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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 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.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?
Because profit is all that matters?
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
Evermore, even our education system in the USA is now a "big" business, just like healthcare - this is despicable. Its a disgrace. It's been going on for decades, albeit at a somewhat chelonian pace; and now it's accelerating. Keep on voting GOP and corporate clown Dems... and this result will continue. Young people- you must get and vote - save your generation. Mine is lost to the oligarchs.
Because there are too many of you.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The state of the education system in the US has become pathetic. I've seen it for years in the primary education system. I'm a little shocked that it is now at the university level too. Especially with the prices of tuition these days. It's even more surprising when you read stories like this
including the Vice Chancellor of Diversity and the Dean of Minority Integration. But you're forgetting scholarships and pizza parties.
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?
It's because colleges and universities are natural collectors of Element 0 -- Administratium
Middle Class jobs. Too many golden parachutes being handed out to administrators.
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.
"At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?"
You are asking the wrong question. It isn't "We" it is "They". Colleges are seen as the bastion of liberalism but they are run as businesses by over paid executives hired by boards of directors (trustees) with the goal of maximizing profits and endowments. There is no "We" in this question.
At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?
Because many more able people want to teach than there are available positions.
The football and basketball coaches are doing great!
I'm seeing a lot of noise about administrators being the high cost.
But don't forget the football coaches and their million dollar salaries.
Allowing a 'middle class' to exist would be permitting a bunch of entitled looters to expropriate the wealth creators!
Professors in technical areas make large amounts of money, and are guaranteed their salary for life once they've been promoted once (to associate professor).
In my department, at the lowest level - assistant professor (tenure track, but not yet tenured) - they are making well north of 10K dollars a month. Full professors fall anywhere between 15K-25K a month.
On the other hand, professors in the arts or history departments make less than many staff earn.
Note that this is all public record - I'm not exactly giving away secrets.
#DeleteChrome
and for the skilled mostly blue-collar jobs that are vital to our society but do not require 4-year degrees.
Once a skilled trade provided a good shot at a decent middle-class livelihood. Something has happened to devalue these skills.
Young people get college degrees for which they are unsuited because it appears there is no alternative.
Despite all the jokes about degreed barristas working for the minimum wage, the absence of a degree is now the best way to ensure a lifetime of poorly paid jobs.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
*Not* being a college graduate is a certain guarantee of a lifetime of poorly paying jobs.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
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.
I honestly feel bad for these people, but they think it's bad now, just wait.
A first semester physics class pretty much covers the same material at every university and doesn't really change from year to year. In this day and age, there's really no reason other than tradition why we need to keep hiring thousands of people to present essentially identical lectures over and over.
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.
Sports and sport complexes, and administration.
I work at a relatively cheap college. Adjuncts get paid 1900 a semester. I'm a part-time librarian and get about 15000 a year when the going rate is about 50000 (so part time would be 25 - 30000). Yet our president lives in a mansion on the main line, one of the most expensive areas on the east coast. The library still has asbestos in it, but will they build a new building? No, they'd rather have a fancy new gym. It is a nice gym and I plan to use the pool frequently once I work fulltime and don't have to pay for membership, but still - you can see where their priorities lie.
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.
This is no different to many other industries. The safety net of "job for life" is no longer viable and no longer exists. Anyone still enjoying it are the last of their breed. Intelligent people EMBRACE change and ADAPT.
"The people"? It must be some communist ploy!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Wow. You really think Republicans control education in this country?
When will the guberment learn blah blah blah wibble blah? This is the angry bold text. Socialists. Socialists. I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing. Government is bad. Except when it's killing brown people, go America. Kill more brown people. Taxes. Taxes. More angry bold text.
I am a university professor, so I know a little bit about fighting for money.
Tuition rates are indeed skyrocketing, and most of that money is getting funneled into two places: athletic programs and facilities.
Most universities are in a facilities arms race to build lab complexes and procure equipment to attract foreign students, who are often backed by enormous and nearly unlimited sums of money back home. The university I work for has an entire administrative department whose sole purpose is to court foreign students.
Athletic programs are pretty self-explanatory.
Time to rethink college we need more trades like learning and less of the old system.
blame HR and the schools the tech schools need to drop the part of giving out an piece of paper and tech real job skills and HR need to stop looking for that piece of paper.
Bureaucracies exist for one reason and one reason alone: to grow themselves larger.
We see it in every level of government, and in every single institution there is, whether it be medical, educational, or professional. The "institution" grows and grows and grows while those who work "in the trenches" do worse and worse and worse and the bureaucrats do better and better and better.
+3, Funny (because its true)
C|N>K
I studied accounting in college- I had CFO's, CPA's, entrepreneurs and lawyers teaching me. Teaching was a labor of love, not a career. They were leaders in their fields of business, not the most published, tenured or "acronym-ed". The demonstrated relationship of theory to the real world was not only valuable, but generally interesting. Even in a major as dull as accounting.
