyone, especially if you're a first-generation college goer," said Wendy Stack, director of the Gear Up program in Chicago.

The organization moved away from holding group activities for parents and toward a coaching model in which they could answer the questions of individual parents. For the most part, said Lorena Gasca, the senior program manager for Gear Up's college transition team, those questions focus on financial aid, a frequent stumbling block for first-generation families.

Gasca said she is pleased to see more higher education institutions reaching out to first-generation parents. "Institutions are finally understanding, especially for first-generation college families, the family goes together," she said. "The student is the one who takes the classes, but it's a family event."

Since his daughter Alexis enrolled at St. Mary's, Robert Aranda has gone back to school himself. Most evenings after work he hits the books in pursuit of an associate's degree in business administration. It's not an uncommon thing; several Gear Up participants who spoke with The Hechinger Report said they were inspired to enroll in college after getting involved in their children's educational pursuits.
*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of the name of Elizabethtown student Kylar Harvey.
Aranda said he'd been thinking for some time of enrolling, but that "having to guide my daughters to college has certainly awakened in me the need to 'walk the talk.' "

If all goes as planned, Aranda will finish his studies by the fall and have an associate degree in hand. Then, Aranda says, he will start the second phase of his program - obtaining a bachelor's degree at the end - and, he hopes, join his daughters as a four-year college graduate.

This story about first-generation college students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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To help first-generation students succeed, colleges enlist their parents

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Robert Aranda knew it was coming. For years, his daughter Alexis had been telling him that she wanted to go far away for college. Since Aranda had never attended college himself and his oldest daughter had gone to a local school while living at home, he wasn't sure what to expect.

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SCSU Program for Families

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Welcome to the Sankofa First-Generation Family Initiative, or Sankofa! This website aims to mentor and empower parents/families with the tools they need to understand how college works through the lens of a college student and what university resources exist at Southern. Selected resources are organized by highlighting information that helps students be successful during their first and second years at Southern. This site's information assists parents/families with meaningful tips to help their students with academic, financial, social/emotional, and other challenges unique to college students.

The word "Sankofa" originates from the Ghanaian languages of Akan Twi and Fante. When translated to English means "to go back and fetch or retrieve it." The symbol of Sankofa is a bird looking back as if it's taking an egg from its back. It represents the critical need and importance of acknowledging and reflecting, going back to our roots to fully bring the knowledge of those that came before us to the present, with the hope that we will thrive and reach our fullest potential. Earning a college degree transforms lives and communities.
We know that students will draw on many forms of support to make it through their educational journeys, but the most influential and most important supporters are those who love their students the most- their parents/families!

Mission of Sankofa

The Sankofa First-Generation Family Initiative is an innovation to show how much Southern values the strong impact of parents/families on individual student success. Sankofa seeks to recognize parent/family influence and increase family engagement to help more students graduate from college. Sankofa aims to deepen familial emotional support through developing knowledge of the college experience, particularly for students who the first in their family to go to college. Sankofa will empower parents to have critical conversations through ongoing communication that helps create empathy and shared commitment to the sacrifices and determination required to earn a college degree.

Vision of Sankofa

The Sankofa First-Generation Family Initiative will provide parents/families another level of support as they are helping their students stay the course and better navigate the unique challenges that arise in college. Parents/families will better understand how to help with well-being of their student. Sankofa will also empower parents/families to encourage their students to use campus resources as much as they need to be successful. Parents will be success partners and learn to develop a new relationship with their student(s) as your student becomes an adult.

OwlChats

Information regarding Fall 2022 OwlChats will be announced in September.

Stay Updated

To get frequent updates about our events and programs, as well as campus life join our Sankofa: First-Generation Family Engagement Facebook group.

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Sankofa: A First-Generation Family Engagement Initiative

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Welcome to the Sankofa First-Generation Family Initiative, or Sankofa! This website aims to mentor and empower parents/families with the tools they need to understand how college works through the lens of a college student and what university resources exist at Southern.

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Aimed at first-gen and other minority academic employees, this will be enlightening to anyone involved in academia. "For those academics who are first-generation, who are racialized, who are women, and who inhabit social locations that are traditionally unrepresented in this exclusionary space, academia is full of landmines. This is why we need academic aunties. Every month, we hear stories and advice from those who have survived and even thrived while navigating this treacherous world. And while we’re at it, we try and plant the seeds for structural transformation."

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Academic Aunties - Stories and Advice from Survivors of Academia

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For those academics who are first-generation, who are racialized, who are women, and who inhabit social locations that are traditionally unrepresented in this exclusionary space, academia is full of landmines. This is why we need academic aunties. Every month, we hear stories and advice from those who have survived and even thrived while navigating this treacherous world. And while we're at it, we try and plant the seeds for structural transformation.

New episodes drop every two weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts!
Other platforms

Love Academic Aunties? There are lots of ways to support the podcast!

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Academic Aunties - Stories and Advice from Survivors of Academia

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For those academics who are first-generation, who are racialized, who are women, and who inhabit social locations that are traditionally unrepresented in this exclusionary space, academia is full of landmines. This is why we need academic aunties. Every month, we hear stories and advice from those who have survived and even thrived while navigating this treacherous world.

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Is Grad School for Me? : Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students (ebook)

Martínez-Vu, Yvette. ; Chávez-García, Miroslava, 1968- author.

Berkeley : University of California Press 2024

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How Faculty Mentors Can Help First-Generation Students Succeed (Video)

Infobase, film distributor; MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, 2018.

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Insider Higher Ed (higher education news)

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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First-generation students describe paths to college success

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While first-generation college students’ backgrounds and challenges are unique to the individual, they tend to have high expectations and multifaceted postgraduation goals—plus complex support needs.

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Teaching STEM to first generation college students: a guidebook for faculty & future faculty (eBook)

Horowitz, Gail, author.

Charlotte, North Carolina : Information Age Publishing, Inc. [2019]

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Creating the path to success in the classroom : teaching to close the graduation gap for minority, first-generation & academically unprepared students (eBook)

Gabriel, Kathleen F., author. ; Carroll, Stephen, writer of foreword.

Sterling, Virginia : Stylus [2018]

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National Center for Educational Statistics (federal government website)

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Anthony Jack studies why minority students, especially first gen students, don't always succeed in college, even when they get in

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On Diversity: Access Ain’t Inclusion | Anthony Jack | TEDxCambridge

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Ready, willing, and able : a developmental approach to college access and success (Hardcopy book)

Savitz-Romer, Mandy. ; Bouffard, Suzanne M.

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Education Press [2012]

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Pew Research (website; survey data)

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Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project

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College graduates without a college-educated parent have lower incomes and less wealth, on average, than those with a parent who has a bachelor's or higher degree

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand more about how the educational background of parents is linked to their children's labor market and economic outcomes. Much has been written about the impact parental education has on children's educational attainment, but less is known about the longer-term impact on economic well-being. Two surveys collected by the Federal Reserve are used to illuminate this relationship. The larger and more recent Survey of Household and Economic Decisionmaking (SHED) collects information on the type of college the adult attended and has a battery of questions on educational debt. The analysis examines adults ages 22 to 59, of which there are 7,429 unweighted respondents in the 2019 SHED. The SHED is not designed to precisely measure economic outcomes such as income and wealth. The well-known Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is the gold-standard for measurement of household wealth, and the 2019 collection ascertained the respondent's parental levels of education. The SCF also has information on inheritances received and expected. This allows us to explore the relationship between the economic outcomes of the head of the household and parental education and some of the ways in which college-educated parents are able to transmit their wealth to their offspring.

In this report, references to college graduates or people who are college educated comprise those with a bachelor's degree or more. Some college includes those with an associate degree, certificate, or technical degree and those who attended college but did not obtain a degree.

A first-generation college graduate refers to a person who has completed at least a bachelor's degree but does not have a parent who has completed at least a bachelor's degree. A second-generation college graduate has at least one parent who has completed at least a bachelor's degree.

