Socio- versus Economic Privilege in Academic Careers

As might suspect, Dear Reader, I am one who is entirely unable to hold back from drenching trainees in career-relevant advice whenever there is the slightest opportunity. As you also know, I am not in a job category that require regular instruction of general populations of undergraduate students so most of my interactions with them come under the general heading of “lab experience”. One of the things that I tend to blurt out very early in my discussions with a student who wants to work in my group is “You know being a graduate student is a job that pays, right?”.
It turns out that many of them are unaware of this fact.

This surprises me, particularly when the person is from a research University. It shouldn’t, I’ve been down this road with undergraduates from my days of being a graduate student TA onward but it still does. My radar is just so focused on the life of research science that surrounds a University that it is hard to remember what it looks like to the undergrad who thinks, arguably mistakenly, that her education is the primary mission of the place.
It is also very likely the case that I am so blind because I have been around the academic job sector for most of my life. That’s right, I simply reek of the sociological privilege of academic careers from very young childhood until the present day.
What I didn’t have growing up was a great deal of economic privilege. The family was demonstrably making less money that a whole host of other folks in our smallish town who worked in what you might think of as stereotypically blue collar jobs. And not sinecure Union-label jobs either…just jobs.
Despite this, I had the social privilege. The privilege of a family that valued education, had books in the home and was willing to extend ivy-tower-type experiences* to the extent we could obtain or afford them.
There is, however, a subtle interaction when it comes to graduate school. Spending four or five years taking out loans to pay for an undergraduate education is one thing. Hard enough for non-academic families to swallow that Junior is going to start racking up debt for a few years instead of going to work. Now the kid is proposing another 6 years of “school”? Are you kidding?
Well, academic families are more likely to understand that this is a longterm investment and a good thing. The offspring knows, from the earliest thinking about eventual career, that academia has some benefits. Moreover, the kid of academics knows that Mom and Dad are going to get it. They might even be willing to kick down some support now and again. Especially if you get in a jam with an exploded car or unexpected medical problem or something. It is the confidence of expectation, even if unused. It allows the undergraduate to risk the academic career path.
We can’t do much to change undergraduate students’ background social conditioning. But one thing we can do is to make sure they realize that, in the biosciences at least, the expectation is that you get paid to go to graduate school.
Not all of them realize that, not even after working in your lab next to graduate students and postdocs for a semester.
Mention it.
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*theater, symphony, music lessons…that kind of nonsense.