This was at a 4 year university, not Heald Business College.
The biggest buzzkill in my 4 years of college? The 32 year old full-time professor that had a Ph.D. in accounting. Talk about painful. It was like the guy had contempt for the students...
Never trust anyone who takes pride in being called a 'geek'....
True, but in my area, the teachers don't last long enough to become veterans. Our schools are funded by property taxes, so only the rich areas have decent, experienced teachers. I have to say though, the college I work at trains a lot of really passionate people to work in schools and they do their student teacher stint usually in poorer areas. So, that's good. But my brother worked as a special ed teacher and after five years felt he couldn't do it anymore and now works in an entirely different field. So a lot of the good ones are driven away. I don't even want to think about administrators. We are the most understaffed library in our area. But we can buy a fancy new house for the fancy new president?
It's the same trend as in America in general, top managers take an ever-larger share of company earnings.
College is about banks making money on government backed loans? Who'da thunk.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Quite a few of my parent's friends and my relatives were professors of this and that. I thought they were the coolest people ever. They were so much more interesting to talk to and came very close to inspiring me to an academic life (the path not chosen for me). But in all those cases they fit that classic profile of having enough money to have the Volvo, the good house, and quite a bit of travel.
But if they had been forced to live like grad students I can certainly say that I would have been far less inspired to follow in their footsteps. While I didn't take that path, how many people who would are being dissuaded now?
I have a simple view as to what the problem is. Science money has two serious political problems. One is that it takes longer than an election cycle to create result, which themselves are often not initially sexy (think of how unimpressive the initial quantum discoveries were, but how much impact they eventually had). Also science often involves giving money to groups of already employed scientists who then spend the money in a myriad of different ways. Whereas giving money to a military contractor provides a bunch of fairly blue collar jobs and loads of kickbacks from the companies.
But even worse this creates a feedback circuit. If you are a math whiz and are looking at your various options then business school should be a snap. Then you can follow in the footsteps of the Ferrari driving cool kids on Wall Street. If this actually works you will inspire another generation of whiz kids to follow you. But quite simply few nations can build greatness from banking. There needs to be something to bank.
Basically if you go to most schools (especially impoverished ones) and ask the kids what route would you recommend for becoming really successful they will first say sports star, then rapper or other entertainer, and then things like banker, doctor, or lawyer. But engineer, scientist, inventor, or even building a manufacturing business just won't be on those kids minds.
This is well emphasized when you look at the classic map of top paid collage official in various states and it is almost always a sports coach.
The crazy thing is that a few schools have managed to master that connection with turning students/professors into businessmen and they are mindbogglingly successful. Not that money should be the only motive for science at least if there is some there it will inspire generation after generation of people who will propel civilization forward.
Obama-era take-over of the student loans business
I am sorry but one of the problems I have experienced personally was the deregulation of the student loan markets in 2005. By reducing the requirements of investors and insuring payoff to investors, it opened up the flood gaits for private investments to student loans.
The "Obama-era take-over" or the special loan consolidation of federal student loans was in response to the growing percent of defaulted loans and the total student loan debt. It wasn't a take over. It was a consolidation at low interest rates (not guaranteed mind you because congress later raised those rates). Funny thing is, the government still made money off those loan consolidations. It helped immensely for those that could do it. The absolute sad part about it though was the argument against it was that the investors wouldn't make enough money back. God forbid you don't get your double digit returns in your stock options.
Sure students hold some responsibility to the student loan problem but there is as much shit to go around to the colleges, governments, and private interests that have muddied the water.
But for you, the Apocalypse started when Obama was elected in 08. No need to critically think about anything because Obama dun did it and Obama hates Murica.
Seriously, fuck you.
Why does a dog lick his balls?
Then lean to program and make your own unmanned drones to fight their unmanned drones! Come brother, we can all look up in the sky to see if our revolution succeeded by seeing their automatons falling from the sky! Or we find out it was a waste of time and back to business as usual. At least we can keep our pitchforks for hay as the FSM intended.
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!
Yeah, sometimes I forget to scale my axes properly too. I'd suggest using Gnuplot.
why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?"
Because it is profitable.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"*Not* being a college graduate is a certain guarantee of a lifetime of poorly paying jobs."
False. Chemical plant operators earn six figures with their overtime and shift differential. They may be working a rotating shift, wearing Nomex, and carrying an escape breather wherever they go, but it's not a poorly paying job.
(I'm in the UK:) At my university, a respected academic who had taken on a (very) senior management role was so disgusted at her pay rise (a couple of years back now) that she donated the extra money back to her department as a bursary for PhD students (and did not publicise this fact afaik). I doubt this is common practice anywhere :-)
In an upcoming news, America wakes up with an army of revolutionary marxist university professors.
Dude,
You're doing that thing where Conservatives blame something that's been in place since the 60s for recent problems. Student loans have existed in (as far as the schools are concerned) this exact form since 1965. And yet in 1970 we did not have this problem. Therefore one of two things is true 1) basic economic theory is total BS, 2) you do not understand basic economic theory.