Net worth or wealth is the difference between the value of what the household owns (assets) and what it owes (debts).

References to White and Black adults include only those who are not Hispanic and identify as only one race. Hispanics are of any race.

A new graduate poses with her family for commencement day at Harvard University in May 2019. (Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images)

Even as the cost of college continues to rise, with student debt levels climbing along with it, the long-term financial benefits of a four-year college degree remain indisputable. Adults who have attained at least a bachelor's degree have better economic outcomes, on average, than adults who have not completed college. They tend to earn more and accumulate more wealth.

But the economic benefits are not equally felt among college graduates. A new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Reserve Board finds that first-generation college graduates are not on equal footing with their peers who have college-educated parents. Among household heads who have at least a bachelor's degree, those who have a parent with a bachelor's degree or more education have substantially higher incomes and more wealth than those who are the first generation in their family to graduate from college.

Adults who have at least one college-educated parent are far more likely to complete college compared with adults with less-educated parents. Some 70% of adults ages 22 to 59 with at least one parent who has a bachelor's degree or more education have completed a bachelor's degree themselves. Only 26% of their peers who do not have a college-educated parent have a bachelor's degree.

Scholars and higher education administrators have focused on the many challenges facing students whose parents have never attended college. Enrolling in U.S. higher education is a complicated multistep process that includes completing college prep coursework in high school and navigating the admissions and financial aid process. Whether labelled "college knowledge" or "cultural capital," students whose parents have their own experience and success in how to go to college have greater access to postsecondary education. Once on campus, students whose parents have not attended college are less likely to complete a degree.

For adults who do complete a bachelor's degree, financial outcomes are strongly linked to parental educational attainment. The median household income for households headed by a first-generation college graduate ($99,600) is substantially lower than the income for households headed by a second-generation graduate ($135,800).

The median wealth of households headed by a first-generation college graduate ($152,000) also substantially trails that of households headed by a second-generation college graduate ($244,500). The higher household income of the latter facilitates saving and wealth accumulation. The gap also reflects differences in how individuals finance their education. Second-generation college graduates tend to come from more affluent families. First-generation college graduates are more likely to incur education debt than those with a college-educated parent. They also have greater amounts of outstanding education debt.

The benefits of having a college-educated parent don't necessarily extend to those who don't graduate from college themselves. Among adults who have not graduated from college, there is no substantial economic boost associated with having a parent with at least a bachelor's degree.

Adults with college-educated parents are much more likely than others to have graduated from college themselves

The likelihood of an adult completing a bachelor's degree increases as their parents' educational attainment rises. Among adults ages 22 to 59 whose parents have no education beyond high school, 20% have completed at least a bachelor's degree. Among those who have at least one parent who has completed some college, 34% have finished a bachelor's degree. The share rises substantially for adults with one parent who has at least a bachelor's degree, 60% of whom have completed college. Among adults whose parents have both finished college, 82% have at least a bachelor's degree.

This pattern is consistent across demographic groups. Among White adults, those with at least one parent who has a bachelor's degree or more education are more than twice as likely to be college graduates themselves as those who don't have a college-educated parent (72% vs. 29%). Black adults who have a parent with at least a bachelor's degree are also much more likely to have finished college than Black adults who don't have a college-educated parent (57% vs. 21%). For Hispanic adults, the pattern is similar: 58% of those with a college-educated parent have a bachelor's degree themselves. By comparison, only 15% of those who don't have a college-educated parent are bachelor's degree holders.

Among both men and women, those with a parent who has obtained at least a bachelor's degree are much more likely to have graduated from college than those whose parents did not attain at least bachelor's degree.

And while younger adults are more likely to have completed at least a bachelor's degree than older adults, the advantage associated with having a college-educated parent is similar across age groups. For example, among 22- to 29-year-olds, those with a college-educated parent are more than twice as likely to have completed a bachelor's degree as those without a college-educated parent (72% vs. 28%). The pattern is similar among 45- to 59-year-olds: 63% of those with a college-educated parent have a bachelor's degree compared with 24% of those without a college-educated parent.

The type of higher education institution adults attended differs according to their parents' educational attainment

Not only is parental education linked to college completion, it is also related to the type of institution a person attends. Among adults who attended college, those who have a parent with a bachelor's degree or more education are more likely than those without a college-educated parent to have gone to a four-year institution (85% vs. 61%, respectively).

Research has shown that students who initially attend a four-year college or university are more likely to complete a bachelor's degree than those who attend a two-year institution. Adults who have completed a bachelor's degree tend to earn substantially more than those with some college.

Patterns also differ by type of college or university. Among adults who attended college, those with a college-educated parent are more likely than first-generation college students to have attended a private institution (29% vs. 17% of those without a college-educated parent). The latter group is more likely than those with a college-educated parent to have attended a private, for-profit institution.

In addition, the selectivity of the college an individual attends differs based on their parents' educational attainment. Among those who attended college, adults with a parent who has a bachelor's degree or more education are more likely than those without a college-educated parent to have attended a "more selective" school (51% vs. 23%, respectively). By contrast, those who don't have a parent with a four-year college degree are much more likely to have attended a less selective college - 54% vs. 24% of those with a college-educated parent. Previous research has shown that the admissions selectivity of the institution impacts the likelihood of completion.

The household incomes of first-generation college graduates lag those of other graduates

Beyond a boost in educational attainment, adults who have a college-educated parent enjoy, on average, better economic returns.

Households headed by an adult age 22 to 59 who has a parent with at least a bachelor's degree had a median adjusted household income in 2019 of $100,900 - significantly above those headed by an adult whose parents lack a bachelor's degree ($65,200). This partly reflects that the former household heads are more likely to have attained a bachelor's degree than the latter.

The income advantage of having a parent who has at least a bachelor's degree, sometimes dubbed the " parent premium," is largely confined to college-educated household heads. The median household income for household heads who have a bachelor's degree and a college-educated parent was $135,800 in 2019. By comparison, household heads with a bachelor's degree whose parents did not graduate from college had a substantially lower median income - $99,600.

Among households headed by those with some college education, the difference in household income between those who have a parent with at least a bachelor's degree ($70,500) and those who don't ($67,000) is modest. The pattern is similar for household heads with a high school diploma or less education.

Some of the household income gap between college graduates with and without a college-educated parent likely reflects educational differences between these two groups. Second-generation college graduates are more likely to finish a master's degree, professional degree or doctoral degree. Among 22- to 59-year-old college graduates, 43% of those who have a parent with at least a bachelor's degree have completed an advanced degree. This compares with 35% of first-generation college graduates. Census data shows that household heads with a master's degree have a median household income of $117,400. The median incomes of those holding professional and doctoral degrees are $162,100 and $142,300, respectively. Households heads having a bachelor's degree but no advanced degree have a lower median income ($100,200).

To be sure, there are differences in the demographic composition of households headed by first- and second-generation college graduates that may account for some of the differences in economic outcomes for these two groups. For example, Black and Hispanic college graduates, who tend to have lower median incomes than their White counterparts, make up a larger share of first-generation than second-generation graduates. Still, parental education matters even when taking race and ethnicity into account. A large income gap by parental education is apparent when the analysis is restricted to White families. Additional recent research finds that parental education matters for the earnings of Black and Hispanic college graduates.

The household income gap is not due to differences in marital status, as first-generation college graduates are as likely as other college graduates to be married.

Second-generation college graduates have substantially more wealth than first-generation college graduates

Similar to household income, there is a substantial wealth gap between households headed by a first-generation college graduate versus those headed by a second-generation college graduate, and, again, the difference is particularly pronounced among those with a bachelor's degree. Wealth is different than the household's income stream. Wealth is the value of all the assets owned by the household (cars, homes, financial assets, businesses, etc.) minus outstanding debts owed by the household. Wealth is valuable because it can be used to tide the household over if its income is interrupted (due to layoff, illness, or variable earnings) as well as fund retirement. It can also be used to pay for a child's college expenses.

