NYT | K Sullivan
Dr. Harris (above) chalked up this deficiency partly to the fact that his parents didn’t graduate from college, and so he never acquired the schmoozing techniques that are more common among the affluent and highly educated. According to a recent paper, such a background can also hurt a scholar’s 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.