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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?
In the "dot com" bubble, many geeks got rich. I've worked with a couple guys over the years who made a million or two in that one. Quite a few math Phds got nice 6-figure jobs for a few years during the finance bubble - nice while it lasted.
The tuition bubble is far more evil. Students are walking away with ~100k in debt, and no better employment prospects* than they had before. Faculty are getting poorer. It's not like the janitorial staff are getting rich here. It's a bubble based on deceiving children that benefits no workers, only the top of the pile: the most evil bubble in my lifetime.
*Yeah, sure, a college education can have other benefits besides future salary prospects but that's not how it's sold to high-schoolers and parents! The sales pitch is outright fraud.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Where does the money go? Not generalizations, but accounts. If research is paid for by outsiders, if sports pay for itself, then where is this ever growing cost of education coming from?
Basically post-secondary education was marketed really really well.
So we have more and more post-secondary students.
This has wide ranging effects.
A diploma is worth less and less, as everyone has one (we have far more graduates than jobs that call for them).
A diploma costs more, more demand for a diploma from children means you can charge more.
And since the job market is flooded with out of work Professors and Master students the mean salary and working conditions for lecturers/professors falls.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Ivory Tower Mentality right here:
If that leads to a job, great, but that shouldn't be the point.
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.
A trillion dollar debt problem in the US makes it the point.
HR departments requiring a BA for the most menial of office tasks makes it the point.
Requiring a fucking MA to work in a library as a salaried employee and not a volunteer (the US is the only country I know of that does this) makes it the point.
But sure, it's /all/ the student's fault for expecting something in return for all that money. /sneer
I have nothing but contempt for you.
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BMO
Administrators care only about getting more students through the door and the tuition dollars rolling in therefrom.
If you want to quickly solve this problem, have US News add percentage of faculty in full-time tenured position as a weighting factor to school rankings. Overnight you'll see tens of thousands of adjuncts being offered tenure.
While a simple faculty/student ratio is used there is actually a huge pressure to have the highest number of faculty, and therefore pressure to drive down cost. Quantity is weighted more highly than quality.
I'm a retired chemistry professor from a Major university and was on some committee or other looking into university finances. One striking stat was that the non academic administration used 60% of the total budget. 60%!!!! Nothing could be done about it - the salaries of those folks were locked in by long term contract and many of them had no idea what an institution of higher education was about. These guys were bean counters, fund raisers and politicians but never taught a class, met a student, got a grant or did research in their professional lives yet they made judgements about the faculty competence, salaries and promotions. One of my professor colleagues found that the department secretary was making more than he was and left academia for a government research lab. No wonder universities are filled with temporary teachers having MS degrees making $2,000 per semester per 3 credit hour course. Think about lab instructors making $700 per semester per 3 contact hours teaching per week involving student contact plus time for lab report and quiz and exam grading, weekly staff meetings, and office hours. I wonder if fast food workers, restaurant wait persons, and bar tenders don't make more income in a year.
The fact of the matter is that there are far too many people who want faculty positions compared to the number of available positions. I quote directly from our university president, "I can get professors anywhere."
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?
There is pressure from the administration to buffer grades, as that effects various important statistics for the school, and it's far easier for them to give out As rather than worry about complaints and legal action etc., but otherwise the administration couldn't give a rats arse about how popular the professors are with the students. They care most about how much research money the professor is bringing in. Maybe at some big private school where you have legacies and wealthy donnors to worry about the administration actually cares about the students' feelings.
No one goes into a professorship expecting a 9-5 job, but pointing out professors are spending extra time with their students isn't really making the case the situtation is detrimental for education, either. When you get your degree, you have a decision -- do I enjoy doing research/teaching so much that I go into academia, or do I want a profitable career and go into industry? Professors aren't in it for the money. They're the sort of people who just wouldn't fit anywhere else. You don't need to pay them well. The professors making $40k tend to work as hard and spend as much time in the lab as the professors making $80k. I'll bet many would work for room and board if you gave them a nice lab to go with it.
If you want to improve the situation, your options are either establish some legal minimums, or curb the excess of academics by providing either positions for them and/or doing a better job of training people for other positions. Unless you're an engineer, most bachelors degrees are more or less geared toward becoming an academic, even though relatively few people will wind up in academia, and it doesn't help this situation when you have a flood of graduates who aren't really sure what they can do with themselves besides stay in the university environment.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Medicine, and particularly the Doctor's part in it, is fundamentally an information technology, which would be getting cheaper, faster, better, and more accurate every year but for the state enforced monopolistic shake down.