More importantly you;re doing that thing conservatives do where they attack a major element of public policy but offer no replacements. I think everyone agrees student loan reforms are needed. I think everyone agrees that the current method of paying for college is broken. But the ultimate result is not gonna be what you want (ie: no taxpayers subsidizing college at an level), it will probably be direct state/Federal funding of the University system. The Middle Class cannot afford these college expenses. They are not gonna vote for a candidate who promises to cut those expenses in the long term by screwing current 18-year-olds. You might be able to convince voters to force colleges to cap tuition, but that would not be a major reduction in Federal power. It would be the opposite.
I swear the right today knows a lot about getting people to show up in elections most ignore (ie: midterms), but just has no clue what to do to solve any actual problems. It's all a bunch of wankers wet-dreaming that denouncing Federal power will magically result in Federal power disappearing.
It's not much guarantee of *any* job.
which shall remain nameless. I have taught electronics in college two times in my 44 year professional career, working in industry the remainder of the time. Currently, I am teaching only one class per week in the evening. If I taught full time, my pay would be about one third of my pay in industry. That was why I left teaching after 3 years as a full time instructor in the 1980s. I had a family to support and could only make ends meet comfortably by taking on consulting work beyond my teaching. Now, I am nearing retirement and was approached by the Dean of the school out of the blue, so decided to give it a try. I have completed one quarter and got good reviews from the students, so am now starting my second quarter. I view it as something useful to do in retirement.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Lord knows Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs each rued the day they dropped out of College. If only they had bothered to graduate... they might have made trillions instead of mere billions.
Why does it cost so much for college? If all the educators are so poorly paid, where are the billions of dollars going?
Very true. And that's why we need to reform the whole system.
When you think of people who teach at a college, you probably imagine moderately affluent professors with nice houses and cars.
You must be thinking of a different institute than I do. Professors don't teach, they're too busy doing their real job of research. The teaching is done by adjuncts and grad students.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Source: Department of Labor, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
By comparison, median personal income is $32000, so those are actually clearly all middle class or above (yes, even taking into account median vs average); keep in mind that the above academic salaries are for 9 months, not 12 months, of work.
Furthermore, faculty salaries have slightly increased over time in constant dollars; they certainly haven't decreased, so teaching college is no less of a middle class job now than it was 10 or 20 years ago.
http://www.nea.org/home/34399....
And for every faculty opening, there are usually dozens of applications, so there is an oversupply of people willing to do this job.
Finally, if you want to earn more money, do something more demanding than teaching French literature, like tax preparation or accounting.
When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor.
The story of Mary Margaret Vojtko is more complicated than it seems on first glance. Vojtko was a hoarder who rebuffed numerous attempts by others to reach out and help. Among other things, she refused to let a repairman fix her boiler because she didn't want anyone disturbing her house. Yes, she was paid poorly and had no benefits, but there were other factors at work.
Of course, people like you are the reason salaries for full time faculty are low in the first place: a lot of people like to teach and they are willing to do it for little money and with few benefits.
Not to mention we're the only computer lab on campus that's open until midnight during the school year (and until 2 am the week before finals). So if you're talking about academic services ... we're not just the place with the books. We also have classrooms which are very heavily used. But still, a new gym is more important than something that actually supports learning. And buying a new house for a new president is more important than paying professors. I guess maybe they'll sell the house the last president lived in? Don't really know. But why should we provide the president with a house in the first place?
I have worked in industry, and have worked in higher education - the list of problems in both related to educating AND training workers is long. And the "blame" list is even longer. But looking at this from another angle - the world has changed
What used to be lower skilled labor is now done by robots. Robots do warehouse stocking/packing/shipping. Robots manufacture things from big to small. I use robots to clean my house. The day will come when taxi's are replaced by self driving cars. What is the point of this argument? We have changed our world and the social economics that were the norm of the past, are not the norms of the future. The need for high tech workers, at a wide range of skill levels will continue to drive many in college.
The real challenges ahead are not those of the past. How do we develop the workforce of the future? How do we develop the new social economic models where large sections of previously employed are replaced by automation - how do we develop the policies and models to balance societal benefits?
And how do we fi our education system to support this new world. I doubt many would say our current system is adequate and meeting our needs - how do you fix it?
This is bigger than student debt and college costs - these are the just the tip of the iceberg
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Capitalism may have some joys but it also is like a cancer that causes a lot of damage as it feeds upon people. Maybe the only people with enough power to get pay for teachers are the students themselves. How long before teachers, covertly, get students to strike or protest the pay issues?
I'm writing this as someone who was foolish enough to pursue a career in academia (STEM), and fortunate enough to escape it and begin building a sane, stable life for myself.
My experience of academia was in the USA, so I can only post based on my experience in the US economy.
