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

[lgw]

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.

Re:Administrators

[dfenstrate]

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.

You beat me to it. It's time for adjunct administrators and more full time professors.

Re:Administrators

[Anonymous Coward]

The tuition bubble is far more evil. Students are walking away with ~100k in debt, and no better employment prospects* than they had before.

To begin with, colleges shouldn't be about finding jobs, but about increasing your understanding of the universe and making you a well-rounded human being. If that leads to a job, great, but that shouldn't be the point. All these people who go to college for the piece of paper are turning colleges into half-assed trade schools. And that's where they should go: Trade schools.

"Everybody's gotta go to college" is a disease that's killing education.

Re:Administrators

[Anonymous Coward]

In capitalism, people doing the actual work get screwed by the layers of management stealing from them.

In leftism, people doing the actual work get screwed by the layers of administrators stealing from them.

Re:Administrators

[cashman73]

I don't know about administrative staff, but at many of the D1 research schools, tenured and tenure-track faculty have largely been replaced by "perma-docs". That is, postdoctoral researchers that are entirely paid by "soft money" (e.g. grants), have zero teaching responsibilities, are not offered tenure (only the minute chance of a tenure-track job if they keep applying enough) and have no job security. It is not uncommon to see people in STEM fields with a PhD and having done three, four, even six post-doc appointments. In the past 20-30 years, the number of tenure/tenure-track jobs has declined dramatically, and the number of post-docs has increased exponentially.

Re:Administrators

[bmo]

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.

--
BMO

Re:Administrators

[mc6809e]

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.

Don't forget those in the construction industry. Like administrators, they contribute where it counts: in the voting booth where they help elect those that will continue to increase spending on that abstraction "education" rather than on actual educators.

Re:Administrators

[Albanach]

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.

Re:Administrators

[Stormy Dragon]

Learning for learning's sake is great, but frankly that can be done in your spare time without getting in debt for tens of thousands of dollars.

Re: Administrators

[bmo]

Oh look, he thinks that IT is programming/comp sci.

How cute.

I don't expect the IT guy to be able to write a damn line of C code, but I have also run into plenty of programmers that can't remember why you have to "safely eject" a USB drive in Windows.

"Uh, hey, I can't find my stuff...can you get it back?"

IT is to comp sci as plumbing is to hydrology - I don't expect the hydrology prof at URIGSO to know how to hook up plastic pipe to copper, and I don't expect the plumber to tell me anything about the Ogallala Aquifer.

--
BMO

Re:Administrators

[Bartles]

It's a bubble fueled by taxpayer money. Huge artificial demand has been created, and then subsidies pay for the inflated tuition.

Re:Administrators

[CRCulver]

Learning for learning's sake is great, but frankly that can be done in your spare time without getting in debt for tens of thousands of dollars.

Not all university libraries are open to the general public, and there are still a number of fields where you cannot get an up-to-date view of the basics online: you need books, and they are expensive books that typically only libraries can afford. Advances are moving at such a pace -- and academic publishers have raised their prices to such a level -- that it is unreasonable to expect the man on the street to "educate himself" like might have been possible in the 1950s.

Re:Administrators

[thunderclap]

Students don't miss the point of education. They are never told. Most still believe its 4 years of party time with classes inserted. Its the small percentage that go to the trade schools who want a career or go to a college for a big money career who get screwed. Those who go to party are lost already. We are already second century Rome here, only we are our own visagoths.

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

[dreamchaser]

You really should get your head out of the clouds. The point of any schooling is to prepare one to live. It doesn't matter if it's college, vocational school, or any other training. Sure, we want to increase our understanding of the Universe and be well rounded human beings, but that is the secondary goal of college. The primary goal is to make a living. You know. Food. Housing. Clothing. Those little things. Such idealism. You sound like you live in the Ivory Tower yourself.

