This could happen, but I think it’s mostly dwarfed by the far larger selection effect that people who are not financially privileged mostly don’t attempt to become humanities academics these days—and for good reason.
While that case has been made in a few isolated studies, I was more generally referring to the fact that people who don’t come from money will usually choose careers that make them money, and humanities academia doesn’t.
Wasn’t sure about that, so I tracked down some research (Goyette & Mullen 2006). Turns out you’re right: conditioned on getting into college in the first place, higher socioeconomic status (as proxied by parents’ educational achievement) is correlated with going into arts and sciences over vocational fields (engineering, education, business). The paper also finds a nonsignificant trend toward choosing arts and humanities over math and science, within the arts and science category.
(Within the vocational majors, though, engineering is the highest-SES category. Business and education are both significantly lower. I don’t know which of those would be most lucrative on average but I suspect it’d be engineering.)
(Within the vocational majors, though, engineering is the highest-SES category. Business and education are both significantly lower. I don’t know which of those would be most lucrative on average but I suspect it’d be engineering.)
I think there are several trade-offs there: engineering looks like the highest expected value to us, because we (on LessWrong, mostly) had pre-university educations focused on math, science, and technology. People from lower SES… did not, so fewer of them will survive the weed-out courses taught in “we damn well hope you learned this in AP class” style. And then there’s the acclimation to discipline and acclimation to obsessive work-habits (necessary for engineering school) that come from professional parentage… and so on. And then of course, many low-SES people probably want to go into teaching as a helping profession, but that’s not a very quantitative explanation and I’m probably just making it up.
On the other hand, engineering colleges tend to have abnormally large quantities of international students and immigrants blatantly focused on careerism. So yeah.
This could happen, but I think it’s mostly dwarfed by the far larger selection effect that people who are not financially privileged mostly don’t attempt to become humanities academics these days—and for good reason.
Are you saying that financially privileged people tend to be less moral?
While that case has been made in a few isolated studies, I was more generally referring to the fact that people who don’t come from money will usually choose careers that make them money, and humanities academia doesn’t.
Wasn’t sure about that, so I tracked down some research (Goyette & Mullen 2006). Turns out you’re right: conditioned on getting into college in the first place, higher socioeconomic status (as proxied by parents’ educational achievement) is correlated with going into arts and sciences over vocational fields (engineering, education, business). The paper also finds a nonsignificant trend toward choosing arts and humanities over math and science, within the arts and science category.
(Within the vocational majors, though, engineering is the highest-SES category. Business and education are both significantly lower. I don’t know which of those would be most lucrative on average but I suspect it’d be engineering.)
I think there are several trade-offs there: engineering looks like the highest expected value to us, because we (on LessWrong, mostly) had pre-university educations focused on math, science, and technology. People from lower SES… did not, so fewer of them will survive the weed-out courses taught in “we damn well hope you learned this in AP class” style. And then there’s the acclimation to discipline and acclimation to obsessive work-habits (necessary for engineering school) that come from professional parentage… and so on. And then of course, many low-SES people probably want to go into teaching as a helping profession, but that’s not a very quantitative explanation and I’m probably just making it up.
On the other hand, engineering colleges tend to have abnormally large quantities of international students and immigrants blatantly focused on careerism. So yeah.
How does that fact impact the morality of moral philosophers as measured?