To those still in school, I say: “GET OUT OF ACADEMIA!!!!” Don't wait. Develop and act on your exit strategy now. If you are a fresh undergraduate, do not choose any field for a primary major that requires graduate school in order to work in the field. If it is too late to change your major, then finish college and apply for non-academic jobs as soon as you earn your bachelor's degree. If you are in graduate school, perhaps consider finding a way to get something out of the time you have already spent (i.e. a terminal Master's degree, for example), but then start submitting resumes as soon as possible. Spend as much time as possible job hunting on the side. Do not let your advisor or your department know about your job hunting, and, if at all possible, find other sources for references outside of your graduate school. Tenured academics are useless for non-academic career guidance and, besides, there is a high likelihood that your advisor and/or your department will turn on you mercilessly if they discover that you have thoughts of leaving their cult. Leave graduate school the instant you receive a decent job offer.
Understand that you will be competing for non-academic jobs in the worst economy since the 1930s with skill sets highly specialized for academic jobs (and in little demand elsewhere) against people who took non-academic career paths. It will not be easy, and you may even need to start at the bottom working minimum wage jobs and internships while you build up employable skills and work experience. But it will still be far better in the mid-to-long run than the academic career path. It's true that it is hard for everyone now, but it's still harder for the “professional students” than for everyone else. In general, work experience counts for more than degrees.
If you disregard this advice and continue to pursue an academic career, then that means you will spend your twenties working hellish hours for low pay and minimal benefits, only to graduate and find that the academic/research jobs you dreamed of and were promised don't exist or don't pay a living wage, while most of the non-academic jobs will either pass you over as “overqualified”, or flatly reject you for having zero applicable skill sets. You will then spend your thirties working a series of post-docs or adjunct positions with low pay, no job security, and regular relocations. As you reach your forties, you will watch as classmates who took non-academic career paths enjoy well-paying, stable jobs, nice houses, and prospering investments and retirement plans while your own financial situation will have improved little since your mid-twenties. And all of that is assuming you didn't have to take on crippling, nondischargeable student loan debt to pay for your graduate studies.
I had the benefit of watching the above scenario happen to many people who graduated with STEM Ph.Ds before or not long after I entered my own Ph.D program. When I saw what awaited me at the finish line, I ran right out of the stadium, so to speak, and spent months job hunting until I found stable employment at a corporate job. And now I'm the only member of my entering graduate class who isn't on welfare/food stamps, forced to work multiple part-time jobs and/or move back in with their parents just to make ends meet, or living out of my car.
Take my advice, or don't. It's your life, your choice. Just know that the game has changed, and the traditional promises of the academic career path as well as many of the traditional escape routes from academia have evaporated away over the last couple of decades. If you are intelligent and motivated enough for academia, then you are intelligent and motived enough to excel in other fields where you can work half as hard while making at least three or four times as much money.
Not so much. Only the cube farms and colleges have super high numbers of people with degrees, and they are usually not paid all that well.
You just need a useful skill, or contacts, or a record of getting things done, or the ability to convince someone to take a risk on you, or a good idea and the ability to execute it, or an much above average intellect, or ambition, or wealthy parents... in short, you need to stand out somehow.
Upper management at many organizations tends to have large numbers of people with no degree (also many MBAs), electricians and plumbers can make quite a bit of money with a certification instead, starting a business is an option open to everyone, consultants generally do not list education at all, etc.
There are a lot of very good options to make as much or more money than most who go get a bachelors degree, they just require that you not float along and take the standard path.
MDs are an exception due to legal requirements, but medical school does not require a college degree to get in either.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
It is unrealistic to think we will have new jobs to replace the ones that technology has taken from us - optimistic capitalists and consumerists with no concept of limited resources or limited consumer demand. You can't grow forever but we built everything around infinite growth.
2/7 people in the world are poor and it is is NOT their fault; the % who are to blame for their plight is not insignificant. This is today's numbers, that ratio will go up. If you think I'm exaggerating, you are probably an American (there are billions of poor worldwide and they are not lazy scum.)
Most people didn't care all that much but when it starts impacting everybody... the way to sustain it will have to involve segregation, along with tribalism. History and the present show us the path humans will continue upon until it becomes impossible. It is going to be difficult to isolate those who have decent jobs from those who do not as the ratio increases... I suppose a blind eye cognitive dissonance will develop, like you see in India where the middle and upper class have a difficult time not being aware of the less fortunate but find rationalizations to essentially defend their success at the expense of others.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I'm sorry, its the 21st century... get with the program.
Put your courses in the can the same way you do the text books. Many classes are not taught in an interactive fashion in the first place so why have teams of guys stand there and repeat the same thing in class after class year after year...
We have the technology... use it.
As to people bitching about administrators gobbling all the money... well, get used to it because the only way to squeeze that out of the system is to actually squeeze money out of the whole college system itself. And the only way you do that is by lowering tuition or subsidies. Since that apparently isn't happening... the administrators are going to keep gobbling everything that isn't utterly required to keep the college functional. Electric bills might go unpaid before the administrators take a pay cut.