Households headed by an adult age 22 to 59 who has a parent with at least a bachelor's degree have more than twice the median wealth ($132,100) of similar households headed by an adult without a college-educated parent ($60,700). This partly reflects the higher educational attainment of the former group, as median wealth steeply increases with the educational attainment of the household head. The typical wealth level of a household headed by a four-year college graduate is $202,500, far surpassing the wealth level of the typical household headed by a high school graduate ($31,200).

Among households headed by a college graduate, the median wealth of those with a parent who has at least a bachelor's degree ($244,500) is nearly $100,000 greater than the wealth of those who don't have a college-educated parent ($152,000).

The wealth disadvantage of households headed by a first-generation college graduate partly reflect their lower household income. Higher household income makes it easier for the household to save and accumulate wealth.

Educational debt is another factor that likely contributes to the wealth gap. First-generation college graduates are more likely to have incurred debt for their education than second-generation college graduates. The amounts outstanding also tend to be greater.

Two-thirds of first-generation college graduates incurred debt for their own education (this includes both those with outstanding debt and debt that has been repaid). In comparison, 56% of those with a college-educated parent incurred educational debt.

Among college graduates with any outstanding debt for their education, first-generation college graduates tend to owe more. About two-thirds (65%) of first-generation college graduates owe at least $25,000 or more, compared with 57% of second-generation college graduates.

Parental education does not influence the incidence and levels of education debt among adults who have not finished at least a bachelor's degree. For example, adults with some college are roughly equally likely to report borrowing for their education regardless of their parents' education levels.

Inheritance boosts the wealth levels of children of college graduates

Aside from paying for their college, another way in which college-educated parents can boost their children's wealth is by directly transferring it to them, i.e., giving them an inheritance. Again, the benefit of having a college-educated parent is much more apparent if the child completes at least a bachelor's degree. Differences in parental bequest behavior are modest for some adults who do not finish college.

One-in-five household heads who has a parent with at least a bachelor's degree report receiving an inheritance, trust, or substantial gift, in comparison to 14% of heads of less-educated parents. For households headed by a college graduate, 23% of those with a parent who is also college-educated have received an inheritance. By comparison, 14% of those without a college-educated parent report getting an inheritance.

Although some people haven't received an inheritance, they may expect to at some point in the future.

Household heads who have a parent who has completed a bachelor's degree (27%) are about twice as likely as heads without a college-educated parent (12%) to expect to receive an inheritance at a later date.

Roughly a third (32%) of heads who are second-generation college graduates expect to receive an inheritance. Only 15% of heads who are first-generation college graduates expect an inheritance.

Parental education also influences the size of the inheritance expected. The median expected inheritance is $250,000 if the head has a parent who has finished at least a bachelor's degree, this compares with $100,000 for heads who don't have a college-educated parent.

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First-Generation College Graduates Lag Behind Their Peers on Key Economic Outcomes

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Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand more about how the educational background of parents is linked to their children's labor market and economic outcomes. Much has been written about the impact parental education has on children's educational attainment, but less is known about the longer-term impact on economic well-being.

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The Brookings Institution (website)

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About 40% of UC-Santa Barbara students represent the first generation in their family to attend college-something my university is proud of. Often, first-generation students come from low-income backgrounds, but are they really all that different from other students who grew up in poverty but are not the first in their families to attend college? At the national level, how do first-gen students fare in college, and how are they supported?

In this post, I first provide some basic, data-based facts about these students. Unless otherwise mentioned, all our data comes from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. This survey has been conducted every eight years since 1990, and it collects information from beginning college students at the end of their first year, and then three and six years after starting college. For this post, I look only at students enrolled in four-year schools, and "first-gen" means neither parent has a four-year degree. I conclude with some discussion of evidence and reminders that "first-gen" and "low-income" are not synonymous labels for college students.

Fact 1: First-gen students are now a sizable, stable population among college enrollment.

The first fact is that neither college-entering rates nor college-graduating rates for first-gen students have changed much in recent years (see Figure 1 below). But note that they decreased drastically in the '90s-partially due to the increased bachelor's attainment rate in the U.S. in the '60s and '70s-leading to more college-goers having at least one college-educated parent. Today, over 40% of entering students are first-gen, as are about one-third of graduating students. (In Figure 1, the label "Class of 2015" means students who would have graduated in 2015 if they spent four years earning their bachelor's. As is standard, the calculation of graduation rates allows up to six years for graduation.)

Fact 2: First-gen students disproportionately enroll in less-selective colleges.

There is a very striking pattern when one looks at first-gen enrollment across college selectivity levels.

In open-admission schools, two-thirds of students are first-gen. Contrast this with "very selective" schools, where less than one-third of students are first-gen. (As an aside, the high proportion of first-gen students at my large, R1 university appears to be something of an anomaly.) The fact that very selective schools have lower fractions of first-gen students is likely not surprising as these schools are (a) more expensive and (b) require more savvy and resources on how to get admitted (i.e., guidance from parents). Unfortunately, as you will see next, outcomes for first-gen students are better precisely at those very selective schools where they are least likely to attend.

Fact 3: First-gen students complete college at lower rates than their peers.

Most first-gen students who attend a very or moderately selective school graduate, while the large majority of first-gen students who attend an open-admissions school do not. Of course, the more selective schools cherry-pick students likely to graduate, where open admission schools take all comers who meet basic qualifications. However, the same cherry-picking-or-not distinction is true for non-first-gen students. At very selective schools, family educational background is associated with a modest difference in graduation rates (10 percentage points). In contrast, the graduation rate for first-gen students at open-admission schools is below half the rate for non-first-gen by a gap of 23 percentage points.

First-gen students are different from low-income students

I dug a little deeper into graduation rates by running regressions predicting whether a student graduated on the basis of both first-gen status and parents' income. First-gen students tend to come from lower-income families (average family income of $58,000 by my calculations) than do non-first-gen students (average family income of $120,000). Perhaps the differences in graduation rates are explained by these large differences in family income?

The first lesson from the analysis is that, while income matters, first-gen status matters even when controlling for income. Holding all else equal, I find that first-gen students are 16% less likely overall to graduate than are non-first-gen students with equal parental income. So being a first-gen student really does mean something more than just coming from a low-income family. This finding resonates with other studies that have looked at the experiences of first-gen students. (For further reading, see Terenzini et al., Engle, and Engle and Tinto.)

The second lesson from the regressions is that the apparently varying first-gen/non-first-gen gaps in graduation rate by college selectivity-the ones shown in Figure 3 above-are mostly about the same size after controlling for family income. With these models, I find that first-gen students are about 16 percentage points less likely to graduate than other students at institutions of varying levels of selectivity. The exception is very selective institutions, where the first-gen difference is only about 7 percentage points.

First-gen students warrant more support than they get

I also examined financial aid. Interestingly, public universities give more financial aid to first-gen students while private universities give more to non-first-gen students. (Data for this question comes from the 2016 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, which is a little more current than the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey.) The survey data shows first-gen students in public universities get about $5,100 in need-based aid and $10,100 total in their senior year, while non-first-gen students get about $3,200 in need-based aid and $8,700 overall. In private universities, first-gen students get about $8,900 in need-based aid and $19,400 overall, while non-first-gen students get about $8,800 in need-based aid and $22,000 overall.

In other words, public universities give first-gen students more need-based aid than non-first-gen students receive, presumably reflecting income differences. Merit-based aid is about equal. In contrast, at private universities, non-first-gen students get about $2,600 more financial aid than do first-gen students. What's happening at private universities, presumably, is that non-first-gen students are competed for with considerably more "merit-based' aid.

