Source Details

{
    "source_type": "extension",
    "content_hash": "ebc41d5453f9b2560179c855584239bf73fd94a2b6eb2c7a862bdab4c8b4bc34",
    "submitted_via": "chrome_extension",
    "extension_version": "1.0.18",
    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/18\/business\/class-barrier-academia.html?emc=edit_ufn_20260928&nl=from-the-times&segment_id=227183",
    "parsed_content": "AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Working Class Face a \u2018Class Ceiling\u2019 in Elite OccupationsBeing female or a person of color has long been seen as a disadvantage in hiring and promotion. A new study of college professors shows that class may loom as large.Listen \u00b7 8:46 min Share full articleClint Harris, whose parents did not graduate from college, says that in graduate school he lacked the savvy and networking skills of his peers.Credit...Kaiti Sullivan for The New York TimesBy Noam ScheiberPublished Sept. 18, 2026Updated Sept. 19, 2026See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google When Clint Harris started his Ph.D. program in economics in 2014, he approached it the way he\u2019d always approached school: He tried to get A\u2019s.But after a year or two, he began to suspect that his strategy was lacking. He noticed that classmates seemed to be getting ahead by not working as hard in some of their classes and cultivating professors instead.\u201cSome people very much seemed savvy,\u201d recalled Dr. Harris, who earned his Ph.D. at Purdue University and is now a nontenure-track economics researcher at the University of Wisconsin. \u201cPeople varied based on how much networking they were doing with faculty and classmates. Those are both the kinds of thing that didn\u2019t come naturally to me.\u201dDr. Harris chalked up this deficiency partly to the fact that his parents didn\u2019t graduate from college, and so he never acquired the schmoozing techniques that are more common among the affluent and highly educated.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTAccording to a recent paper, such a background can also hurt a scholar\u2019s career. The paper, in the prestigious journal Econometrica, found that scholars whose parents did not graduate from college are less likely to land tenure-track jobs at major research universities and less likely to get tenure.The researchers, Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez, found that the disadvantage of being a first-generation college graduate could be even greater than the disadvantages associated with being female or nonwhite.A key reason is that first-generation graduates appeared to have less social or cultural capital than people from more privileged backgrounds, as the paper puts it. Because of their upbringing, they have fewer friends and relatives in a position to help them, and aren\u2019t as good at working the system on their own. They might bungle a social interaction or come off the wrong way in an email. They might fail to leverage a chance encounter with a famous professor, or be altogether unaware of the need to court prominent patrons.The disparities appear to matter in fields far beyond academia, where so-called class ceilings persist. \u201cIn many other elite professional settings, the qualities on which you\u2019re judged \u2014 on which you\u2019re getting ahead, getting opportunities \u2014 are somewhat subjective,\u201d said Dr. Stansbury, an economist at M.I.T. Lawyers, bankers, consultants and middle managers typically advance when higher-ups perceive them as crafting strong arguments or giving good presentations. But there\u2019s no way to measure these skills precisely.Instead, just as for aspiring professors, \u201cnetworks, social capital, perceptions and bias of how you present yourself \u2014 cultural capital \u2014 are a big reason for how it plays out,\u201d Dr. Stansbury said. And those criteria put the working class at a real disadvantage.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThough rising through the academic ranks would appear to depend on the quality of a scholar\u2019s research, in practice it also hinges on one\u2019s dexterity with subtle interactions, unwritten rules and non-obvious customs, sometimes known as the \u201chidden curriculum.\u201dIn 2015, a former academic and department chair named Karen Kelsky tried to demystify the process in a book called \u201cThe Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job.\u201d A cultural anthropologist by training, it was not lost on Dr. Kelsky that she was in some sense cataloging the rituals of a highly insular and poorly understood tribe: upper-middle-class intellectuals.The book is filled with advice to the uninitiated: Don\u2019t talk excessively about your dissertation during a job interview (a signal of \u201cimmaturity as a scholar\u201d) and be sure to organize a panel discussion at a national conference (\u201cyour \u2018coming out\u2019 party\u201d) before going on the job market.Given the elaborate rules and rituals, it\u2019s perhaps no surprise that the people most likely to hold tenured positions at major research universities are those with a parent who earned a Ph.D. themselves, according to the paper by Dr. Stansbury and Ms. Rodriguez.But the researchers, who focused on academics in the sciences and social sciences, found that children of parents who earned other graduate degrees also had considerable advantages. And those advantages remained even after accounting for the quality and quantity of their publications \u2014 the ostensible basis for advancement.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTDr. Stansbury and Ms. Rodriguez reasoned that having a parent with a graduate degree reflected a \u201cgeneralized socioeconomic advantage.\u201d Though personalities differ and there are plenty of exceptions, growing up affluent often \u201chelps you learn how to read between the lines in certain situations, because you\u2019ve been in similar kinds of situations, even if not in academia,\u201d Dr. Stansbury said.By contrast, graduate students from working-class backgrounds describe not just moving through school in the dark, but also unaware of what they\u2019re in the dark about, partly because they\u2019re uncomfortable seeking advice.To Dr. Harris, the idea of leaning on advisers was in some sense at odds with the message conveyed by his mother, a homemaker, and his stepfather, a production scheduler at an orthopedic plant, while growing up in Warsaw, Ind. \u201cAsking for help was explicitly criticized during my childhood,\u201d he said. \u201cRather than tell me, \u2018We don\u2019t know how to help you with algebra\u2019 in middle school, they would perhaps have said, \u2018It\u2019s important to learn the skill of self-reliance and independence.