Anyway, i don't really care... the point of the university is to perpetuate and disseminate knowledge. There's more then one way to do that and we might have to start looking at more sustainable methods of maintaining and evolving our education system.
Really unless people are mentally flexible enough to consider creative solutions all the bitching is going to be just that... bitching.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Sports. That is all there really is to it. The idiocracy of America values sports infinitely higher than academics. University of Chicago, one of the schools with the least emphasis on sports, has 81% full time instructors, the majority tenure or on the tenure track, and a student to teacher ratio of 6:1. Yes it's expensive to go there, but at least you know where the money is going. It's not paying $5 million a year for a name football coach.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Chihowa,
This seems to be an echo chamber observation. "Too many fat cat administrators!" is a rallying cry of the right. A study concluded in Texas in 2010 (Texas Tribune, hardly an organ of the left!) showed the average fast food restaurant had a "administrator" to worker ratio of 20-30%, while the average K-12 institution had a ratio of 11-15%, some as low as 6%. In addition, the pay difference was generally much lower at K-12 than at fast food, being that the average administrator made only 10% more than the average faculty member in the classroom. Fast Food managers frequently made more than a class room teachers with 20 years or less in their position.
In K-12, it's not until you get to the ranks of senior leadership (or more than 25 years of service, or a football coach) that one sees wages in excess of $80,000, at least in Texas. The 5 largest school districts typically had fewer than 15 Senior Staff making more than 90,000 in their districts, serving 100,000 students or more each, with faculty and staff of about 11,000.
In the case of Texas, one doesn't have to listen to the echo chamber, as pay for any public employee is a matter of public record. You can look it up.
There is an infinite supply of cash in the form of student loans that schools have access to. They have increasing demand no matter how high they raise the price.
Quality is no longer a differentiating factor in the nature of the product - why not water it down to maximize revenue?
Oh - you want ethically competent students graduating college? Are you willing to pay for that??
(end cynical comment)
...I find this whole thread really amazing to read, and almost impossible to understand.
Most countries I know have large, well-reputed public university systems. I happen to work on the largest university of Mexico (and Latin America), UNAM. Tuition? Virtually zero (there is a 1940s law where it stipulates a tuition for this university... It currently sits at MX$0.30, or ~US$0.02 per semester). Most public schools in Mexico have 100% free programs. Not only that, the same situation holds for most of Latin America. And that's for college level ("Licenciatura") — Want to study a Masters or Doctorate degree? In all of the "excellence"-rated programs, you are automatically entitled to receive funding from the government so you don't have to find a way to pay for your life while you work to become a more productive member of society. And yes, we do have private universities, often as expensive as USA-based ones are. But the fields where they excel are usually very different.
I know this same model exists in most Latin American countries. European states have a somewhat different program, but still, public (government-funded and tuition-free) universities are all but the norm. I just cannot understand how the USA continues to function (some would even say, thrive) under such schemes.
Yup. They pass NCLB and otherwise deliberately sabotage it to pass vouchers so rich kids can get tax breaks to send their kids to exclusive schools.
Learn to love Alaska
More importantly you;re doing that thing conservatives do where they attack a major element of public policy but offer no replacements.
It isn't necessary to supply a new parasite when what you're trying to do is excise a parasite. You're doing what statist liberals do: assuming that there's a necessary 'major element of public policy.'
It's all a bunch of wankers wet-dreaming that denouncing Federal power will magically result in Federal power disappearing.
When you cut off a parasite's supply of resources (power, funding, etc.) it goes away. Unfortunately, you're right that the bloodsuckers in government won't just disappear if we defund them.
It's also a guarantee that you wont be in for a lifetime of destitution if the student loan gamble doesn't pay off for you.
I know math is hard, but there simply are not enough administrators to account for all the money. This is the typical union canard.
The truth is, at many colleges, the full time faculty have gobbled up all the salary and benefits, despite teaching a small minority (~25%) of the courses. They limit the pay and hours of the part timers who teach 3/4 of the classes. So the part time faculty are limited to 60% weekly load hours, less per hour, and locked into a cycle of lower middle class or outright poverty.
Typical union greed: They accrue all the goods for a small minority, at the expense of the unemployed or underemployed.
The best part is, even the janitors have tenure. So what gets cut first? Classes - the ones taught by part timers.
Ask me how I know...
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
We have many faculty that are, how do I put it, well past their sell-by date. These faculty are 60-70 years old, commanding top dollar salaries, and for the most part, they do nothing but rest on their laurels. Fancy titles, distinguished, scholars, etc, but no grants, no teaching responsibilities, no real purpose other than committees, dean of this or that, and his is what they've done for the past 20-30-40 years. While I am by no means discounting the knowledge/wisdom/experience of these elder faculty, education should be a fluid, moving entity. Every University needs a succession plan. My point is there is a HUGE cost here - the lack of funds available for new faculty. These departments have not had an influx of faculty in decades because as budgets get slashed, what funds are available are taken by tenured obligations. Sorry, but retire, move on, and make room for the next generation of faculty.
www.itjerk.com
I've had it with these references to the "IT wonders". You can't base your life plan on the successes of four (!) individuals.
