An Irish Town Planner: The Thick Father Problem: Following a Parent into a Degree

A personal Sunday discussion piece by Brendan Buck. It is not the opinion of BPS Planning.

A confession at the kitchen table

I did geography as part of my degree in Trinity. My son is now studying geography and statistics in UCD. In most families that would be a touching bit of heritage, a map folded and passed across the table. In ours it comes with a complication. He had a Leaving Cert points total that, as I understand the CAO, opens most of the doors in the building. He could have studied almost anything. He walked past the corridors with the brass plates and chose the one with the maps in it. Then he added statistics, which I am told is where you have to be right rather than merely interesting.

I have therefore concluded that I am the thick father. If the cleverest option available is the subject Dad did, what does that say about Dad? It is a joke, mostly. But it set me wondering about something I had never properly asked. How often do children actually follow a parent into a field of study, and why?

What the research says about following in footsteps

The first thing to say is that the numbers are bigger than I expected. A Swedish working paper by Adam Altmejd, published through the IFAU research institute in 2023, reports that university graduates are more than three times as likely to hold a degree in the field their parent graduated in. Three times is a big family resemblance, and the sort of figure that should make anyone suspicious, because families share a great deal besides a surname: schools, neighbourhoods, bookshelves and expectations.

The clever part of Altmejd's paper is that it tries to separate the resemblance from the cause. He looked at Swedes who applied to university programmes between 1977 and 1992, and compared parents who only just got into a field with parents who only just missed it and ended up studying something else. Since the two groups were otherwise much alike, the difference in what their children later studied is a fair estimate of the parent's own influence. That influence is real. Children became about 50 per cent more likely to graduate in a field if their parent had enrolled in it. In the paper's main estimate that works out at roughly two percentage points. It was far larger in some fields. For technology, engineering, medicine and business, parental enrollment raised a child's chances by between 2.0 and 12.8 percentage points.

Two details struck me. The first is that the effect is not about passing on skills. The paper finds no sign that a parent's field raises the child's grades in that subject, and little evidence of a comparative advantage. What seems to matter is that the parent makes a path visible. Children were more likely to follow a parent of the same gender, and less likely to follow a parent whose field had weak labour market prospects. Altmejd calls this the parent as role model, and cautions that his data cannot fully settle the question. The second detail is a mild comfort. On average 28 years separate a parent's university application from a child's, so children are following less what the parent studied than what the parent did with it.

On the same-gender point, I should record that a father and a son are the pairing the research says is most likely to repeat itself. I claim no credit. I merely note it for the file.

Other studies, other professions

The wider literature points the same way. A study of Swedish adoptees by Matthew Lindquist, Joeri Sol and Mirjam Van Praag found that parental entrepreneurship raises a child's chances of becoming an entrepreneur by about 60 per cent. Because some of the children were adopted, the authors could separate what comes from birth parents from what comes from the people who raised them. Post-birth factors accounted for about twice as much as pre-birth ones, and the evidence pointed, suggestively, to role modelling. In plain English, it is largely about what you see done at home.

Entrepreneurship is not a degree, but the pattern recurs in Hans Hvide and Paul Oyer's Norwegian paper on "dinner table human capital". Using Norwegian register data, they found that a majority of male entrepreneurs start a firm in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers' employment, and that those who do tend to outperform others in the sector. They also found that higher-IQ entrepreneurs were less likely to follow their fathers. I mention that for balance. It concerns firms and not degrees, and my son appears to have ignored it anyway.

For degrees themselves, a Norwegian register study of everyone born between 1955 and 1980 found that children often reproduce their parents' fields, most of all where parents are professionals with master's degrees or higher. Even children who chose differently tended to choose something close. A Swedish thesis by Helen Dryler found a "same-sector" effect on choice of upper-secondary programme, somewhat stronger for fathers and sons. Xiaoyu Xia suggests one practical mechanism: students learn what a major might pay from the wages of parents and older siblings.

There is also the sibling effect. A study across Chile, Croatia, Sweden and the United States in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow an older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. The effect disappears if the older sibling drops out, which suggests that it is the experience and not the brochure that persuades.

What the research cannot tell me

I should be honest about what I did not find. I could find no study of whether the children of geographers become geographers, so I cannot tell you whether geography passes down more or less than medicine or engineering. Altmejd's strongest results are for technology, engineering, medicine and business, and he does not single out geography. Most of the best evidence is Scandinavian, Altmejd's paper is a working paper rather than a journal article, and I found no Irish study of the question. Some of the resemblance is simply families passing on advantages and tastes, and the causal studies can only strip that out for the groups, country and period they study.

