What is the social class background of academics?
What is the social class background of academics?
Concerns about equality and diversity rightly continue to be high on the agenda in higher education. These concerns relate to the representativeness and diversity of students and – to a lesser extent – of academic staff, especially at professor level.
It is time to expand our attention to the latter. Several years ago, campaigns such as #whyismyprofessorwhite highlighted significant disparities in progression of staff from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds into senior academic positions. The Athena SWAN initiative arose from similar concerns about an academic glass ceiling for women and subsequently expanded to address gender equality more broadly. And of course these two issues intersect, with shockingly small numbers of black female professors in UK universities. While there continues to be a need for rapid progress and no easy answers, the depth and range of data about the characteristics of gender and ethnicity have at the very least enabled debate and provided a spur to action.
Similar concerns have been raised about social class. But whereas there is extensive data about the gender of academics and reasonably good data on self-reported ethnicity, we have almost no systematic data about the social class background of academics.
The experience of working-class academics
There is no shortage of testimony. Recently, the report The impact of social class on experiences of working in post-16 education (University and College Union) presents findings from a survey of the UCU membership. Respondents who identified as having a working-class background were more likely to perceive barriers relating to recruitment and career success and progression. In 2018 there were a number of pieces in the higher education media about the experiences of academics from working-class backgrounds, including a major feature in Times Higher Education and a call in the Guardian for working-class lecturers to‘come out of the closet’. There is a Facebook group for the Association of Working Class Academics, a group associated with the US-based Working-Class Studies Association. As I have written about previously, within academic literature, there is a veritable sub-genre of autobiographical critical analysis by scholars from working-class backgrounds, almost entirely working in social science and humanities disciplines.
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While it is vital to understand these personal experiences, there is also a need for systematic data about the social class background of academics. Without such data, we cannot know the shape, scale or scope of the issues facing those from different social class backgrounds seeking to enter an academic career and progress within it. One recent study explores the social class background of academics in the United States. The study ‘Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty’ (Morgan et al.) focuses on access, showing that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a PhD.
In the UK however, the last large-scale study of this question is now over 30 years old. Using survey data from 1989 (and some from 1976), the Oxford sociologist AH Halsey found that 17% of his sample of several thousand had fathers in manual occupations (falling to 13% of professors). My analysis of data collected as part of the BBC’s Great British Class Survey in 2011 finds about 23% of the 2,500 academics completing the survey reporting working-class origins, although only 10% self-identified as working-class. By way of comparison, about one-third of UK undergraduate entrants in 2020-21 were from working-class families.
Given their efforts in widening participation, it is ironic, not to say embarrassing, that higher education institutions are not collecting data about or paying attention to the social class background of their staff. A range of other organisations, including the Civil Service, the BBC, and major law and accountancy firms, are making great efforts to collect data about the socio-economic background of their employees and job applicants. The Bridge Group has led work in this area. Universities are some way behind – in fact socio-economic data is rarely collected about PhD students. All of this means we cannot tell to what extent progress through academic careers is affected by social class background. Are there pinch points in entry to the PhD or are problems worse afterwards? How does the distribution of academics from different social class origins vary across types of institution or subject disciplines? Is there a ‘class ceiling’ which matches the glass ceiling for women at professorial level? How does social class background intersect with other characteristics such as gender and ethnicity across the academic workforce?
Some practical steps forward
Measuring social class background is a complicated and contested issue, but that should not stand in the way of progress. There are simple measures which can be collected from PhD students, job applicants and academic staff to give useful and usable data. The measures developed by the Bridge Group for the Social Mobility Commission’s Employer Toolkit , which are similar to those recommended in my advice to Research Councils UK, are simple to understand and cost effective. By capturing information about parents’ social class and higher education qualifications, together with whether the individual was in receipt of free school meals, we can make rapid progress in mapping the social class landscape of the academic workforce. Only with such an understanding can we start to work to put our own house in order.
In addition to being a Fellow of the Bridge Group, Professor Paul Wakeling is a sociologist of education and Head of Department at the Department of Education, University of York. His expertise is in access to postgraduate study, including doctoral education. He has written numerous funded reports and academic articles on this topic. He has evaluated HEFCE’s £75 million Postgraduate Support Scheme and has worked with RCUK to advise on measuring socio-economic diversity among students in centres for doctoral training. Paul is currently undertaking research on institutional stratification at postgraduate level, and on the impact of tuition fee changes on EU student enrolment in the UK. As part of the OfS/Research England funded Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education, he is leading work on racial equity in doctoral admissions.