More importantly you;re doing that thing conservatives do where they attack a major element of public policy but offer no replacements.
It isn't necessary to supply a new parasite when what you're trying to do is excise a parasite. You're doing what statist liberals do: assuming that there's a necessary 'major element of public policy.'
This is a democracy. An extremely flawed democracy, that's damn close to Oligarchy, but a democracy nonetheless.
If 50%+1 decided that free boob jobs were so important that taxes absolutely had to go up so the government could start the Federal Breast Enhancement Agency, then the new FBEA would be a necessary element of public policy.
The American people think universal access to education is a necessary element of public policy. Student Loans are in many ways the most conservative solution to the problem. There's moral hazard: art students get screwed unless they're really good at starting a business selling art. There's individual initiative: students in high demand field make a huge profit. In theory the government should at least break even on the loans. It does not increase Federal control over the economy significantly because students decide where they'll go to school.
It's interesting that you didn't complain at all about student loans until Obama fired the middlemen. You don't actually oppose student loans, or governmental power. What you oppose is governmental programs that sketchy MBAs can't get rich off of.
It's all a bunch of wankers wet-dreaming that denouncing Federal power will magically result in Federal power disappearing.
When you cut off a parasite's supply of resources (power, funding, etc.) it goes away. Unfortunately, you're right that the bloodsuckers in government won't just disappear if we defund them.
That's the theory the right has been hawking for decades.
It never works because the right prefers to engage in ridiculous denunciations of things the American people really like (ie: student loans), to convincing said American people to change their minds about the goals of public policy.
The "parasites" line of reasoning is incredibly over the top, and won't convince the 53% who voted for Obama of anything but your need for more medication. Especially when combined with the fact that you didn't oppose student loans until Obama realized the MBA middlemen were getting paid for nothing.
When you're not satisfied with what you earn, get a real job. And when you earn as little as you say it shouldn't be hard to find one. Or go on strike, apparently the universities depend on all adjuncts, so stand up.
Good move. Now stupid Ivory Tower types get a taste of what liberal socialism really looks like. Shit - in a few years most of THOSE jobs will be offshored to India and China anyway. I'll be laughing my head off. Meanwhile Dr Income Redistribution Paul Krugman gets $225,000 a year to teach ZERO classes at CUNY. Fauxcohantas Dr Elizabeth Warren was paid millions as a tenured prof to do no actual work other than run for political office.
And that was over ten years ago.
Ward is the jackass who compared the 9/11 victims to Nazis, shortly after 9/11.
Really, $140K a year to teach that kind of crap, and those coddled ivory tower bozos are still crying poverty?
It is true that many universities world-wide are run more my administrators and their helpers, sucking up resources that are not spent on the universities core mission. In the U.S., anyway, a good bit of that has to do with two things: (a) regulation forces universities to check and double-check compliance with a complex set of rules imposed by federal and state governments and other sponsors. (b) Exposure. A larger university is much more likely to lose large sums of money (and public credibility) as a result of litigation when things go wrong. The system over-reacts because the stakes are high. In science, empiricism means that we do not conclude anything from anecdotal evidence (sample size: one). "Learning from experience" in policy-making means that when one person messes up one thing, everybody else will have to fill out more forms for rest of their lives.
If the job pays that poorly and the benefits are that lame, go elsewhere. If your skill set makes it the only job you are qualified for, get new skills. 25 years and no retirement benefits. Sounds like a lot of non-union workers who must save for their own retirement directly. And certainly it was no surprise right? 25 years is a long time to be waiting patiently for that fully funded 401k to appear.
And that 3 credit hours amounts to teaching on the order of 30 classes, usually less due to holidays, breaks and exams. At $3500 per class taught, that works out to be $117/hour. Granted, some more hours to grade HW and exams. Even at 1/3, $39/hour is pretty good pay and a lot of people would take it. And most of these classes do not change significantly semester to semester so once a teaching plan is in place variations are going to be incremental.
Note too that one can also try to only teach classes at night thus keeping a day job full or part time. That is pretty common with city based colleges where faculty are often employed professionally.
Truly skilled trades are still in demand, and make what I consider to be "middle class" - i.e. better than the average wage earner. Here's the thing, though - if you're a tool, just doing a rote job, you will not be paid particularly well in the grand scheme of things. Someone who finds and gathers the work for you to do and houses you and invests the capital for your craft will take a larger cut than you will. Example: if you are a welder, you might make $20-25hr by putting on leathers and a helmet each morning and hanging it up when the day ends. If you run a shop - own the building and equipment, get jobs, parcel our work - you'll be billing that $25/hr welder at $80-100/hr. That's no different than an engineer who makes $30-40/hr by showing up in an office vs the firm that bills clients at $125-$150/hour. Or even a fast food worker making $10/hr, but is priced into the cost of a burger at $50/hr.