Google could replace 80% of doctors with free web app in a year, and a free market in medicine and diagnostics would reduce prices to a tenth of what they're currently.
I work at a college and I don't believe this. First of all, what most students learn in college is what they should learn in high school. I've met people who went to high school in Germany and France and know more about most things than American college graduates. The problem we have is that pretty much every job requires a college degree and pretty much every education system is underfunded. It's particularly bad in my home state, Pennsylvania, where underfunding of education just might be the issue that gets us a Democrat as governor. At the college where I work, some students get a point of education. Which is basically to be qualified for jobs.When I was a student, such people annoyed me because all I cared about was knowledge itself. But now, I understand and respect their perspective. For example, I proofread the paper of one kid who wrote in response to Plato. Now, he misunderstood what Plato said - but I have to blame the teacher for that, not the student, as his response was appropriate and clever. He responded to the idea that people are of different types - and interpreted it as meaning that a "gold" person is one who comes from influential parents and a "silver" person would come from military parents - whereas of course Plato actually envisioned a world where the children were separated from their parents because birth was not a determinant. Plato was still wrong, of course, because he had children judged far too early, but he never implied it was genetic. But what the student wrote was that he felt he shouldn't be held back just because his mom worked at walmart. Astute and true. Why is he going to college? Probably because he wants something better in his life. Not for reasons of loving knowledge, although it seems he does .. but that's not why. You don't pay that much money just for the love of knowledge. If you did, I'd have about 20 advanced degrees by now (I love coursera ... and udacity ... and all the rest).
Our students are not generally partiers. Sure, some are, but most are disadvantaged city kids who want an education. They come to us clueless because Philadelphia schools are absolutely terrible and getting worse by the second. And yes, a lot of them annoy me because they don't seem to care about what they're studying. They ask me for help finding articles and play on their phones while I try to help them. So it goes. They're in it for jobs, not because they care, but ... well ... that's the world we've created.
In my opinion we should fix k-12 education so that it's enough for most jobs and should also provide government funded university education, but with higher standards.
I work with two branches of linguistics. The present consensus was essentially reached in the early 1990s, but is still not represented online in freely-available resources: you need access to university holdings. Now, there are sometimes ways for laymen to get access to some of this information (inter-library loan, a JSTOR subscription), but not everyone in North America or Europe is so fortunate, and it would come at such great expense that you are better off establishing some kind of status at a university anyway. Furthermore, so much of the information, whether publically available or limited to universities, is not in English and probably won't be available in English for some years more.
There were a couple of researchers who thought it would be nice if Wikipedia reflected the state-of-the-art instead of outdated views from half a century ago that dilettantes had put up, but they quickly abandoned Wikipedia after being dissatisfied with its editing climate.
I've heard the same complaints from fellow academics in fields from anthropology to mathematics. You can keep on thinking you have access to everything you might possibly want, but you simply have no idea how much you are missing.
Don't forget the government. They're the ones that make the loans possible.
Acch - my bad. Yes. As long as the government is willing to make these insane loans, the Universities will be more than happy to take the money.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Common Core is being unnecessary vilified by people who don't understand it. All Common Core does is define a base line of standards for all children in all states that adopt it. I
Poisoning the well, and then show that you don't know a damn thing about Common Core (funny how you threw that accusation at me). No, it's not just standards. It's standards where the materials must come from Common Core as part of the Copyrights you agree to when signing up for the program. Materials that are horribly confusing intentionally, go look at some of the math examples that people are complaining about. Materials by the way, that are very expensive due to copyrights, are not designed or written by educators (and educators have 0 input), and where the material is trying to get your kids to purchase products at least as much as teach them something.
Common Core is not "Standards Testing", we have "Standards Testing" already and it's of questionable value (Many teachers will tell you that it's very bad for education and worse now that testing is quarterly at most schools).
How about reading a bit of actual book from Common Core and then talking, instead of repeating propaganda and claiming other people just "don't understand". Talk to educators that have read the book and understand the material. I have not read the _whole_ book, it's about 4" thick and I made it through about 400 pages so far. I have friends and relatives who are educators, and I trust their perspective on the material more than I trust you repeating what I can find on a propaganda web site.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.