https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01425-4 (“Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty”)

In the US, “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 … .” It must be similar in Canada.

In the field of history (their humanities’ example), 26.7% of tenure-track professors have at least one parent with a Ph.D., and 34.3% have at least one parent with a master’s degree. Professors are 25.3 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. than the general population does, whereas all people with Ph.D.s are merely 1.9 times as likely to have such a parent. Both cases, but especially permanent faculty members, approach zero in having–like me–high school completion as the highest level of study of either parent.

It’s unusual for someone of my lower socioeconomic background to have completed a Ph.D. at all and not in any way surprising that I didn’t become a tenure-track professor. It would have been several hundred times as unlikely for me to become a professor compared to people with at least one Ph.D. parent. Ethnicity is rightfully discussed as an important factor in these issues, but I am white, and socioeconomic status is also a major factor.