Re:Administrators

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe people like you, there are individuals out there (like this guy) who actually are savagely hungry for knowledge & a chance to apply that knowledge in a career field knowing they are taking a large risk in a competitive environment completely driven by the desire to succeed, & disregarding any excuse to remain "normal" & "laim" like the majority of society. INTELLECT IS PRICELESS.

Re:Administrators

[cheesybagel]

I had neither of those. Then again I chose a degree in a subject matter that actually gets people employed.

Re:Administrators

[buybuydandavis]

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.

Yeah, it's all fine and dandy to talk about education as discovering the wonders of the universe, but few would go into debt 100k for the feel good experience, particularly when it's available to you for free. If you want to discover the universe, a universe of information is available to you on the web. Read it and feel all warm and fuzzy.

But if you want a family and any financial security, that kind of money needs to *produce* an equal or greater amount of benefit that you couldn't get otherwise.

Re:Administrators

[Mantrid42]

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

Re:Administrators

[buybuydandavis]

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.

Re:Administrators

[jythie]

I think you missed the poster`s point. The idea is that college should not be a prerequiste for jobs, and that all those HR departments that are requiring it are a big part of the problem.

Re:Administrators

[MrBigInThePants]

This too, but also marketing, the corporate/profit-driven approach and other concerns apart from teaching and research.

To answer the question: "At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?"
Because you allowed your (entire) education system to be run by people who do not have education as the foremost priority.

The issues with other parts of the education system are of a different nature (e.g. they are run as a cost centre) but the fundamental problem is the same.

Re:Administrators

[ekrst]

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.

Re:Administrators

[jedidiah]

This vanity that academia has about not being a part of the real world is really a red herring. Universities started as "trade schools" because the people paying for them weren't interested in just p*ssing money awy. The notion that Universities are above that sort of thing is just the result of academics repeating their own propaganda to each other over and over again.

But to the real point... Tuition has been rising far faster than inflation for a very long time and there seems to be no real reason for it. This article makes that pretty blatant. If academia can't affort to pay the instructors, then what the HELL are they wasting all of that money on?

It's like the prices going up at Walmart 15% a year.

That's the way these institutions are treating their people (like Walmart employees).

Re:Administrators

[timeOday]

Not in the US. The government turns a profit on student loans. Nor is the demand artificial, because as bad a student debt is, being without a degree is still much worse.

Re:Administrators

[currently_awake]

Very few people can afford the drugs/sex/booze if they are attending college. Rich kids go to University. What you are regurgitating is Holywood myth.

Re: Administrators

[NicBenjamin]

Union faculty?

I've never heard of a college with union faculty. Non-profesor-type instructors (grad students mostly) are generally unionized, but they aren't on the faculty. I'm sure somebody's got a union, but it just is not typical of the college experience in the US.

Hell, I've never heard of a prof who hasn't literally written the book on his subject getting a six-figure salary. Writing the book on the subject is generally actually the prerequisite to earning six figures, because it's very difficult to get near six figure territory without a lot of book royalties.

Re:Administrators

[ohnocitizen]

You need to shift your perspective. Nothing but contempt? Colleges are turning into trade factories, and that's a problem. There are HUGE societal benefits to the intellectual exploration that comes with college. We need to expand who has access to that! Universal college is a laudable goal.

In saying "6-figure debt makes it the point", you've made a mistake. Debt is a problem, and we need to address it. But the fact that college is too expensive doesn't mean you need to turn college into merely a stepping stone to a job. That's misguided.

Re:Administrators

[innocent_white_lamb]

I beg to disagree.

The largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled is right here on your desktop, and mine. I live in a rural area, and I can immediately look up pretty much anything that I'm interested in finding out, and get more information about it in more formats than were ever available to ANYONE in the 20th century or before, regardless of whether they were at a university or not.

There is absolutely no need to run to a library or purchase a book that may already be out of date.

Earlier today I watched a video demonstrating how a synchro-mesh transmission works. Never knew that before; never knew how a transmission worked at all, in fact. Now I do. Does that change my world view? Is it an earth-shattering accomplishment? No.