Prior research suggests that increased financial aid is particularly important in helping first-gen students succeed, though other academic supports could help as well. Angrist, Autor, and Pallais conducted a field experiment that randomly assigned aid to Nebraska high school graduates to study the effect of merit aids on college degree completion. They found that the estimated effect for first-gen students is twice as large as the estimates for students from more-educated families. Further, Angrist, Lang and, Oreopoulos found that a combination of financial aid for higher grades (with enhanced academic support services) was especially effective for first-gen students, but only for women as it had little apparent effect for men.

In summary, first-gen students do well at selective institutions, but the less selective institutions that most attend haven't found a way to get graduation rates up compared to rates for non-first-gen students. Part of the difference in outcomes is due to first-gen students coming from lower-income families. Income differences don't explain everything though. The disadvantages of coming from a family where you are a pioneer in higher education are real.
The author is grateful to UC-Santa Barbara undergraduates and Gretler Fellows Leshan Xu and Karen Zhao for research assistance.

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First-generation college students face unique challenges

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About 40% of UC-Santa Barbara students represent the first generation in their family to attend college-something my university is proud of. Often, first-generation students come from low-income backgrounds, but are they really all that different from other students who grew up in poverty but are not the first in their families to attend college?

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Straddling class in the academy : 26 stories of students, administrators, and faculty from poor and working-class backgrounds and their compelling lessons for higher education policy and practice (eBook)

Ardoin, Sonja, author. ; Washington, Jamie, writer of foreword. ; Martinez, Becky, author.

Sterling, Virginia : Stylus [2019]

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Student Persistence and Retention: The Perception of Educational Attainment from Underrepresented Sophomore Students (Online thesis)

Grimalli, Julia

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing 2018

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Technology and Engagement : Making Technology Work for First Generation College Students (eBook)

Rowan-Kenyon, Heather T., author. ; Alemán, Ana M. Martínez, author. ; Savitz-Romer, Mandy, author.

New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press [2018]

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33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-By-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students (eBook)

Nunn, Lisa M., author.

New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press [2018]

# data[].attributes.body
Clearing the path for first generation college students : qualitative and intersectional studies of educational mobility (eBook)

Rondini, Ashley C., editor. ; Richards, Bedelia Nicola, editor. ; Simon, Nicolas P., editor.

Lanham : Lexington Books [2018]

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College aspirations and access in working-class rural communities : the mixed signals, challenges, and new language first-generation students encounter (eBook)

Ardoin, Sonja, author.

Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books 2018

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Why it's so important for faculty to recognize first-gen status of students and colleagues

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Main

Professors play a unique role in the knowledge economy: they both train the next generation of thinkers and generate new scholarship, which informs national policy and advances scientific discoveries. But the professoriate has never represented the sociodemographic characteristics of the population it serves. While the diversity of the educational pipeline has been extensively studied in terms of race and ethnicity1,2,3, and the links between parental income and occupational status, and their children's educational attainment are well documented4,5,6,7, there exist comparatively few systematic studies on the socioeconomic roots of professors or how their socioeconomic origins interact with institutional prestige. Analyses of the socioeconomic backgrounds of faculty will both improve our understanding of the social reproduction of the highest levels of academic attainment and scientific influence, and provide a quantitative basis for studies of how representational diversity influences which and what kind of discoveries are made.

From early childhood through advanced degree attainment, family socioeconomic origins shape educational outcomes8. Parental socioeconomic status (SES) impacts children's educational attainment in numerous ways. Parents with higher SES, who tend to be college-educated and occupy high-status occupations, cultivate advantaged cultural and social capital for their children9. Parents with high SES also engage in 'concerted cultivation', whereby parents prioritize organized activities that facilitate educational success10, and spend an increasingly large amount of time on developmental activities that advantage their children's attainment7. Families with parents with high SES also have more information about schooling and resourceful social networks than working-class families. Research also suggests that middle- and upper-class students request accommodations and attention in school that ultimately advantage them in their attainment11. These networks function through power and privilege across racial, ethnic and social class lines, forming unequal opportunities for academic success. SES and race also impact where families live and the schools that children attend. The dispositions and skills of students with high SES are judged differently by teachers and other school personnel who favour the cultural capital of middle- and upper-class youth12. Ultimately, parents, teachers and students behave in ways that reproduce class and racial inequality in academic achievement9. Schools in more and less advantaged neighbourhoods differ markedly in resources available to students13,14. These factors all contribute to the substantial effects of family SES on postsecondary schooling.

Research has shown notable socioeconomic differences in not only whether individuals attend and complete college, but also where they attend, with more advantaged students attending more selective institutions. Students completing degrees at highly selective institutions are more likely to come from the top 1% of the US income distribution than from the bottom 50%15. Students from more disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds who attend college, particularly those who attend selective colleges, also have different experiences on campus that are less conducive to academic success than their higher socioeconomic peers16,17.

Family SES also influences graduate school applications and admissions18, as well as students' experiences once accepted19,20. In fact, graduate and professional degrees are substantially more heritable than other levels of education. Individuals with parents who have a doctorate or professional degree are increasingly overrepresented among doctorate and professional degree holders20. Moreover, research on social mobility suggests that the association between parents' SES and their children's status is larger among postgraduate than bachelor's degree recipients19,20. Occupational closure plays an important role in the intergenerational transmission of status21, and an association between children and their parents' occupations (sometimes called micro-class reproduction) has persisted for decades22. Unequal social, cultural and financial capital help reproduce micro-class advantages across generations, and the professoriate may be an occupation with a high level of closure and reproduction.

The accumulation and consequences of these tendencies can be expected to limit the socioeconomic diversity of the professoriate. However, the extent and shape of this association, and its precise interactions with gender, race, ethnicity, academic discipline and prestige are less well understood. Past work shows that faculty are increasingly representative of highly educated families23, while professors from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds report hyperawareness of how those backgrounds impact their careers24, which can make them feel like outsiders in academia25. SES may also interact with academic job placement. Vague narrow definitions of merit or 'fit' disadvantage the work of marginalized scholars, particularly racial minorities26 or those from working-class or poor backgrounds27, due to differences in social and cultural capital between these applicants and faculty search committees21. Structural factors that influence whether and where a person earns a faculty job, as well as difficulties once employed, will influence the composition of the professoriate.

Beyond composition alone, representational diversity is known to improve academic scholarship28, and a lack of socioeconomic diversity is likely to deeply shape the type of scholarship that faculty produce and the scholars they train. Recent studies have begun quantifying how researcher identity affects research topic choices29, as well as the evaluation of that work30,31. However, it remains generally unclear what scholarship is missing as a result of limited representational diversity across the professoriate, in part because we lack a clear and quantitative view of current diversity and its roots.

Here, we develop such a view by investigating the indicators of childhood SES of US-based tenure-track professors across eight disciplines spanning science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), the social sciences and the humanities. Tenure-track faculty positions are less financially precarious than contingent positions, rendering the socioeconomic representation of the faculty who obtain these privileged positions notable for social reproduction. We consider how SES is systematically related to faculty placement within academia, how the role of SES varies across broad disciplines, and how parental advanced degrees relate to the likelihood that their children become and remain as faculty. We conclude by suggesting how socioeconomic diversity and its historical trends may limit diversity in the professoriate.

Results

To study the childhood SES of US faculty, we conducted a large survey of tenure-track faculty at Ph.D.-granting departments in the United States from eight academic disciplines. Responses include information on the education levels of parents and the zip code where faculty grew up. We augmented our survey data with national estimates of educational attainment, income and rural or urban classification by zip code from the US Census, National Science Foundation (NSF) Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), Internal Review Service (IRS), US News and World Report (USNWR) and the National Research Council (NRC), which allowed us to contrast survey characteristics with patterns in the general US population.

We conducted the online survey between summer 2017 and autumn 2020 on a frame of 46,692 current tenure-track faculty across 1,360 Ph.D.-granting departments in Computer Science, Business, History, Psychology, Physics and Astronomy, Sociology, Anthropology and Biology. These eight academic disciplines were chosen for their diversity of scholarship and represent a broad sample of tenure-track faculty at research intensive institutions in the United States. The sample frame was constructed from the online public directories of institutions, allowing us to explicitly compare respondents with the frame.

