From my own experience in academia I was surprised by how many of my peers went into academia because they were expected to do so by their parents, who were also academics. It's a smallish sample, but ~90% of the people I talked to never considered other careers paths. Their parents were academics, so it's just natural that they become one too. They already knew this ever since high school.
As someone who got into academia "by chance" this was quite a shock to me.
Not unheard for me too: it seemed for some that having both parents with PhDs, and a partner too, basically made them feel like they needed one.
Plenty going on in such a phenomenon I feel. There’s the relative directionless-ness that can plague smart people coming out of unchallenging high school environments; the often accompanying “prestige for the sake of prestige” logic that you can get in middle-upper class culture, and, IMO, the inflated value and prestige of actually having a PhD in the modern (ie production-line) education system. A healthy dose of cynicism about the corporate world is often involved too I’d say.
I personally find it unfortunate how classist and stupid Grad school would feel at times.
That was me, 20 years ago. Going to grad school after college was just automatically assumed, like going to college after high school. And why not? My parents had made a nice life for themselves, going from farms to a secure upper-middle-class existence. Seemed like a relatively low-stress occupation that provided a lot of intellectual variety.
Of course, the level of competition changed dramatically between their generation and mine. Then you could go directly from grad school to a tenure-track position and generally expect lifetime employment. Now, in the sciences, you're expected to live a nomadic life as you go from postdoc to postdoc, making less than $50k, perhaps eventually landing that coveted tenure-track. In the humanities it's even worse, where you work adjunct jobs that pay less than minimum wage.
It's no surprise that people with family money are most likely to win these contests of endurance. If you need to earn your own money, it's simply irrational to persist in the academic rat race.
I wonder if that will maintain going forward. All the doctors I am business partners/friends with advise their kids to go into commercial real estate/tech/law/finance/engineering.
They say declining pay and difficulties negotiating with bigger players such as governments and larger and larger healthcare employers in combination with the bad quality of life at work no longer make the costs of becoming a doctor worth it.
As someone who got into academia "by chance" this was quite a shock to me.