Do PhD admission committees prefer prospective professors over practitioners?
Yes (but it's usually an unconscious bias, and not openly stated).
Many academics consider failing to become a professor actual &quot;failure&quot;. An academic career is supposed to be a vocation. PhD students are supposed to be passionate about the topic, so much so that they'll want to continue to work on it after graduating. The best graduate students go on to become professors; the not-so-good ones are eliminated and &quot;get a job&quot; (because being an academic isn't actually a job!). The belief is pervasive enough that many academics who quit felt compelled to write blogs about why they're quitting and why they don't consider themselves to have failed.
Viewed this way, a prospective PhD student openly states they want to work in industry is a red flag. They've already ruled themselves out of being the best, they're likely to fail. Admission committees might not think this crassly, but they'll come up with the closely-related reasons &quot;not passionate enough&quot; or &quot;applicant is not motivated by the subject, therefore when things inevitably go badly in the PhD they might drop out&quot;, both of which stem from the idea that the only way to be sure the applicant is passionate/motivated enough is for them to want to be a professor.
Granted not all academics think like this, but unless you are certain otherwise (e.g., you are applying to work under Phillip Greenspun, or the program description explicitly says they have an eye on preparing students for industry jobs), I think you should err on the side of caution and say you will consider an academic career even if you are almost certain you will join industry, or at least be non-committal about your future plans.