There are two problems. Middle class, if you believe the standard of living on TV shows and commercials, is closer to the 90-95th percentile earner, not the 50th. That's going to be a problem if you want to be a top 10% or top 5% earner to consider yourself "middle class." And if you want a job where you will never get dirty, or shower *after* a hard day at work, you're going to be very disappointed by going into the trades. Learning a trade and owning your own tools IS a way to hit that 80-90 percentile income, but it means getting dirty for a living and that's not a 95th+ percentile value, and you have to be willing to drive yourself to be the boss - even if it's a one-person operation - and own your equipment and provide your services. Being a cog in a machine that someone else owns does not make you the 10%er that people consider "middle class" these days. (BTW 90th percentile is $65,000/yr for a single person, and is not far from the bottom of most of the "owner" tradespeople who run their own shop/own their own equipment)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I graduated from college back in 1980, and college tuition has gone up roughly 10-fold in the intervening years. But peoples earning power has not gone up by a similar amount over the same period.
I think part of the problem goes back to the era of easy credit. Parents could take out loans on their houses, and students could borrow all kinds of cash - thus the students and parents weren't all that price conscious. But what they looked for were amenities - nice student centers, athletic centers, all kinds of bells and whistles. Some were academic (new libraries, computer centers), others were just to make the place look like a cool place to be. The thinking was that colleges would be better able to attract students if they had this stuff. But it all came at a cost - in particular higher tuition.
In the current climate people are far more aware of the costs of colleges than they were before. But the colleges have already spent the money on all of the amenities, and need to pay back the bonds. Thus they can't easily drop tuition.
Not every school is big into athletics. Smaller liberal arts schools may have football and basketball teams, but it is much more low-key and I don't think the coaches earn that much more than the rest of the faculty.
My father was a college teacher, my mother an elementary school teacher
It would be nice if a small portion of your budget was spent on fences and walls to keep potential students from escaping into the US. I don't know if it a failing of your country or some unseen benefit that draws them here. I do understand that many of these migrants are not Mexican citizens either but why do these people not appreciate their homeland?
Why is in the best interest of our country to build fences? No, building a free-transit area akin to what Europe and Mercosur have would be way better. But I know that won't happen, because of the strong assymetry between our countries.
But anyway: Yes, university education is free and has a very high level. But we do lack in many aspects. My university is huge (350,000 students; the main universitary campus is about 6Km, which would be about 3 square miles; around 35,000 full-time academic staff). However, it only manages to accept about one tenth of the people that try to enter (and some courses, mainly in the first semesters, have up to 70 students — Far from ideal. I teach, however, in 5th-6th semester courses, and my groups have been 15-35, much better).
But how many people reach university? Or how many people reach even high school? If your work is needed at home at age 12 because there's no other way the family has enough money, most probably you won't ever consider entering a university.
And... Guess who are the people that leave the country for the USA without proper migration documents? Right. It's not the lucky ones who get through profesionalization, but those that don't have the opportunity.
So, yes, there is no contradiction between us having very good universities and very low income, particularly in some areas. Of course, there's a lot to criticize our government's priorities about. But it is also not by a long shot a simple problem to solve.
I would be more interested in making it harder for educated people to migrate (legally) to the USA. If one of my students graduates and leaves to work in the USA, he will probably earn 5-10 times as much as here (to begin with), but it will also be a waste of public resources, because his talent and intelligence will not benefit our society. Funding universities is a long-term investment from a government, and the only way to get a ROI is to have the students stay here for their professional life.
and hire these professors directly, thus cutting out the middlemen (Universities)? If the cost of higher education keeps going up, yet the money is obviously not going to teaching, there must be some enormous overhead somewhere else in the process.
The only activity that brings money into most universities is teaching. Administration is a money sink. What most people don't realize is the research is also a money sink. Grants from NIH provide for the direct costs of doing research - supplies, travel, salaries. They also provide on top of that indirect costs: that is an additional 70%+ for a place like Harvard Medical School (because that's what HMS demands), but lowly UAB can only command 40-50%. The point is that these numbers can't support the quite necessary support staff (secretaries, grant managers, safety infrastructure, purchasing, etc.), physical plant, utilities that the research enterprise requires. Keep in mind that the top researchers (faculty) can't possibly carry the teaching load - they're too busy writing for grants, traveling, writing papers, and running labs! So who picks up the slack? Graduate students and adjunct faculty. So very often (and I write from personal experience here) the person getting paid $5k to teach a course is standing in front of a lecture hall of students (10 or 20 or 150 or 350), each of whom may have paid $5k to take the course. We should take into account that many students are receiving financial aid and that many are also receiving many other services from the University. If the instructor is a graduate student, we should take into account that their education is being paid for in some part by their work. What we can't take into account, though, is any benefits for the adjunct faculty doing this teaching. Bottom line - the difference between the actual cost of teaching students and what students actually pay is quite LARGE. Where is that money going? Administration AND research.