In total, 7,204 faculty provided information on a parent's level of highest education (15.4% of survey frame) and 4,807 provided the US zip code in which they grew up (10.3%).

Parents' education

Faculty tend to come from highly educated families. Nearly a quarter (22.2%) report at least one of their parents holds a Ph.D., and 3.7% of faculty report both parents hold Ph.D.s. Across all eight disciplines, over half (51.8%) of faculty have at least one parent with a masters degree or Ph.D. (29.6% and 22.2%, respectively; Table 1). In comparison, among adults in the United States aligned to when faculty were born, on average, less than 1% held a Ph.D., and just 7.4% held a graduate degree of any kind.

Table 1 Percentages of faculty by their parents' highest-held degree

We calculated the relative likelihood that a faculty member has a parent with a Ph.D., compared with either the US adult population or parents of Ph.D. recipients, by estimating upper and lower bounds. These bounds correspond to differences in whether these datasets described individuals (US Census and NSF SED) versus households. Across all eight fields, we estimate that faculty are on average between 12 and 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. than the general population, and about twice as likely as other individuals who hold a Ph.D. (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Note C).

Percentages of faculty members by their parents' educational attainment levels ( n = 7,204) divided by either percentages of the US adult population in those educational attainment levels (solid) or percentages of Ph.D. recipients with parents' in those educational attainment levels (dashed)68,69. Disciplines denoted by symbols.

The distributions of parents' educational attainment are similar across the disciplines surveyed, suggesting that despite disciplinary differences in scholarship, funding and culture, having a parent with a Ph.D. is universally advantageous for becoming a professor. The rates at which parents of faculty have a college degree or higher have also slightly increased over time, which mirrors broader social trends in the US population (Fig. 2). Women are particularly more likely to have highly educated mothers: 33.3% of women versus 28.3% of men have a mother who holds a graduate degree (two-tailed test, z = 4.5, n = 7,107, 95% CI = 0.028 to 0.073, P < 0.001). Historically, rates of parents' college completion among women faculty are higher than among men faculty; however, this gap has steadily closed over time fully reaching parity for faculty born in 1985 (Fig. 2).

Percentages of faculty reporting their parents' highest level of education was at least a college degree by faculty year of birth (green), compared with the fraction of US adults earning a college degree or higher in a given year (black). Grey arrows show the difference between men faculty and US adult trends.

Academic support

We find that faculty with Ph.D. parents are far more likely to receive support and encouragement for their academic careers from their parents (on a scale of 1 to 5: 4.5 versus 3.9 for less than Ph.D., two-tailed test, t = 17.2, n = 5,725, 95% CI = 0.497 to 0.625, P < 0.001), which is consistent with prior work32. This question came from an optional later section of the survey, but responses were representative along faculty rank and departmental prestige of the frame (Supplementary Note A). In fact, the career support that faculty report receiving from their parents increases with greater parental education (Fig. 3) and does not depend on faculty gender (average rating of 4.0, two-tailed test, t = − 0.2, n = 5,695, 95% CI = −0.072 to 0.057, P = 0.827). This strong correlation between parental education and faculty career support suggests that the family resources and experiences of faculty with highly educated parents differ from those without highly educated parents and differ in ways that correlate with improving the odds that a person becomes a professor. For example, the degree of family support is known to correlate with both undergraduate and graduate student retention19,33. Given what is known about educational stratification, we expect that there are other sociocultural mechanisms through which being the child of highly educated parents increases the chances of becoming faculty, such as greater identification with academic ideals, more and earlier experiences in activities valued by academia, or simply closer role models34.

Amount of support parents provided for academic careers on a scale of 1 (None at all) to 5 (A lot), stratified by faculty members' parents' highest education levels.

(Proxied) parents' income

Faculty also tend to spend their childhoods in wealthier zip codes than do the general public (Fig. 4). The median proxied household income based on zip code data for surveyed faculty when they were children is 23.6% higher than the median across all zip codes (US $73,000 versus US $59,000, Mann-Whitney U, ρ = 0.4, n = 1.2 × 10 ⁸, P < 0.001). Consistent with the importance of parental education on faculty careers, proxied parental income is correlated with parental education: faculty who reported that at least one of their parents holds a college degree were associated with higher average proxied household incomes (US $78,000) than those who said their parents did not hold a college degree (US $59,000; ρ = 0.3, n = 3,916, P < 0.001). Across disciplines, median proxied parental income remains relatively high, ranging from US $67,000 (Sociology) to US $78,000 (History). Faculty are more likely to have grown up in urban areas compared with the geographic distribution of the US population around the average year faculty were born (89.6% versus 73.6%, point estimates)35. And the majority of faculty reported that their parents owned a home during the first 18 years of their life (75.7% versus 13.4% said primarily rented, and 10.9% rented and owned equally, point estimates), higher than one would expect given rates in the United States at the time (62% of homes owned by their occupants in 196036). Hence, faculty tend to come from families with relatively stable childhood financial circumstances.

Average income distribution estimated using faculty members' childhood zip codes (green), compared with the income distribution across the 1998 US population (black).

Impact of parental education on becoming faculty

Because the educational attainment of parents is strongly correlated with becoming faculty, we can use data on how many Ph.D.s are granted in a given year to forecast the changing composition of the professoriate. To better quantify this relationship, we model how the likelihood of having Ph.D. parents depends on a scholar's characteristics.

Conditioned on having a parent with a Ph.D., the probability of becoming a faculty member is given by:

$$\Pr \left({{{\rm{faculty}}}}| {{{\rm{Ph.D.}}\,{\rm{Parent}}}}\right)=\frac{\Pr \left({{{\rm{Ph.D.}}\,{\rm{Parent}}}}| {{{\rm{faculty}}}}\right)\,\Pr \left({{{\rm{faculty}}}}\right)}{\Pr \left({{{\rm{Ph.D.}}\,{\rm{Parent}}}}\right)}$$

where our estimates of \(\Pr \left({{{\rm{Ph.D.}}\,{\rm{Parent}}}}\,| \,{{{\rm{faculty}}}}\right)\) and \(\Pr \left({{{\rm{Ph.D.}}\,{\rm{Parent}}}}\right)\) are given by the probability of faculty with Ph.D. parents in our survey, and the probability of an adult having a Ph.D. close to the birth year of a professor (22.2% and 0.9%, respectively, Table 1). To estimate the probability of being a tenure-track faculty \(\Pr \left({{{\rm{faculty}}}}\right)\), we assess the proportion of the US adult workforce employed in postsecondary education recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around the year in which a professor started their job (0.4%)37. Because tenure-track faculty are just one kind of employee in postsecondary education, it is likely that this approach overestimates the percentage of the workforce employed as tenure-track faculty.

Combining these quantities, we estimate that the probability of becoming a faculty member given that one's parents hold a Ph.D. \(\Pr \left({{{\rm{faculty}}}}\,| \,{{{\rm{Ph.D.}}\,{\rm{Parent}}}}\right)\) is 9.5%, indicating a strong degree of both educational heritability and substantial professional advantage.

Relationships with sociodemographic diversity

To the extent that becoming a professor is strongly influenced by having parents with doctoral degrees, our results paint a disheartening picture for efforts to build a racially diverse pipeline to the professoriate. Broad social and educational inequality within the United States indicates that Black and Hispanic adults are less likely to hold graduate degrees of any kind compared with white adults (Fig. 5). Our race/ethnicity-independent estimate of the probability of becoming faculty may overestimate the production of Black or Hispanic faculty because it fails to account for the lower probability of Ph.D. parents among Black and Hispanic children conditional on SES. Obtaining a precise race/ethnicity-conditioned estimate would require additional conditional estimates that are not currently available (for example, the proportion of Black and Hispanic people who obtain faculty positions).

