The DOI matches its Crossref record; 73 of the 73 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty
Open accessAbstract
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. Combining national-level data on education, income and university rankings with a 2017–2020 survey of 7,204 US-based tenure-track faculty across eight disciplines in STEM, social science and the humanities, we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years. Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life
Field, A. J., Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1977) · The Journal of Human Resources · doi:10.2307/145392 · Cited by 2,900
Measuring Social Class in US Public Health Research: Concepts, Methodologies, and Guidelines
Krieger, N., Williams, D. R., & Moss, N. E. (1997) · Annual Review of Public Health · doi:10.1146/annurev.publhealth.18.1.341 · Cited by 2,696
Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life
Lareau, A. (2011) · University of California Press eBooks · doi:10.1525/9780520949904 · Cited by 2,188
Krieger, N. (1992) · American Journal of Public Health · doi:10.2105/ajph.82.5.703 · Cited by 1,654
The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason
Bourdieu, P. (1975) · Social Science Information · doi:10.1177/053901847501400602 · Cited by 1,483
Why So Slow?: The Advancement of Women
Valian, V. (1999) · doi:10.7551/mitpress/7235.001.0001 · Cited by 1,252
The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects*
Chetty, R., & Hendren, N. (2018) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjy007 · Cited by 1,135
First-generation college students: Characteristics, experiences, and cognitive development
Terenzini, P. T., Springer, L., Yaeger, P. M., Pascarella, E. T., & Nora, A. (1996) · Research in Higher Education · doi:10.1007/bf01680039 · Cited by 1,040
Trends in educational assortative marriage from 1940 to 2003
Schwartz, C. R., & Mare, R. D. (2005) · Demography · doi:10.1353/dem.2005.0036 · Cited by 1,033
The fading American dream: trends in absolute income mobility since 1940
Chetty, R., Grusky, D., Hell, M., Hendren, N., Manduca, R., & Narang, J. (2017) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aal4617 · Cited by 981
Cited by
Intersectional inequalities in science
Kozlowski, D., Larivière, V., Sugimoto, C. R., & Monroe-White, T. (2022) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2113067119 · Cited by 312
Torres Acosta, M. A., Chandra, S., Li, S., Yoon, E., Selgrade, D., Quinn, J., & Ardehali, H. (2023) · BMC Medical Education · doi:10.1186/s12909-023-04399-7 · Cited by 28
Metadata
- Authors
- Morgan, A. C., LaBerge, N., Larremore, D. B., Galesic, M., Brand, J. E., & Clauset, A.
- Venue
- Nature Human Behaviour
- Published
- 2022-08-29
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 1625-1633
- ISSN
- 2397-3374 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4293476357
- Cited by
- 269
- References
- 73
- FWCI
- 75.28
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41562-022-01425-4
- The paper
- Morgan, A. C., LaBerge, N., Larremore, D. B., Galesic, M., Brand, J. E., & Clauset, A. (2022). Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01425-4
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
