Academics hold a unique and privileged position in society. They are experts in their fields, communicate knowledge to the public, educate new generations of students and recruit future academics. While there has been much research on how social background – such as parents’ educational level, income or class position – influences who succeeds in higher education, little is known about how this affects recruitment to academic positions.
The ACCESS project will investigate the relationship between social background and recruitment to academia in three ways: A) by analysing and comparing developments in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, B) by studying how social background influences different academic career patterns in Norway, and C) by using experimental methods to understand which factors influence recruitment to academia.
The project combines extensive Nordic register data, which contains information on the entire population in the respective countries, with a unique research personnel register from Norway, as well as new experimental data on recruitment processes in academia. Growing economic inequality in the Western world in recent decades underscores the need to understand how inequality is reproduced in different sectors of society. ACCESS will contribute new knowledge about this by focusing the spotlight on a group that has so far received little research.
