[HN Gopher] An academic Great Gatsby Curve - How much academic s...
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An academic Great Gatsby Curve - How much academic success is
inherited?
Author : nabla9
Score : 16 points
Date : 2024-12-21 14:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.lse.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.lse.ac.uk)
| 77pt77 wrote:
| 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.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Not my experience at all, as a first generation college
| student, now research faculty at a highly regarded University.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| "Pedigree" assumes many forms.
|
| The fact that you are a "first generation college student" is
| irrelevant and conclusively shows that you do not understand
| what's at stake.
|
| I can assure you, you are wrong.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Yes, I misunderstood, and was just about to delete my
| comment, but you caught me.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, but if you are going to
| make sweeping statements like "you are wrong", you should
| explain a bit more, because your argument is somewhat too
| vague to engage with meaningfully.
|
| Obviously one can find discrimination anywhere, but I don't
| think it's as systematic as you seem to imply. Most
| academics are under considerable pressure to publish or
| generate results, so e.g. when faced with hiring a postdoc
| or a PhD candidate, they don't have the luxury of rejecting
| a brilliant candidate that could be productive for spurious
| reasons.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Well, the person I replied to aparently understood, so it
| wasn't as "sweeping" as you are implying.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yep, this. Another reason why the left has lost all public
| trust in institutions. Too much of elitism and connections.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| This is completely general and independent of left/right
| liberal/conservative dualities.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Not quite. Almost all academia and universities are left
| leaning. It directly falls on the left's head that people
| lost trust and faith in these institutions.
| billy99k wrote:
| "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.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| _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.
| newsclues wrote:
| I didn't get informed consent to be born to my mother and
| father.
|
| No choice in being alive or who would be my parents.
|
| Isn't that normal?
| gtmitchell wrote:
| 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.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| 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.
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