Being female or a person of color has long been seen as a disadvantage in hiring and promotion. A new study of college professors shows that class may loom as large. Clint Harris, whose parents did not graduate from college, says that in graduate school he lacked the savvy and networking skills of his peers. Sept. 18, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET When Clint Harris started his Ph.

D. program in economics in 2014, he approached it the way he’d always approached school: He tried to get A’s. But after a year or two, he began to suspect that his strategy was lacking. He noticed that classmates seemed to be getting ahead by not working as hard in some of their classes and cultivating professors instead. Dr. Harris chalked up this deficiency partly to the fact that his parents didn’t graduate from college, and so he never acquired the schmoozing techniques that are more common among the affluent and highly educated.

According to a recent paper in Econometrica, scholars whose parents did not graduate from college are less likely to land tenure-track jobs at major research universities and less likely to get tenure. The researchers, Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez, found that the disadvantage of being a first-generation college graduate could be even greater than the disadvantages associated with being female or nonwhite. A key reason is that first-generation graduates appeared to have less social or cultural capital than people from more privileged backgrounds.

Because of their upbringing, they have fewer friends and relatives in a position to help them, and aren’t as good at working the system on their own. They might bungle a social interaction or come off the wrong way in an email. They might fail to leverage a chance encounter with a famous professor, or be altogether unaware of the need to court prominent patrons.

The disparities appear to matter in fields far beyond academia, where so-called class ceilings persist. In many other elite professional settings, the qualities on which you’re judged — on which you’re getting ahead, getting opportunities — are somewhat subjective. Lawyers, bankers, consultants and middle managers typically advance when higher-ups perceive them as crafting strong arguments or giving good presentations.

But there’s no way to measure these skills precisely. Instead, just as for aspiring professors, networks, social capital, perceptions and bias of how you present yourself — cultural capital — are a big reason for how it plays out. And those criteria put the working class at a real disadvantage.