It's the Mathew principle all the way down.
Actually it's a bit worse, in the sense that if you exhibit competence without the "appropriate pedigree" all you'll get is punishment.
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This is not surprising. Poor or rich, if you have good family support, you have a much better chance at success. This can be seen with rich kids with absent/uncaring parents blowing all of their money within a couple of years/going to jail/becoming alcoholics or drug addicts.
I don't think the distinction is nearly as concrete as the authors seem to assume.
Parents, in choosing their mates, certainly have in mind a broad set of concepts about how their offspring should turn out, and even the most gentle and supportive of them have values, behaviors, and disciplinary strategies they put into place to mold their children - obviously not a guaranteed outcome, but certainly on the whole correlative in many dimensions of child outcomes we could measure.
In the opposite direction, I would not assume mentor and mentee relationships in academic are as fluid and breakable as the author might assume. Students make major decisions about where even to attend graduate programs based on prospective but not promised guarantees to work with mentors, and mentors take on mentees based on initial impressions of research compatibility that don't always turn out as positive as they might have hoped, and it's not that easy when grant money or institutional budgeting is at stake to reverse these decisions.
The harsh truth is that key to academic career advancement is who you know much more than what you know. I every single person I knew in graduate school who got a postdoc position did so through informal means (i.e. knowing someone who knew someone), and having letters of recommendation written by the right people from the right departments at the right schools opens all sorts of doors to the academic hierarchy that would otherwise be closed.
Obviously one can find discrimination anywhere, but I don't think it's as systematic as you seem to imply. Most academics are under considerable pressure to publish or generate results, so e.g. when faced with hiring a postdoc or a PhD candidate, they don't have the luxury of rejecting a brilliant candidate that could be productive for spurious reasons.
If genetics/parental upbringing had very little to do with child outcomes then the entire concept of parenting would be irrelevant.
You could just choose any partner, have a child, leave them to fend for themselves on the street, it'd all be down to random chance and then suddenly 50% of those kids end up in the 50th percentile or above academically, financially, whatever metric you choose.
I would intuitively need an incredibly, incredibly strong proof to show the opposite were true, on par with someone telling me that in their city gravity runs backwards or something.
So you did get it.
Just another note.
If you had the wrong facial bone structure, or some kind of deformity (before starting, not after like Hawking before anyone makes the point), or you were ridiculously short, or your voice had the wrong pitch, or a myriad of other traits, then that starting academic "pedigree" wouldn't have happened.
If you, by any chance worked in a field where you can work on your own and actually achieve something alone (you don't), had you achieved some great result you would have at best been ignored, but usually ridiculed.
If you insisted, the punishment would just get more and more vicious, but usually ignoring is enough.
It's the Matthew principle:
> For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
This is ingrained in human psychology innately (like the just world fallacy and other delusions) and there is no way around it.
Most evidence, in fact, says that mentor/mentee realtionships in academia are incredibly immutable. Many people put up with hideous amounts of abuse because their advisor has a thumbs up/thumbs down effect on their career that a Roman emperor would be envious of.
I can think of at least 3-4 very highly respected faculty at top institutions who are short guys. Several more whose voice would never make it in a TV or radio career.
And that’s just in CS systems and security.
The physical stats will give you a masters degree, looking it up after gets you the PhD.
An example I like to give is, my junior high school had an annual writing competition. The winners were so far ahead in terms of ability ,which was evident when they read their stories aloud , that such ability had to have been divined in some way. There is no way you can be competitive when some have such a huge head start due to genes.
reputation is a currency in academia, and even people in prestigious positions arent usually going to spend it to get someone mediocre into a top position.
You want to look dominant enough with gravitas
Without that any competence elicits a tremendous response from other people that can easily go all the way to murderous violence.
In a sense, they feel that you are undeserving and that your competence is an affront to the "natural order". And this is in areas where there is some objective metric, which is not the norm.
These are very old biological truths and they will never change at the human timescale, if ever.
While I think there's a lot of higher-priority work that could be done, it's worth taking a moment to step back and look at the process of academia to see if what we have is working, what needs changing, and what improvements -- if any -- are worth investigating.
It's like development retrospectives. Some yield actionable items. Some aren't worthwhile.
It's nepotism and it's enshrined in the recommendation letter system.
The fact that GRE is a joke and that in the USA undergrad, even at the elite level, is usually just a glorified partying program doesn't help either.
1) Tacit knowledge. In many fields, there are important information only accessible from having a mentor like heuristics, insider information, in-lab techniques etc.
2) Investment opportunities. A good adviser is often good at spotting opportunities for their students. It's also common for an academic adviser to share their most valuable opportunities with their students.
It's clear to me that the ideal of meritocracy (talent and hard work leads to success) does not hold in academia, and maybe not anywhere. Having a good mentor gives you extremely valuable information that contribute to success. On the other hand, I am not sure this can be fixed or even needs fixing. I think it's healthy for academics to be partially siloed, so that they can develop their unique approaches and maintain a healthy diversity for the field.
Its basically a filter on who can stick with a program for an extended period of time. You know, skills you need if you going to do a 5-7 year PhD.
It certainly doesn't prepare you for research, unless you specifically seek out certain opportunities.
Although ironically, it turns out the 4.0 GPA types may not make the best researchers - at least in experimental science. Better GPA make better grad students up to a certain point - then after a certain point (around 3.5-3.6) there is a negative correlation (except medical school where that doesn't happen). I've heard this from multiple professors.