However, what I learn by reading and viewing thing online do enrich my life to a huge extent. How to write a computer program. How to waterproof a basement. When I'm reading a book (ebook) and come across a reference to Hadrian's Wall, I can immediately look it up and read more about that if I'm interested. And so on.

When provided with this huge pool of available knowledge, some folks use it to read about Brittany Spears. But that's not the only thing it's good for.

It's never been easier, cheaper and simpler to be an autodidact than it is today. You don't have to walk past your front door, unless you want to.

Re:Administrators

[PRMan]

Stanford has all their classes online, as do many universities. You can LEARN all you want. You can get a top-notch education for free. But people need the PAPER that gets them by the HR tollbridge.

Re:Administrators

[jrminter]

There is a clear reason for the rise in tuition: The availability of "easy credit" for student loans.

In the Dark Ages when I was an undergrad, we lived in dorms with painted cinder block walls, spartan furniture, and a bathroom per hallway. We had a minimal gym facility but reasonable equipment in the labs. With some help from my parents and working had during summers and breaks, I graduated with only $750 in loans.

Now you have luxury dorms and sports complexes. Sadly, the cost increases for these facilities and the explosion of administrators made it practically impossible to pay for one's education at a top tier state school by working hard during the summers and breaks and some help from ones parents.

Let's not mention the Lake Wobegone mentality that all the children are above average. Colleges love remedial courses - they get paid and the students stay longer. But that changes the economics. Attending college is a business decision and if the graduate can't repay the debt in a few years, the ROI wasn't there.

Re:Administrators

[CRCulver]

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.

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.

Re:Administrators

[CRCulver]

Stanford has all their classes online, as do many universities.

See my reply above. In any event, they may have all their lectures online, but that is only a part of an education. The other part, readings, are not necessarily available to the general public. If you want to get any recent consensus in a field, you need access to e.g. JSTOR, which is not freely available to the public (some people are lucky enough to have a public library with an institutional subscription, but not all).

No, not a "top notch" education at all. In my own field one very quickly tires of talking with dilettantes who have "educated themselves", because they have a view of the things decades out of date. They can't read the journals they need to stay up to date because these are closed-access. Furthermore, other publications are easy to get within a university network, but may not circulate out to public libraries under inter-library loan.

Re:Administrators

[Ol Olsoc]

None of that tirade makes job placement the point of a university.

Except when it's being sold as that.

Funny, I recall the local university making job prospects a big part of thei pitch.

In your idealized situation, the university exists as a way to produce more professors, and to advance knowledge. Not as a training ground for careers. I think at one time, that was probably true.

Okay - then why do they all quite happily take money from people who are especting something that they have no intention of producing? Your ideal University, and the real world situation make the University/student relationship identical to the Carny/Rube relationship.

In other words, how to get as much money as possible from people you despise, while giving as little back in return.

If your ideal University actually existed, they would turn away most potential students. It's pretty hard to justify taking money from people with no intention of giving them what they think they are there for.

Re:Administrators

[Ol Olsoc]

I think you missed the poster`s point. The idea is that college should not be a prerequiste for jobs, and that all those HR departments that are requiring it are a big part of the problem.

HR departments are a big part of the problem all by themselves. the Type of suit, the type of shoes, the fonting on the resume'. What is important to HR is only important to making more HR people.

Re:Administrators

[magical liopleurodon]

Don't forget the government. They're the ones that make the loans possible.

Re:Administrators

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re:Administrators

[FuzzNugget]

Typical ruling class: manipulating their underlings for the purposes of self-perpetuation. Only when their entirely selfish ambitions are exposed, will they relent just enough to create a facade of change, but never enough to relinquish power and restore a healthy balance.

This is the toxic parasite of American over-individualism that exists in just about every facet of its society.