Percentages of white, Black, Hispanic and Asian adults (at least 25 years old) in the US population who hold doctorate degrees84. Trends are smoothed with averages every three years.

However, we do find evidence of racial differences within our survey results: white professors are more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. (23.4%, n = 5,905, point estimate) compared with Black or Hispanic faculty (17.2% and 16.9%, respectively, n = 518, point estimates). This distinction is even more pronounced among women surveyed, where 25.5% of white women have a Ph.D. parent versus 14.6% of Black women (point estimates, Supplementary Table 3). To the extent that the probability of becoming faculty depends on parental education, and specifically on having Ph.D. parents, this large racial gap in Ph.D. attainment is an intergenerational impediment to the proportion of Black and Hispanic scholars who become tenure-track faculty.

The relationship between parents' education and the gender composition of the professoriate is complex. For instance, women in our sample are more likely to have Ph.D. parents than are men (24.8% versus 20.8%, point estimates). Identifying the reasons underlying this pattern is an interesting direction for future work. Of course, SES does not impede gender diversity in academia in the same way or to the extent that it does for racial diversity. Nevertheless, parents may differentially allocate resources to sons and daughters that influence their academic achievement38. Moreover, the intersection between race/ethnicity and gender is not neutral with respect to the likelihood of becoming faculty. For example, Black women faculty are less likely to have Ph.D. parents than are Black men (Supplementary Table 3). Prior evidence suggests that there has been a growing gender gap in college completion, with women outpacing men, among both white and, to a larger extent, Black Americans39. The overrepresentation of Black men from educationally privileged families may imply a differential selection within academia, wherein Black men need more social capital to pursue these careers. Untangling how gender, race/ethnicity and social origins interconnect to shape who pursues academic careers, and specifically why Black women professors were less likely to come from more educationally privileged families, is an important direction for future research.

Trends in socioeconomic origins

Academia has undergone many dramatic shifts over the past 100 years, and our survey reveals several interesting and related trends. For instance, we find that the rate of faculty born from 1940 to 1960 reporting that a parent holds a Ph.D. has increased from 13% at the beginning of the period to 26% by the end (Fig. 6a), but then remains stable at above 20% across the next 50 years. This increase from the 1940s to 1960s mirrors the increasing college and graduate school enrolment rates within the United States over the same period40,41, and hence may simply reflect a general broadening of access to higher education. However, the subsequent stability of the rate at which faculty have a Ph.D. parent, in contrast to the continuing growth in and diversifying demographics of doctoral degree attainment42, suggests that the relationship between the educational attainment of faculty parents and the likelihood of becoming faculty has been consistent and strong for nearly half a century.

a, Percentage of faculty with at least one parent holding a Ph.D., stratified by prestige of the faculty's current institution. Green upward triangles describe faculty at the top 20% of institutions by USNWR or NRC ranking, and downward triangles the bottom 20% of ranked institutions. Shaded regions denote empirical 95% confidence intervals. The black line describes the average proportion of faculty with Ph.D. parents. b, Current institutional ranking of professors surveyed and the percentage of surveyed faculty at that institution who have a parent with a Ph.D. Dots indicate empirical estimates for 1,360 universities of more to less prestige; lines show a stable negative relationship between increasing institutional ranking and having a Ph.D. parent for faculty born in 1940-1960 (dark green), 1960-1980 (medium green) and 1980-2000 (light green).

Parental education is so consequential that it also correlates with where in the academic hierarchy a professor lands. Across all years, we find that nearly a third of faculty at top-ranked universities across all eight fields report that one of their parents holds a Ph.D., and faculty at these elite departments are 57.4% more likely to have a parent who holds a Ph.D. than are faculty at the least prestigious departments (29.8% versus 19.0%; two-tailed test, z = 6.5, n = 2,612 95% CI = 0.076 to 0.142, P < 0.001). This concentration among elite departments is consistent with prior research documenting the ways academic hiring tends to devalue faculty of lower socioeconomic standing 26,27, and advantage faculty from more privileged backgrounds.

Modelling faculty placement

Adjusting for faculty discipline, Ph.D. prestige, race/ethnicity and gender within a model, we find that faculty who had parents who attended college tend to be employed at significantly more prestigious universities than faculty without these childhood socioeconomic advantages (Table 2). We recognize that Ph.D. prestige may in fact be endogenous to this model of faculty placement because of Ph.D. placement's likely relationship with parents education, but regardless include it as a control due to the strong evidence of its importance in predicting faculty placement43. Here, institutional prestige is defined by ordinal ranking, where the most prestigious universities have smaller rank (1), and less prestigious have larger rank (100). On average, faculty with a Ph.D. parent move 'up' in the institutional rankings by nearly 7 percentile ranks (two-tailed test, t = −3.4, n = 2,709, 95% CI = −10.536 to −2.850, P = 0.001). Faculty who grew up in wealthy neighbourhoods, who are also less racially diverse than the general population, also tended to place at more prestigious institutions. SES may constrain an individual's search for a faculty job either by influencing which institutions they apply to, or by shaping their ability to stay on the academic track while searching for employment (Supplementary Note D). These results have direct implications for efforts to increase the socioeconomic and racial diversity of the professoriate, particularly at the most prestigious institutions that train most future professors43. The higher-prestige placement of faculty from advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds also represents a structural barrier to the visibility of the ideas of lower SES faculty because scientific discoveries made at more prestigious universities are more likely to spread throughout academia44.

Table 2 Regression of current institutional prestige based on childhood SES

Disadvantaged socioeconomic origins

Despite the significant correlation between having a parent who holds a Ph.D. and placement as faculty in the prestige hierarchy, not all faculty at elite universities (here: top 20% by USNWR or NRC) have this advantage. For elite faculty without Ph.D. parents, career support from colleagues both within and beyond their institution, and the wealth and urbanicity of their childhood zip code all become more important factors in explaining their placement at an elite institution. Faculty without Ph.D. parents who are employed at prestigious institutions report slightly higher levels of support from colleagues compared with those at lower-ranked institutions both within their institution (4.0 versus 3.8; two-tailed test, t = 3.6, n = 4,449, 95% CI = 0.078 to 0.261, P < 0.001), and outside their institution (4.0 versus 3.9; two-tailed test, t = 2.6, n = 4,448, 95% CI = 0.028 to 0.204, P  = 0.009).

Most faculty earned their Ph.D.s at elite institutions43. Faculty without a Ph.D. parent, currently employed at an elite university, were more likely to come from more elite Ph.D. programmes than were similar faculty at non-elite universities (5.5 versus 14.0 median; Mann-Whitney U, ρ = 0.3, n = 3,813, P < 0.001). Furthermore, without Ph.D. parents, faculty at the top institutions are more likely to come from urban neighbourhoods (92.3% versus 87.3%) that are higher income (US $80,000 versus US $69,000 median; Mann-Whitney U, ρ = 0.4, n= 2,974, P  < 0.001).

Discussion

Using a large survey of eight academic disciplines spanning STEM, social science and the humanities, we quantify the extent to which becoming a professor is associated with indicators of SES, and in particular is most accessible to the children of doctoral recipients and those who grew up in wealthy urban neighbourhoods. Considering the intersection between race/ethnicity and class, we also conclude that this dependence on parent educational education and SES is likely to limit racial diversity within the professoriate.

To summarize, nearly a quarter (22.2%) of faculty reported that one of their parents holds a Ph.D., and over half (51.8%) had a parent who holds a graduate degree, compared with less than 10% of US adults of similar ages (Table 1). Faculty who have parents with Ph.D.s report receiving more support from them for their careers (Fig. 3) and are more likely to be employed at elite institutions. Nearly a third of faculty at top-ranked universities report that their parent holds a Ph.D. (29.8%), versus a fifth (19.0%) at lower-ranked institutions. This pattern represents a significant source of social reproduction at the highest levels of academic attainment. Moreover, given broader racial inequality in educational attainment, academia's overrepresentation of inherited advantages represents a fundamental constraint to increasing its racial diversity (Fig. 5).