A three-fold resemblance is a statement about averages, and my son is not an average. A fairer reading is that a parent in a field makes that field more thinkable, not inevitable. Nor would I take the finding that children avoid parental fields with weak earnings prospects as a verdict on geography. The papers do not test it, and I choose to treat his choice as a vote of confidence in the subject.

Why he chose well

Which brings me to the part where I stop apologising and start boasting. UCD's School of Geography describes its degree as combining data collection, analysis and interpretation, spatial analysis and fieldwork, with Geographical Information Systems, or GIS, among the skills it says employers value. On its course page the programme lists an Introduction to GIS for the Social Sciences in second year and an Applied GIS module later on. Pair that with statistics and he is training in two things the modern economy keeps asking for: where things are, and how sure we can be about them. I do not know the module list for his combination, but I have drawn enough maps without confidence intervals to see the point.

Then there is where it leads. UCD says its geography graduates have found work as GIS specialists with local government agencies and private industry, as researchers and policy analysts with Teagasc, ESRI, NGOs and government departments, and as planners in local government and consultancies, and that many go on to master's degrees in social sciences, spatial analysis, planning, law or business. Trinity's page lists urban and regional planning, environmental consultancy, research and teaching, financial services and foreign affairs among its graduates' careers. In the UK, the Royal Geographical Society's data on graduate destinations puts environment professionals first among the jobs held by human geography graduates, followed by a category that includes planning officers and consultants.

The demand for spatial skills seems real. A TU Dublin presentation to a European mapping body lists a significant deficit of qualified geospatial professionals in Ireland. Tailte Éireann, the State's mapping and land agency, put out a tender notice in March 2026 for a four-year framework, estimated at €2 million, for GIS specialists and development work on its GeoHive and MapGenie services. And a voluntary 2024 salary and skills survey by a GIS recruitment firm found that 79 per cent of respondents held a master's degree or higher, and that people with programming and automation skills such as Python or R commanded higher pay. It was a first-year, self-selected survey, so I would not lean on its salary claims, but a geographer who can code and count looks like a useful creature.

Which is what statistics is for. The Royal Geographical Society argues that geographers combine qualitative and quantitative methods with spatial data analysis, and cites a UK Geospatial Commission estimate of up to £11 billion a year in potential benefit from location data. It is an advocate for the subject, so I take that as an argument and not gospel.

To keep myself honest: geography is not a magic wand. The same RGS figures show that fifteen months after graduating, 7.8 per cent of human geography graduates and 6.0 per cent of physical geography graduates were unemployed, against 6.2 per cent of all first-degree graduates. That is respectable and ordinary, and the "gateway" depends on the skills, the further study and the people you meet on the way.

The planner's bias

I did geography at Trinity as part of my degree and I now work as a town planning consultant, so you may suspect I find geography a natural gateway into planning. The suspicion is fair. In my defence, the Irish Planning Institute's accredited courses are all planning degrees and masters, at TU Dublin, UCD and UCC, so a geography degree is not itself on the list. It is a door and not a destination, but it opens onto the same landscape: land, people, data, and the awkward business of deciding what goes where.

The verdict

So what should a thick father conclude? That children following a parent into a field is real and more common than chance, that the best evidence points to role modelling and information rather than inherited talent, and that none of it tells us about one particular son. He may have chosen geography because of me, in spite of me, or because a teacher once drew a good contour line on a whiteboard. I will never know, and neither will the economists.

What I do know is that he has chosen a subject that teaches you to see the forces behind a place, and another that teaches you to doubt your own conclusions. They are a good pair. If a father's job is to give a son a head start, I will accept the research's most flattering reading: that I made geography seem thinkable. If a son's job is to quietly outdo his father, he has begun well, and he has the statistics to prove it.

One last thing, in the spirit of public service. If anyone at Trinity or UCD, whether a geography society, a department, or a student event, would like a speaker, I am happy to accept the invitation. I would be glad to talk about geography and planning, and, I admit, to embarrass my son in front of his classmates while I am at it. Consider it a standing offer, with baby photographs available on request.

An Irish Town Planner

Sunday, 25 October 2026

The Thick Father Problem: Following a Parent into a Degree