Re:Administrators

[Beck_Neard]

You still need a college degree to get a white-collar job, and the fact is that most people want white-collar jobs. I 100% agree with you that it's an evil system designed to exploit the vulnerable, but it's not just an empty sales pitch like you're describing. The system is rigged in such a way that a lot of students HAVE to be burdened with massive debt to succeed in life. We have ZERO need for huge buildings with lecture halls in them in the age of the internet, but those people at the top are going to do anything it takes to keep this cash cow flowing.

Obviously, it's flat-out stupid to spend this debt getting a liberal arts degree or anything that doesn't have good job prospects.

Re:Administrators

[drinkypoo]

The other part, readings, are not necessarily available to the general public.

Who told you that? Could it have been someone with a vested interest in you paying for college?

The full versions are often not available online without a subscription, and there may be other required course materials (no, really required, like you can't understand the material without them because of heavy reference) which are not free. Finally, you are typically not permitted into a university library without a student ID, unless it also contains a bookstore and that bookstore has an agreement with the college which requires them to permit non-students to come in to shop. And if you do get in there, you won't be able to use the computers anyway.

Re:Administrators

[s.petry]

First of all, what most students learn in college is what they should learn in high school.

This I agree with 100%, Common Core makes things worse. As does pretty much anything a massive bureaucracy gets it's hand on. But in the US, it's not just the Bureaucracy, it's Media. Watch some prime time TV. It is cool to be stupid, and if you are stupid somehow you can make millions of dollars just being stupid (or slutty, or a criminal, etc...). So not only has our education system gone to shit, but Media has helped them drastically.

The problem we have is that pretty much every job requires a college degree and pretty much every education system is underfunded.

Wrong on both accounts. First, most jobs don't require a college degree but people have been using that as a measure for some time for people that can succeed. It's wrong, and we need to somehow re-educate employers.

To the 2nd part, the education system is not underfunded at all. In fact it's over funded to cover all of the bureaucratic positions that Schools and Colleges have been adding for the last couple decades. UC for example has numerous regents who make very high 6 figure salaries to do nothing. There are backups to the backups to the assistants in many schools, meanwhile a professor has their pay cut and are blamed for the woes in funding. Most public schools today have a paid board, where when I was a kid boards were voluntary and made up of parents. So no, there is no funding problem. There is an abuse problem made partially by Government and partially by greed and nepotism.

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.

No offense, but you don't understand Plato either. According to Plato, Socrates stated that the Military (Guardians) would not be able to raise their own children while performing their duties, so THEIR children would be raised by the community. The remainder of society would be raising their children just like we do today.

Socrates also stated much earlier in "The Republic" that in order to found a Republic you would have to kick all of the adults out of your society because they knew what corruption was and would bring corruption into the newly found Republic. Therefor, the only way to form a Republic in his opinion was to start with all children, educate them in Philosophy, and then a Republic was possible.

If you want an excellent version of The Republic I can provide one. What we normally see in College Philosophy text books is a gross distortion of the actual "The Republic" (with the exception of The Allegory of the Cave).

Based on how you write, I'm going to guess that either English is your second language or you are not an Educator at your college.

Re: Administrators

[drinkypoo]

IT is to comp sci as plumbing is to hydrology - I don't expect the hydrology prof at URIGSO to know how to hook up plastic pipe to copper, and I don't expect the plumber to tell me anything about the Ogallala Aquifer.

I don't think that's an apt comparison, although a better one escapes me at the moment so I'll just skip that part. Programming and IT skills are absolutely complementary. Also, both are substantially more complex than shit rolls downhill and payday's on friday. As a sysadmin of very little programming skill at all (oh bother) I have often felt positively crippled by not being able to perform what I suspect are fairly basic programming tasks, like making certain changes to program behavior to make it more closely approximate what I actually want. Meanwhile, the programming skill I do have has helped me immensely. If a program is not too obfuscated then I can usually read the sources and have a good idea of what is going on inside, and I even have successfully fixed things in other people's software that prevented compilation or even caused runtime bugs. That is clearly immensely useful.