Previous studies of childhood SES of faculty have often been limited in scope, due to relatively small surveys of faculty or a lack of historical data on indicators of SES in the broader United States, both of which were necessary for this study. Given the well-established correlations between household parental income and child educational attainment and patterns of micro-class reproduction in other economic sectors, the overrepresentation of faculty with Ph.D. parents is perhaps unsurprising. Yet our results quantify just how large, and how persistent, that overrepresentation is.

In fact, the importance of having Ph.D. parents appears so great that the rate of having them nearly doubles across the transition from completing a Ph.D. to obtaining a faculty job (11.8% versus 22.2%; Table 1). This effect indicates a substantial loss of talent in the pipeline from Ph.D. to the transition to a faculty job. Doctoral students with Ph.D. parents may be better prepared for the difficulties of the academic job market, which may confer an advantage that becomes even greater during periods when academic jobs are scarce, for example, during a pandemic or a recession. Furthermore, the stability of this pattern across STEM fields, the social sciences and humanities suggests that the loss of talent at this stage in the pipeline is unlikely to be caused by the existence of attractive non-academic jobs for STEM Ph.D.s. Understanding the causes of this pattern is an important direction for future work.

But the even greater overrepresentation of faculty with Ph.D. parents at the most prestigious institutions (Fig. 6) implies that increasing sociodemographic diversity in academia is not only a pipeline problem. Indeed, our findings complement research that suggests a re-emergence of socioeconomic reproduction at the highest levels of educational attainment8,45. Progress towards broadening participation in science will remain limited if our current practices within academia favour individuals with advantages conferred by parental socioeconomic and occupational privilege21,26,27.

Socioeconomic background plays a critical role in shaping academic success, from secondary school to reaching the ranks of tenure-track faculty positions. Social and cultural factors also play a role46, such as the cultural value of academic success (which Fig. 3 suggests can involve intergenerational transmission), effective role models or even access to scholarly advice or opportunities from parents who understand how academia works. Ph.D. parents are uniquely positioned to offer guidance and support in children's postsecondary studies, through the graduate application process, negotiating admissions offers, progress in graduate programmes and job market success. For example, within our study, faculty who had a Ph.D. parent also earned their Ph.D.s at slightly more elite institutions (7.1 versus 11.6; Mann-Whitney U, ρ = 0.4, n = 4,906, P < 0.001), and earning a Ph.D. at an elite institution contributes towards upward academic mobility47. This finding suggests that Ph.D. parents' deep understanding of these processes facilitates micro-class reproduction. The overall socioeconomic composition of faculty is likely shaped by several complex, interacting factors, and a full explanation of the patterns will require a careful accounting of each in future work.

The interpretation of our work is limited by the granularity of the IRS and Census data we link to individual responses, and the current composition of tenure-track faculty. Several of our comparisons rely on aggregated measures used to proxy for income based on respondents' childhood zip code. Many zip code boundaries have changed over time and may span heterogenous populations48. Each of these may limit the accuracy of our childhood income measures, especially for older faculty. In future work, better estimates of household income could be obtained from information on respondents' childhood Census blocks, or from de-identified historical tax records49. Similarly, our analyses of race and ethnicity are limited by the use of the 2010 Census classification standard, which provides some consistency with 2020 standards50, but precludes certain more fine-grained analyses.

Furthermore, our survey was restricted to current tenure-track faculty at research intensive academic institutions between 2017 and 2020. As a result, our data say little about contingent faculty at these institutions, which represent an increasing fraction of university instructional staff51. We also do not know how gender discrimination, racism or classism impacts academics' intentions to persist, and we do not observe faculty who left academia before our survey date, whether that was after graduate school, a postdoctoral position or a contingent or tenure-track academic position, and whether that is due to feeling pulled towards more desirable opportunities outside of academia or pushed out by discrimination in hiring or promotion within. This group may be a population biased toward faculty from lower-income backgrounds19. Such a bias would tend to lead us to underestimate the observed associations or importance of SES in our analyses if we aimed to examine associations for all faculty entering academia, but these associations do not bias our estimates for current faculty. An important and complementary direction of future work would examine SES among non-tenure-track faculty and investigate its role in recruitment and retention before and along the tenure track.

While this work highlights the advantages that SES may confer for becoming and remaining faculty, it does not explicitly speak to the social or professional difficulties that underrepresented individuals experience stemming from their gender, race, ethnicity or SES once they become faculty. For example, women are less likely to be viewed as competent52,53, less likely to be awarded for their research54, less likely to be invited for talks55 and less likely to be compensated fairly56,57. Black faculty earn less despite no measurable differences in productivity58 and may have their research evaluated less positively31, all while facing unequal service burdens and racism on and off campus59,60. While research on how SES shapes faculty careers is less comprehensive, work generally points to less supportive environments24,25 and differences in research or teaching appointments61. Individuals with disadvantaged socioeconomic origins may become faculty and still have greater difficulty navigating and finding support within academia.

Future research should consider why the importance of family background varies moderately by gender and across fields. In our survey, women are more likely than men to have a parent with a college degree or higher (Supplementary Table 2), indicating the greater barriers facing women in reaching the highest ranks of academia. The reasons for this difference among tenure-track faculty require more investigation. Percentages of faculty with a Ph.D. parent are lowest among Business and Sociology (17.3%), and highest among Computer Science and History (26.3%, χ ² = 39.1, n = 3,362, P < 0.001). Compared with the educational attainment of professors' parents (Table 1), and generally consistent with the result presented here, a survey of lawyers found that about 12% of lawyers were the children of lawyers62, and among doctors in Sweden, 20% of physicians were the children of physicians63. Whether or not having a Ph.D. parent provides more of an advantage to academic faculty than one would expect relative to other high-status occupations is an important question for future research.

Our study's detailed and cross-disciplinary view of the deep socioeconomic roots of current US faculty highlights the social reproduction of the highest levels of academic attainment and scientific influence. These results raise a critical question regarding what ramifications high SES overrepresentation in the academic workforce-and its skewed intersection with race/ethnicity and class in the United States-have on the type of scholarship that faculty produce and on the scholars they train. That is, what discoveries are not made and what ideas are not developed as a result of academia's historical and current lack of socioeconomic diversity? A lack of diversity is already known to reduce research on public health disparities31, immigration, mental health and gender-based discrimination29. However, it is likely that the loss of useful research is more pervasive, because the relationship between researcher identity and scholarship is complex, depending not only on scientific social capital64 but also on how that capital can be invested. Developing a quantitative understanding of how representational diversity shapes scholarship across fields is an important direction for future work, which will rely on quantitative assessments of current diversity and its roots like the one provided here. Making academia more diverse and inclusive is a considerable challenge, given the complex interplay of SES and academic achievement from early schooling through academic appointments. Progress in this direction, however, is likely to produce substantial scientific and societal benefits.

Methods

Our survey protocol was approved by the University of Colorado Boulder Institutional Review Board. All participants were included in drawings for cash lotteries (Supplementary Note A). Although contingent faculty represent an increasing proportion of the US academic workforce, we surveyed tenure-track faculty because their unique stability in academia makes them more likely to contribute research and mentor scholars over the course of their careers.

Overall, our response rate resembles other online surveys with email invitations conducted in the context of academia65,66. While it is not possible to know whether faculty respondents differ in their childhood SES from those who did not respond, respondents were generally representative of their fields by institutional prestige and faculty rank. Additionally, women responded at slightly higher rates than expected in several disciplines (Supplementary Table 1). This pattern may imply a slight upward bias in our analysis of parents' education: in our sample, women are somewhat more likely to come from highly educated families (one of their parents holds a Ph.D.: 24.8% versus 20.8%; z = 3.9, n = 7,145, P < 0.001), across all disciplines (Supplementary Table 2). Roughly a quarter of respondents provided a country outside of the United States where they grew up ( n = 2,007; 25.1%), consistent with prior estimates of the proportion of international faculty at US universities67.

