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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?
Government intervention is ALWAYS economically bad, inefficient, rife with negative side-effects, etc (Yes, even in things like having a military - but THERE it's at least a "necessary evil"). Our founders explained this; they warned against it; SOME people simply refuse to learn basic lessons no matter ho many times the evidence smacks them in the face.
The huge ramp-up in federal involvement in education (NOT among its Constitutionally-enumerated powers) which has gone "on steroids" in the Obama-era take-over of the student loans business, broke a basic economic constraint and the numerous consequences will be felt for decades. By making it so students had virtually unlimited ability to "go into debt" paying for college, the federal government freed the colleges to boost tuition and other student expenses (even while neglecting their basic and vital job thereby producing no more, or even less value) WITHOUT LOSING CUSTOMERS (the normal constraints on such increases were gone). The Colleges, in effect, contracted "defense contractor disease". The Colleges, flush with new money, did what most institutions do when buried in cash: They boosted the pay and benefits of the top executives and hired lots of their friends to be "top executives" and administrators (with great salaries and benefits) while ignoring infrastructure and "lower-level" workers. The new armies of executives did what they always do: complained about the legitimate costs of the institutions and looked for ways to reduse THOSE in order to suooprt their own lavish lifestyles. California's "U.C. System" is a fantastic example of this: Stagnant salaries for profs, reductions in the number of full-time profs, increases in un- or under-paid assistant positions, but MASSIVE growth in the army of highly-paid administrators. All this corruption to be paid for over the coming decades by the current generation of college kids who were duped into supporting this with the lie of "free money", are getting educated no better than their parents, but are ending up with huge student loan debts they will be unable to escape via bankruptcy filing and which will impact their purchases of homes, and cars, their marriage plans, etc.