An IT employee in a position of any importance will benefit from programming knowledge, and they can't really know too much, though if they know very much they can make more coding. A programmer will only benefit very much from a little IT knowledge, but no amount of it will hurt them either. And of course, there's always a demand for management software, which demands an intersection of both skill-sets.

Re:Administrators

[rtb61]

Greed is the problem. Sheer insensate insatiable greed is consuming the whole system and education is just part of that system that is also collapsing. Snarling animals fighting in a pit, the more they fight, the less they have, so the more they fight. Greed is consuming US society, starving it into collapse. The illusion of marketing is predominating all, attempting to hide the reality of the harm greed is causing. Blame it on government, blame it on corporations but never ever blame it on the person in the mirror. The US government has become exactly what Americans have allowed it to become, a puppet of US corporations run by psychopaths and everything else is being torn down with it. Government is never corrupt, individuals within government are corrupt and of course those paying the bribes from private industry are corrupt. Don't forget, they are always the minority because when they cease to be a minority the country collapses and ceases to be. They are social parasites consuming ever more resources creating vast piles of economic dung that they live in, starving out the rest of society, until it all collapses. This failing is just another sign of that collapse.

Re:Administrators

[sandytaru]

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. It says, "This is what a US student should know at each grade level." The methods and curriculum for how to achieve that goal are still left up to the states and local school boards, but the educational companies who supply them with books are not helping them the way they should. Many books incorrectly state they are common core compliant.

The way it was handled could certainly have been better, but I see nothing wrong with saying all second grades should be able to do basic multiplication and all 7th grades should be able to find the primary theme of a passage of writing.

Re:Administrators

[datavirtue]

Funny, study history and you will see that declines last painfully long...everything will still be livable when you die, probably much worse, but liveable. Society is like a complex organism...it can weather a lot of bad health an continue living through tons of adversity. Many of us would like to see then end of a rotting society but the truth is that it will flounder on for many more generations. Maybe the spread of information will harry in a quick death or transformation...who knows. Get some popcorn, and change yourself.

Re:Administrators

[Skuld-Chan]

I can confirm this - I work at a university. The executive management there is decrying a 6-7 million dollar shortfall, but the employee to management ratio is 2:1 (2 employees per manager) at a school with 30-35k students and about 800 full time employees - and apparently 400 managers.

The shortfall just happens to equal the amount of money paid to the "executive" staff - including 180k a year for their "chief of diversity" - a woman who was a humanities major.

Re:Administrators

[Bing Tsher E]

Fire all the HR drones. They want fucking wallpaper, let them work for interior decorating contractors.

Every good job I have gotten, I obtained in spite of the fucking HR people. Somebody inside the company wanted me working there, and routed around HR.

Re:Administrators

[hrvatska]

In most US states the highest paid public employee is a football or basketball coach.

Re:Administrators

[cerberusti]

Few sane people use HR to fill the good jobs, you use your contact network to do that. That is how I used to get good jobs, it is how I fill good jobs now, and that is true for almost everyone I know.

HR is a last resort, or for entry level positions. Even if you cannot fill something, if it is important you take on some contractors or consultants for a while and find someone that way (either directly, or through one of their recommendations.)

I am not sure what you do for a living, but good programmers are very hard to find (even decent web developers are getting difficult.) If you have been around for a while and are competent, you probably know someone who wants to hire you.

Re:Administrators

[Seatche]

We can tin-foil all we want, but can we follow the money? If Universities are subsidized by grants from the Federal and State governments, from non-profit organizations and from private industry, there has to be a paper trail. If the trail is littered with dead-ends, it is contigent on us to make the financial in-flows and out-flows transparent. Somebody is being paid the money we have invested in education. If we pay more in tuition, pay less in teacher salaries, and our economic productivity has gone lower in the mean time, somebody is bleeding the system. It's easy for me to say "text books" and "privately funded research" as the culprits, but I prefer a more holistic and realistic view-point. Only those in education can tell us where money is bleeding, or how/why productivity has dropped through their personal experiences. Please contribute, if you have any insight into this plight.