\u2019\u201dHaving imbibed this ethos, he was uneasy spit-balling ideas with professors and slow to settle on a research topic. \u201cI probably would have gravitated to what I\u2019ve wound up doing quicker if I had more long-winded conversations with people at Purdue,\u201d he said.ImageNatasha Tonge, now a professor at George Mason University, recalls that as a graduate student, she didn\u2019t realize that getting to know professors at other universities could help her career.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York TimesNatasha Tonge, a tenure-track clinical psychologist at George Mason University, recalls standing near her adviser at a conference while he made plans for dinner with colleagues from other schools. Only in retrospect did she recognize it as an opportunity to network. At the time, she was confused about whether it was even appropriate to join them, and didn\u2019t quite realize that getting to know senior scholars could benefit her career.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTDr. Tonge said she was raised by a single mother who worked as an administrative assistant at a liberal arts college but did not graduate from college herself. \u201cMy mother had no reason to network,\u201d Dr. Tonge said. \u201cIt was, \u2018Why would I want to be at dinner with the college president?\u2019 Is anyone paying her to do that?\u201dThis unsteadiness with networking can be an even bigger impediment in other elite professions, where warm feelings and familiarity \u2014 do the higher-ups enjoy talking golf with you? \u2014 often influence judgments as much as measurable reality. The researchers found that first-generation college graduates with Ph.D.s earned less when they entered the private sector and were less likely to hold senior management jobs than Ph.D.s whose parents had a graduate degree.So important is class, the paper found, that the effect on one\u2019s career prospects appears to loom as large if not larger than that of race or gender. For example, Dr. Stansbury and Ms. Rodriguez found that women who earned Ph.D.\u2019s and stayed in academia received tenure just as often as men, once the researchers controlled for research output. Black scholars were less likely to get tenure than white scholars, but didn\u2019t pay a price in terms of the prestige of their university. Only the children of working-class parents appeared to experience a kind of double jeopardy \u2014 not only did they get tenure less often but at less prestigious universities.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSome of the gains for women and nonwhites appear to reflect efforts to combat discrimination or provide greater opportunity to members of these groups, interventions that are less common when it comes to class.Kristen Renn, an expert on higher education administration at Michigan State University, said that while many universities had dedicated offices and advisers to help first-generation undergraduates, the efforts are much sparser on the graduate level.Dr. Stansbury said that a more consistent focus on class may be in order. \u201cIt rounds out the D.E.I. movement in a way that moves it toward fairness,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you\u2019re a white working-class guy in an elite profession, you\u2019re also facing pretty serious barriers.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-18T09:02:43+00:00",
    "author_name": "Noam Scheiber",
    "site_name": "The New York Times",
    "section": "Business",
    "publisher": "The New York Times Company",
    "ai_headline": "The Working Class Face a \u2018Class Ceiling\u2019 in Elite Occupations",
    "ai_simplified_title": "Working Class Face Class Ceiling in Elite Occupations",
    "ai_excerpt": "A new study reveals that class background, specifically not having college-educated parents, significantly disadvantages individuals in elite professions like academia, often more so than gender or race. This 'class ceiling' is attributed to a lack of social and cultural capital.",
    "ai_subject_tags": [
        "Social Mobility",
        "Class Inequality",
        "Higher Education",
        "Academia",
        "Professional Development",
        "Cultural Capital",
        "First-Generation Students",
        "Diversity Equity Inclusion"
    ],
    "ai_context_type": "Analysis",
    "ai_context_details": {
        "tone": "analytical",
        "perspective": "academic",
        "audience": "general",
        "credibility_indicators": [
            "research_cited",
            "expert_quotes",
            "data_cited"
        ]
    },
    "ai_source_vector": null,
    "ai_confidence_score": 0.9999999999999999,
    "ai_extraction_metadata": {
        "extracted_at": "2026-09-30T10:02:28.782942Z",
        "ai_model": "gemini-2.5-flash",
        "extraction_method": "automated",
        "content_length": 9557,
        "metadata_prompt_body_chars": 9557,
        "metadata_prompt_truncated": false,
        "url": "https:\/\/nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/18\/business\/class-barrier-academia.html",
        "existing_metadata": {
            "author_name": null,
            "published_at": null,
            "domain_name": "nytimes.com",
            "site_name": null,
            "section": null,
            "publisher": null
        },
        "openai_refusal_gemini_fallback": false
    }
}

{
    "extracted_at": "2026-09-30T10:02:28.782942Z",
    "ai_model": "gemini-2.5-flash",
    "extraction_method": "automated",
    "content_length": 9557,
    "metadata_prompt_body_chars": 9557,
    "metadata_prompt_truncated": false,
    "url": "https:\/\/nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/18\/business\/class-barrier-academia.html",
    "existing_metadata": {
        "author_name": null,
        "published_at": null,
        "domain_name": "nytimes.com",
        "site_name": null,
        "section": null,
        "publisher": null
    },
    "openai_refusal_gemini_fallback": false
}