Does anyone else feel as if most of these studies are kind of just navel gazing? Like someone just needs to fill their time with busy work and so here's an easy academic job they can do that doesn't really give any new information?
If genetics/parental upbringing had very little to do with child outcomes then the entire concept of parenting would be irrelevant.
You could just choose any partner, have a child, leave them to fend for themselves on the street, it'd all be down to random chance and then suddenly 50% of those kids end up in the 50th percentile or above academically, financially, whatever metric you choose.
I would intuitively need an incredibly, incredibly strong proof to show the opposite were true, on par with someone telling me that in their city gravity runs backwards or something.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the article, but I find it baffling that they don’t mention the simple fact that the “best” professors have access to the “best” students. Especially early in career students. Never mind the fact that great schools -> employ great researchers -> enroll great students, even within one cohort this is clear. The top 5% of a class can do their undergraduate research everywhere they please and are in fact often scouted out by top chairs.
"This suggests that academic success is shaped by structural forces similar to those that govern social mobility, where the advantage of having a top mentor can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of success"
This is not surprising. Poor or rich, if you have good family support, you have a much better chance at success. This can be seen with rich kids with absent/uncaring parents blowing all of their money within a couple of years/going to jail/becoming alcoholics or drug addicts.
Academic success depends on intelligence, creativity, but also the way you speak. Being someone coming from the outside (first in my family to do a PhD) this is something I discuss frequently with others that are in similar positions. We don’t struggle with research so much as understanding how to write in the same language, understanding what is “novel” or rather how to convey something is novel and not explain in a way that makes it obvious post hoc. Understanding which research topics are worthy or not. Some of this is even true for people who transfer fields. So I would expect you can find a gradient of the success compared to how closely aligned the child is to their parent’s research.
I think this result is obvious to anyone who has spent any time in the academic world, although it is nice to see some solid numbers behind it.
The harsh truth is that key to academic career advancement is who you know much more than what you know. I every single person I knew in graduate school who got a postdoc position did so through informal means (i.e. knowing someone who knew someone), and having letters of recommendation written by the right people from the right departments at the right schools opens all sorts of doors to the academic hierarchy that would otherwise be closed.
I don't think it's nurture as the article suggests. Academic success (I define it as getting a permanent position) is mainly finding a researcher or research group that likes you. That's basically it. It's who you know.
Getting into a PhD program requires a lot of preparation soon after entering college. Having a parent with a PhD probably helps a lot to guide their child towards the necessary steps to get into a good program. I was totally clueless and thought just a high GPA would suffice and I had to spend 3 years improving my credentials to get into a PhD program. A lot of my peers had parents who were professors.
There's already a gazillion sociological studies on this subject from the 70s onward.
Even if we pretend nepotism doesn't exists, academia is still not a strict meritocracy. In addition to merit, at least two factors play an important role in success, which having a good mentor helps a lot.
1) Tacit knowledge. In many fields, there are important information only accessible from having a mentor like heuristics, insider information, in-lab techniques etc.
2) Investment opportunities. A good adviser is often good at spotting opportunities for their students. It's also common for an academic adviser to share their most valuable opportunities with their students.
It's clear to me that the ideal of meritocracy (talent and hard work leads to success) does not hold in academia, and maybe not anywhere. Having a good mentor gives you extremely valuable information that contribute to success. On the other hand, I am not sure this can be fixed or even needs fixing. I think it's healthy for academics to be partially siloed, so that they can develop their unique approaches and maintain a healthy diversity for the field.
Genes play a huge role in individual variability of outcomes, whether it's leanness or obesity, strength, cardio/fitness, academic ability etc.
An example I like to give is, my junior high school had an annual writing competition. The winners were so far ahead in terms of ability ,which was evident when they read their stories aloud , that such ability had to have been divined in some way. There is no way you can be competitive when some have such a huge head start due to genes.
It's the Mathew principle all the way down.
Actually it's a bit worse, in the sense that if you exhibit competence without the "appropriate pedigree" all you'll get is punishment.
In everyday life, parents and children do not choose each other, whereas in academia, mentors and mentees actively select one another.
I don't think the distinction is nearly as concrete as the authors seem to assume.
Parents, in choosing their mates, certainly have in mind a broad set of concepts about how their offspring should turn out, and even the most gentle and supportive of them have values, behaviors, and disciplinary strategies they put into place to mold their children - obviously not a guaranteed outcome, but certainly on the whole correlative in many dimensions of child outcomes we could measure.
In the opposite direction, I would not assume mentor and mentee relationships in academic are as fluid and breakable as the author might assume. Students make major decisions about where even to attend graduate programs based on prospective but not promised guarantees to work with mentors, and mentors take on mentees based on initial impressions of research compatibility that don't always turn out as positive as they might have hoped, and it's not that easy when grant money or institutional budgeting is at stake to reverse these decisions.