Re:Administrators

[Bite The Pillow]

I'm sure others have so replied, but I do so for the record.

Higher education in your chosen career is furthering education, but it is not currently job preparation. High school is job prep, and college/uni is on the verge of becoming job prep. But it currently is not. By definition, leading to a job is not the point. For students it may be the point, but for everyone else it is not.

A trillion dollar debt problem is NOT THE FUCKING CONVERSATION. At all. It is unrelated, unless you are talking about student debt and nothing else. Not "and credit cards", not "and house". And you don't clarify, so I classify this claim as nutter territory.

Given this, unless you have specific objections outside of someone performing outside of the expected average, HR departments requiring a BA at least kinda says college pays off. Again, unless you have specific objections.

Requiring a MA degree for library work, as far as I understand the number of positions and number of applicants, sounds like a very reasonable way to cut down the number of applicants. It does not make whatever point you have in your head.

I have nothing but contempt for you, but the reason is that you seem to have preconceived notions which rate some sort of bile response, rather than some amount of thoughtfulness on your part.

Just think about this for a bit, and try to defend yourself with 1) related data and 2) no unrelated data

Re:Administrators

[s.petry]

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.

Re:Administrators

[Hognoxious]

We are already second century Rome here, only we are our own visagoths.

The ancestors of the mastercard race...

Re:Administrators

[flyingsquid]

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.

This is a problem in two ways. First, one of those groups- the leadership and administration- is in charge of determining how the pie is cut. Unsurprisingly, over time we find that the people who cut the pie end up with larger and larger slices, and the people doing the baking, rolling the dough, grinding the flour and cutting up the pumpkins (it is a pumpkin pie in our example, because I like pumpkin pie, and if you don't, you can write your own pie-based metaphor) get less and less. Good leadership and management are critical to the success of an organization, but administrative bloat just increases the paperwork and make life more difficult for everyone else. Now the guy rolling the dough has to fill out a bunch of forms and get a performance review, and the guy buying the flour has to go through a complicated procurement process instead of just going down to the store. So this creates inefficiency and waste within the university.

The other issue is the degree to which university education is itself wasteful. We're fed the line that we need more PhDs to be competitive. This is a vicious lie, spread by self-serving academics. One recent article found that only 15% of biology PhDs got a tenure-track job within 5 years of receiving their PhD. I don't know what the figure is these days, but I guarantee you that with the economic downturn and the surge of grad school enrollment after the financial crisis, that percentage went down. I don't necessarily have a problem with a system that rejects 85% of people and keeps only the 15% who are good if the cut is made early. The problem is that you're forcing people to invest 5-6 years in a PhD (perhaps on top of a couple years of MS), and then another 5 years as a postdoc... and then you're casting them off. Training up a bunch of people to do jobs they will never realistically get to do is exploitative, cruel, and wasteful. It reminds me of a parable told by Zhuangzi, about a student who paid a great deal to a teacher to be taught the art of dragon-slaying... he graduates only to find that there's no market for his highly specialized skills, because he can't find any dragons. Grad school is a lot like that.

Graduate school primarily exists to serve one need- not the need of a student for education, not the need of society for a highly educated workforce- the need of academia for cheap labor. Graduate students exist to help teach courses and run experiments, cheaply. They are the cheap, hard-working, moderately skilled migrant fruit-picker of academia. Recently I was given this advice on a grant proposal: don't hire a postdoc, they're expensive and if they're actually any good at all, they'll just try to get a job and leave. For the same price, you get two grad students, and they're guaranteed to stick around for the duration of the PhD. Great. So instead of throwing a lifeline to some dumb bastard of a postdoc who was stupid enough to go into academia, we're going to instead create two new people who will in a few years go on to compete with the first poor fuck in the impossible quest for a tenure track job. But the incentives are structured by the university and the granting agency so that we will end up doing just that.

