Elite organizations who have adopted the value of eliminating disparities and increasing diversity in their workforces have rightly framed gender and race as central to address. These diversity efforts, however, almost always omit class. In our recent paper (Stansbury and Rodriguez, 2026), we find evidence that class differences may be pivotal to career progression in elite professions, in many ways having impacts as large as, or larger than, race and gender.  

Many people hold the belief that class, or socioeconomic background, only impacts individuals up to the point of getting an elite education or first job, and that it becomes “washed out” thereafter (Laurison and Friedman, 2024). This assumption is reflected in organizational decision-making: among roughly 600 large U.S. firms whose DEI goals and reporting we reviewed in September 2024, virtually all discussed gender and race, and most discussed LGBTQ status, disability, and veteran status as well — yet only 6 percent made any mention of socioeconomic background. Class is similarly absent from most academic research on career progression (Ingram, 2021). 

We use US tenure-track academia as a case study to examine whether this widely held assumption holds any truth. Our data are from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Survey of Doctorate Recipients (1993–2021), which is a representative survey of tens of thousands of U.S. PhD recipients in STEM and the social sciences. We measure socioeconomic background using the highest level of parental education reported by respondents. Our core “class gap” compares the first generation college graduates and those with at least one parent with a non-PhD graduate degree – we don’t focus on those with parents with PhDs, because having a parent with a PhD likely confers academia-specific advantages beyond class (and we are interested in the effects of generalized socioeconomic advantage, rather than academia-specific knowledge or networks). 

Our results show that while there is no class gap in whether someone ends up tenured (getting a permanent position), the ultimate career milestone in US academia. First-generation college graduates are less likely to end up tenured at high-ranked institutions compared to their former PhD classmates from more advantaged backgrounds. Specifically, first-generation college graduates are 10 percent less likely to end up tenured at a highly research-intensive (R1) university, and are tenured at institutions ranked 11 percent lower, than their former PhD classmates with a parent holding a non-PhD graduate degree. First-gen college grads also earn 3 percent less and report 5 percent lower job satisfaction than their former PhD classmates with a parent with a non-PhD. graduate degree. 

What explains this gap? We investigated three sets of mechanisms. The first is differential research productivity: it is possible that first-gen college grads end up tenured at less research-intensive, lower-ranked institutions because they publish less or lower-quality research. Even with detailed research controls, however, we can only close at most two-fifths of the class gap in tenure institution rank, and less than one-fifth of the gap in the rate of getting tenure.  

Our second investigation examined whether the class gap is simply a result of different choices. But we find no evidence for any of these channels. The class gap is unchanged when considering distance from home, student debt, having children, and preferences for job location, pay, or institutional mission. 

With research productivity and preferences unable to explain most of the class gap, what might? We think our quantitative and qualitative evidence points to differences in social and cultural capital as being the important mechanisms. Following Bourdieu, we define social capital as relationships which can provide useful professional resources, advantages, and knowledge in academia; and define cultural capital as the tastes, ideas, habits, and behaviors that confer status or recognition in academia (Bourdieu, 1986). In academia, social and cultural capital might matter for having better mentors, more opportunities to get grants or feedback on work, professional opportunities, and professional recognition. 

We find several pieces of supporting evidence. First-gen academics have fewer coauthors, their coauthors are less well-published than you would predict given these academics’ other characteristics, and first-gen academics are more likely to coauthor with other first-gen academics. This is reminiscent of other research on women and racial minorities (e.g., Cullen and Perez-Truglia, 2023; Linos et al., 2023) – suggesting barriers exist to forming professional relationships between more- and less-advantaged colleagues.  

There is only so much nuance that you can get from large-scale quantitative data. So, we supplemented our analysis with a survey of over 2,000 U.S. STEM and social science faculty members, which we ran in Spring 2025. In this survey, we asked open-ended questions about how individuals’ socio-economic background has or has not affected their career. 

When discussing post-PhD careers, cultural capital emerged as an overwhelming theme. Respondents described an academic “dress code and speaking code that is difficult to learn unless you are raised with it,” and noted how cultural knowledge – international travel, literature, classical music – greased the wheels of networking and professional recognition.  

Social capital was another dominant theme. First-gen academics described having fewer pre-existing relationships with academics and finding it harder to build new mentorship networks. The consequence was difficulty navigating what many called the “hidden curriculum” of academia – the unwritten knowledge about how to publish, apply for awards, negotiate, and advance.  

 Is this just a problem with academia? No. Academia is a useful case study – it has common, quantifiable measures of employer quality, promotion, and productivity – but we think these findings apply more generally. Indeed, for PhDs who go into industry we also find a class gap in earnings, job satisfaction, and the probability of becoming a manager (conditional on PhD program attended) – and the earnings gap widens substantially over the career. This means that academia is not unique: a class gap in career progression likely exists across many elite occupations. 

The challenge is that most organizations do not collect data on employees’ socioeconomic backgrounds, making the gap nearly impossible to study – and invisible to the institutions that need to address it. Our findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should consider socio-economic background alongside race and gender as an important axis of advantage in elite career progression. Studying it – and ultimately addressing it – requires, first, that we start paying attention to it and measuring it.