Teaching College Is No Longer a Middle Class Job

An anonymous reader writes When you think of people who teach at a college, you probably imagine moderately affluent professors with nice houses and cars. All that tuition has to go into competitive salaries, right? Unfortunately, it seems being a college instructor is becoming less and less lucrative, even to the point of poverty. From the article: "Most university-level instructors are ... contingent employees, working on a contract basis year to year or semester to semester. Some of these contingent employees are full-time lecturers, and many are adjunct instructors: part-time employees, paid per class, often without health insurance or retirement benefits. This is a relatively new phenomenon: in 1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this percentage had shrunk to 33.5." This is detrimental to learning as well. Some adjunct faculty, desperate to keep jobs, rely on easy courses and popularity with students to stay employed. Many others feel obligated to help students beyond the limited office hours they're paid for, essentially working for free in order to get the students the help they need. At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?

Comments

Administrators

[chihowa]

In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.

Re:Administrators

[flyingsquid]

In my department, the faculty work in a run-down, dilapidated old building. Offices are barely large enough to hold weekly meetings with undergraduates, and it's difficult to get the lab space you need to do research. Half a dozen postdocs and graduate students are crammed into a single office. The building is infrequently cleaned- the walls, bathrooms and offices are filthy- and they don't even empty the trash cans in the offices anymore. The workers went on strike to get something like a 1.5% annual raise- which is not a raise by any stretch of the imagination when you factor in inflation. It just means your salary isn't cut.

Meanwhile, administration gets a shiny fancy new building, with huge meeting rooms and offices, and the head of the university gets a big fat raise- and they were already paid about ten times what a starting faculty member would make.

A good administrator is worth their weight in gold. They make things happen, they facilitate research and teaching, and make it easier for everyone else to do their job. But bad administration... bad adminstration is like a parasite. They turn things around. Instead of supporting the university, they see the rest of the university as working to support them. Instead of focusing on doing groundbreaking research, they want faculty to get government grants which pay overhead- i.e., support for administration. Somehow, there's never enough for the people who actually make things happen. But there's always enough for the people at the top of the university hierarchy. It reminds me a lot of that scene in 'Animal Farm' where the milk goes into the pigs' slop;

Re:Administrators

[Mantrid42]

Yup. One administrator should not be worth four professors: http://io9.com/professors-pran...

Re:Administrators

[Ol Olsoc]

>Don't straw man me

You said, and I quote accurately:

All these people who go to college for the piece of paper are turning colleges into half-assed trade schools

If those aren't students, then who the fuck are they?

-- BMO

For all the arguments about "who's to blame", the students are probably the least to blame.

Kids have been indoctrinated since day one that they have to go to college, lest they lose the game of life. It takes a while to figure out that it is bullshit.

And what has happened is that in the supply and demand world created by the entire educational system, and gobbled up by parents who fear that their children will get too far behind if they don't read stories to them while in the womb, colleges have seen fit to increase tuition by double digit amounts every year.

And they have added layer upon layer of management structure, which conveniently sucks up all that money as overhead. Teaching has become irrelevant, and college is viewed as High school grades 13 through 17.

And unless the student is a scholarship case, or has wealthy parents, many (most?) parents are forced to forgo retirement savings, or the student has to take out easily available loans, which put them in a huge amount of debt.

Now however, they have a tiger by the tail. They've been churning out graduates like crazy, and in a supply/demand equation, there is a glut of supply. Which is why you see Staff assistants and McDonald's shift supervisors with degrees, and businesses even demanding them for jobs that need no degree at all. We'll be seeing demands for degrees in the mailroom soon.

So IMO, the heirarchy of blame:

1. Academically inclined people who like every working group, believes that solving problems demands more of their own group. Engineers wnat more engineers, accountants, more accountants, etc.

2. Primary and secondary schools that buy in.

3. Well meaning but stupid parents who adhere to the old stereotype - Go to the right preschool, so you can go to the right Kindergarten, so you can get itno the right school, so you can go to the right college, so you can meet the right person, get the right job, get married in the right church, live in the right neighborhood.......

4. Colleges and universities that are willing and able to take advantage of people who are willing to pay almost anything to achieve that "rightness".

5. Way down on the list are the victims, the students.

It's just now, after years of grumbling, that the equation is getting askew, that the benefits are starting to not be worth the cost.

Because we reward administrators and not teachers

[Anonymous Coward]

Administrators are getting record salaries, all the benefits you can imagine, and extremely lucrative "golden parachutes"

At my university they have a graph showing administrator pay and lecturer pay, and the administrator pay is literally off the chart while lecturer pay is on a steady decline.

It's the same thing in high schools. We're bitching about tenure and bad teachers -- who hires those bad teachers? Administrators. They pick the cheapest green thumbs they can find so they can get rid of the more expensive, more qualified veteran teachers. It is literally, entirely their fault why schools hire bad teachers.

Administrators are the reason high school and university funds are misspent, misdirected, misused, and why actual services to help the students and teachers/lecturers are not funded. They're the ones that want a $400 ELMO machine in every classroom but won't spend a nickel on writing paper, pencils, books, or any of the basics.

When it comes to education administrators are always the problem. They are the most removed from education, they have the least experience with education, and they never listen to the students, parents, or other faculty when making their decisions.

Governments are main Reason

[Roger W Moore]

6-figure debt makes it the point. A debt that you cannot refinance makes it the point. A debt you can't escape through bankruptcy makes it the point.

Agreed but the real point is that if not everyone goes to university then the cost borne by students is far less. When I was at university in the UK tuition was free because the government paid it. The argument being that I would then go and get a job and with a higher salary my higher taxes would pay for the investment the government had made.

However this model collapses when 50+% of the population goes to university. First the universities have to either provide additional teaching resources and/or lower graduation standards because such a large increase means that the educational standards on the incoming students are lower. This is exacerbated by the fact that the average salary of all graduates drops because the total wages available does not increase with the number of degrees granted so essentially you have the same tax base as before but now have to pay for twice as many degrees.

The result is that tuition has gone through the roof. The same degree that was free for me 25 years ago now costs £9,000/year ($16,400/year). It is also now a 4 year degree (used to be 3 years) because of the lower standards in school. Of course this means that students acquire so much debt that they have to be extremely concerned about their potential salary after graduating. The puts an increasing pressure for universities to shift from the academic institutes of higher education which have served society for the best part of a millennium (or possibly longer in some cases) towards becoming vocational training colleges where each course is targeted to a specific career which provides enough income to pay of the massive debt so good luck finding the next generation of teachers!