We asked faculty to reflect on their childhood and report their parents' highest levels of education during this period (Supplementary Note A). We compared their responses to the adult educational attainment statistics in the US population in the year the survey respondent was born68, and to educational attainment of parents of US doctoral recipients in the year they graduated from their doctoral programme69. These benchmarks, respectively, facilitate comparisons of faculty with the general public, and with academics at a career stage just prior to their current one. Comparing faculty to national estimates describe how privileged the upbringings of faculty were relative to the general public, and comparisons to doctoral recipients describes how the socioeconomic roots of faculty differ from the broader set of their doctoral peers.

Data on the educational attainment of adults are drawn from the American Community Survey of the US Census, and information on family's educational attainment among Ph.D. recipients is drawn from the NSF SED. While historical data on undergraduate and graduate achievement is available from the NSF70, it does not report demographics as percentages of the adult population or describe any earlier education levels as we require. Before 1993, the Census recorded educational attainment as years of schooling, and completion (or not) of high school or bachelor's degree71. More recent data recorded educational attainment as highest degree held among adults 25 years and older. In our study, we refer to both. Using the earlier Census data, we compare parents' college completion among faculty to college completion rates in the adult US population. When we require information on degree earned, we compare respondents with the Census dataset closest to the year faculty were born that records this information.

Our estimates of US adult Ph.D. completion (from 1993 at the earliest) are likely higher than the true Ph.D. completion rate in the year a respondent was born (which was 1967, on average), due to rising educational attainment in the United States. Thus, our comparisons of faculty parents with the general public may in fact underestimate academia's overrepresentation of highly educated families. Data on the highest degree attained by parents of Ph.D. recipients is available for select years from 1993 to 2018 from the NSF69. Details on how many respondents matched with a given year of data are provided in Supplementary Note B.

As childhood household income is also predictive of educational attainment, we construct proxy measures of childhood income levels and geographic diversity among current faculty. The ideal dataset would be individual-level household income and location during the childhoods of faculty. Because it is difficult for survey respondents' to estimate their parents' income retrospectively, we approximate these quantities using more easily recalled information. We link zip code responses to the closest publicly available IRS tax release (1998-2018) when faculty were children (adjusted to 2020 US $). Proxying individual SES based on aggregate zip code-level data is a widely used approach72,73. However, the geographic proxy may suffer from some mismeasurement because zip codes often span heterogeneous populations74. To measure whether faculty come from rural or urban areas, we use US Census data from 1990 to 2010, linked to faculty responses by their year of birth75, which records how many people live in urban or rural areas in a given zip code. We labelled zip codes as either rural or urban based on whether the majority of the population in that zip code lived in a rural or urban area. As with our measure of income, this approach may suffer from mismeasurement due to the underlying heterogeneity of a zip code. These measures of childhood household income and geographic diversity, when taken together with self-reported information on parental education, speak to how faculty SES shapes academic careers.

Finally, to assess whether SES impacts job placement within academia, we compare the previously described measures with the institutional prestige of a respondent's current faculty appointment and Ph.D.-granting institution. For most of the disciplines considered here, we refer to 2017-2020 college rankings from USNWR, which are provided for most Carnegie-classified R1 and R2 doctoral universities. Because Anthropology departments are not ranked by USNWR, we use their R rank in the 2010 NRC Anthropology rankings. To account for differences in the number of departments across disciplines, we rescale each ranking to the unit interval. Where faculty were employed at institutions not ranked by USNWR or NRC (11.1% of responses), we coded their ranking as missing and excluded them from our analysis of institutional prestige.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Acknowledgements

We thank E. Colunga, B. Donovan, B. Fosdick, T. Harris-Tryon, H. Lamothe, R. Manduca, J. Pyne, S. Spielman, K. Spoon, J. Van Cleve and S. Way for helpful comments, and all survey participants for providing their valuable opinions and time. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (award No. SMA 1633791 to A.C.M., A.C., D.B.L. and M.G.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (award No. FA9550-19-1-0329 to A.C., D.B.L., M.G. and N.L.), National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (award No. DGE 1650115 to A.C.M.) and California Center for Population Research at UCLA (CCPR), which receives core support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (grant No. P2C-HD041022 to J.E.B.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Recent work in several fields of science has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minority scholars are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field76,77,78,79,80. Here we sought to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, race, ethnicity and other factors. First, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a first name being carried by a woman80,81. By this measure (and excluding self-citations to the first and last authors of our current paper), our references contain 27.8% woman (first)/woman (last), 9.5% man/woman, 16.6% woman/man and 46.1% man/man. This method is limited in that (1) names, pronouns and social media profiles used to construct the databases may not, in every case, be indicative of gender identity, and (2) it cannot account for intersex, non-binary or transgender people. Second, we obtained predicted racial/ethnic category of the first and last author of each reference by databases that store the probability of a first and last name being carried by an author of colour82,83. By this measure (and excluding self-citations), our references contain 10.8% author of colour (first)/author of colour (last), 16.5% white author/author of colour, 14.3% author of colour/white author and 58.4% white author/white author. This method is limited in that (1) the names and Florida Voter Data used to make the predictions may not be indicative of racial/ethnic identity, and (2) it cannot account for Indigenous and mixed-race authors, or those who may face differential biases due to the ambiguous racialization or ethnicization of their names. We look forward to future work that could help us to better understand how to support equitable practices in science.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

Allison C. Morgan, Nicholas LaBerge, Daniel B. Larremore & Aaron Clauset

2. BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

Daniel B. Larremore & Aaron Clauset

3. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

Mirta Galesic & Aaron Clauset

4. Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Jennie E. Brand

Contributions

A.C.M. and A.C. devised analysis, and A.C.M., A.C. and J.E.B. wrote the manuscript. M.G., A.C., D.B.L., A.C.M. and N.L. designed and conducted the survey. M.G., N.L. and A.C.M. collected data and performed data validation. A.C.M. and N.L. analysed data. All authors finalized the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Allison C. Morgan or Aaron Clauset.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Morgan, A.C., LaBerge, N., Larremore, D.B. et al. Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1625-1633 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01425-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01425-4

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Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty - Nature Human Behaviour

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Despite the special role of tenure-track faculty in society, training future researchers and producing scholarship that drives scientific and technological innovation, the sociodemographic characteristics of the professoriate have never been representative of the general population. Here we systematically investigate the indicators of faculty childhood socioeconomic status and consider how they may limit efforts to diversify the professoriate.

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Universities should look more closely at the subject of ‘first-generation academics’, according to The Young Academy. It has examined this group’s experiences and has recommendations for making the academic world more accessible to academics from differing backgrounds. Among its recommendations: make unwritten rules explicit, and encourage mentoring.

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Recommendations

Starting a conversation about 'first-generation academics' will make the academic world more accessible and promote equal opportunity. The following six recommendations, meant for Dutch universities and funding bodies, can make a difference:

Make implicit rules explicit. Ensure that everyone has access to the same information.

Diversify university boards and assessment committees. Take advantage of the knowledge and experience of first-generation academics.

Encourage mentoring for early-career academics. A mentor can provide information, create opportunities, and inspire mentees to take the next step in their career.

Support grassroots initiatives for first-generation academics. For example staff-initiated mentoring programmes or first-generation funds.

Showcase role models. That will give staff, students and even children a more inclusive image of academia and academics.

Recognise and reward the skills and outlooks of first-generation academics. Shift the emphasis from self-promotion to other qualities, such as humility, perseverance and engagement with society.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Universities should look more closely at the subject of 'first-generation academics', according to The Young Academy.