There is more people persueing the academic lifestyle than there is money chasing them. Professors are not incentivised for education, just research. Many see the undergraduates as a burden. Why do we entrust education to researchers? Unless you are a liberal arts major, the bachelors degree is about having a career. 'We're teaching students how to think' is a copout. The core curriculum is for that, the individual classes (outside of philosophy or logic) are not. College currently specializes in teaching students how to succeed as college students. Not with a career. Leading to diminished ROI and the academic glut.
US Colleges need to produce good Americans who believe in global warming and take their vaccinations on time. The education system seems to be doing just fine.
This is what this is about: http://www.trilateral.org/down... And what it leads to: http://inequalityforall.com/
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
I've been doing a web cartoon about college costs. It puts a whole new spin on the wizards school idea that has been so popular. Here is a link to the first episode of the current storyline about school. http://www.jastiv.com/d/201401...
Americans are anti-intellectual for being too pragmatic and now, too unproductive, not from the criteria of wealth or its distribution but from just not doing anything useful. The case in point is finance and administration, generally, not just in schools but in business and government generally. We need to rediscover useful work. Someone mentioned PhD Mathematicians making 6 figures working as quants. Isn't that a totally cynical waste of time and useless speculation and greed? Shouldn't people make better use of their talent and time. If Americans can find no higher calling that that or using computer science to push social media marketing schemes. then maybe they deserve what is happening to them. I wish America could have a Cultural Revolution: force all the business and finance and administrators to have to work in the fields harvesting vegetables and fruits for a living. who knows people with those backgrounds are making such poor decisions that the environmental catastrophies they are bringing down on all of use might make them have to literally scrape to survive in just that way. I think that much of the evil in the world is due to the thinking that comes out of business schools and the pragmatism of Americans generally, that wisdom is traded for easy gain and that we have sold out morally to people who will continue to screw us. Capitalism run amok, not solved by deregulating markets. When government gets out of regulating markets, organized crime takes over. We must be responsible for each other and to each other and begin to think of consequences beyond the next fiscal quarter.
It is not, and has never been, a democracy. It's a Constitutional Republic. As far as I know, there's no such thing as a true democracy in the world. 50% + 1 doesn't exist in Western society, and for good reason. It's the fact that we theoretically elect skilled and educated representatives (ha!) to understand the complexities and repercussions of things that countries DON'T have an FBEA.
But aside from that, I agree with you.
College administrations are bureaucracies, and what's going on is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
(Thanks to Jerry Pournelle for this observation of emperical fact. Alas, without any sure-fire way to kill the damned thing.)
Early predictors of the tuition bubble: John Stossel and Matthew Continetti http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
In the news this week, Mark Cuban on the tuition bubble: http://www.businessinsider.com...
Making the bubble worse: the current Administration, by nationalizing the student loan industry and further removing market forces from individual decisionmaking: http://heritageaction.com/2013...
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I know this same model exists in most Latin American countries. European states have a somewhat different program, but still, public (government-funded and tuition-free) universities are all but the norm. I just cannot understand how the USA continues to function (some would even say, thrive) under such schemes.
When I went to my university, it was almost all foreign students from China and the middle east. On a good day, the physics department had about 25 undergrads, if you included the probable engineers that hadn't really decided their majors yet, and about 160 grad students, almost all were Chinese. I went to school more than two decades ago, but still live next to two colleges and the population of foreign Asians is still very high. At the teaching hospital I work at, most of the foreign residents are Indian with an occasional European.
The positions in college administration about doubled the past decade whereas academic positions stayed flat. Since tuition cannot compensate for all of that the cuts are made even more in academics by cutting instructor pay. Add to that college sports, which loses money across the board except for very few programs. The fix is to cut admin jobs, split college sports off into self-organized clubs that can still coordinate with the university, but have no financial ties, and cut tuition in half. Otherwise we get colleges that have top of the line sports facilities and more admin jobs than graduates.
I do believe some immigration is good for the US. Unfortunately we are letting those wanting in make the policy. As a man of Scotch-Irish descent I see preferences giving to Indian and other Asian H-1 visas troubling. The what can only be called an invasion from southern countries is frighting. I know nothing can be done with this president but in two years drastic actions will have to be made. This doesn't even address the US caused "drug war". Sometimes I think neither government has the best interest of its citizens as a priority. Your best students rush off to the US and our best go to Wall Street. God help us all.
From: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
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Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. ...
Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.
Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India.
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A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... ... ..."
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus.
So, the academics you knew were from before the "Big Crunch". Such people advised me, from their success, and meaning well, to get a PhD. But the world I faced was post-Big-Crunch and so their advice did not actually make much sense (although it took me a long time to figure that out).
More related links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.