That's my reward for being in the 15%. I get to go from being the exploited, to the exploitee. No longer a whore, but madam of my own whorehouse. Hopefully I'll still be able to look myself in the mirror in a few years. I try to rationalize what I'm doing by saying hey, at least I'm honest. I tell prospective students just what they're in for. I will never, ever say "in a few years there will be a lot of retirements, and a lot of jobs will become available". They've been saying that for 20 years, and they'll say it for another 20, and it will never, ever happen. And if I ever say that, please shoot me. But there's

Re:Administrators

[AthanasiusKircher]

Finally, you are typically not permitted into a university library without a student ID, unless it also contains a bookstore and that bookstore has an agreement with the college which requires them to permit non-students to come in to shop. And if you do get in there, you won't be able to use the computers anyway.

I don't know what the stats are on this, but I've certainly just walked into MANY university libraries. Particularly many public universities in the U.S. seem to have a general policy allowing public access (but also MANY private universities). And while some computer use may be restricted, you'll likely at least be able to access computers with the catalog and probably at least some access to electronic resources.

Sure, there are plenty of places where you'd have to show documentation that you are a scholar or researcher to get inside a university library (or sometimes pay a fee -- mostly at really elite universities or places with a major crime problem), but there are also plenty of places where that is NOT true.

Re:Administrators

[hey!]

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.

I keep hearing this, but perhaps it depends on your locality. Looking at the first hundred entries in our local school staff directory, I get:

71 teachers
8 secretaries *
5 special needs professionals (4 speech pathologists +1 occupational therapist)
5 nurses
4 principals*
2 guidance counselors
1 police officer
1 payroll clerk *
1 information technologist *
1 Librarian
1 assistant superintendent *

* administrative staff

So going by this sample, 15% of the school department employees are "administrators" of some sort, although most of these are secretaries who handle a lot of things that teachers and more highly paid administrators would otherwise have to. But I hear people in my town make claims like the one above, even though they could just look in the school department directory and see for themselves this isn't even close to true. They believe this, not because it's factual, but because it's "truthy".

It's like when my town passed a tax increase to pay to replace the crumbling middle school. There was an anti-tax group in town that claimed we shouldn't give the school department any more money because they kept the school budget "secret". It just wasn't true. You can go on the town website and see the budget. That's how I know that at the high school teachers account for 79% of the salaries, and that system-wide administration (including superintendent, office staff and system-wide IT support) accounts for about 6% of total salaries. When we voted on the tax increase referendum I actually saw a parent try to hand a printout of the budget to an anti-tax protester holding a "no secret budgets!" sign. The protester literally recoiled, like she'd been offered a ripe piece of roadkill.

Are there schools or school departments out there that literally have more administrators than teachers? I don't know; maybe there are. My point is we shouldn't believe this about some school or school system simply because it sounds true to us. We should check. And if the answer is "yes", then you should do something about it.

Re:Administrators

[lgw]

"Greed" is too broad of a word. You make it sound like it's some demon manipulating man against his nature, and requiring only a plucky hero to slay. Complaining about "greed" is a shallow platitude.

There's nothing wrong with self interest per se; it's the source of most of the progress of humanity from the dawn of reason onwards. The problem is short-sightedness. Stupidly chasing short-term reward and hurting oneself long term, in predictable and obvious ways, as a result. The problem is irresponsibility, not greed. The more each of us act as if our actions have consequences, and realize that it's each of our duty to try, as best we can, to predict the outcomes of our choices in life, and act smartly in our long-term self interest, the better everyone in society will be. "Greed" is a distraction from the real problem.

We magnify the problem every time we remove negative consequences from bad choices. We make it worse with every social acceptance of choices where the upside goes to the individual, but the downside goes to society; to risks where if one loses, it's society and not one's own resources that will cushion the blow.

When the unexpectedly great happens, be charitable, it's only right. When the unexpectedly tragic happens it's on you to be ready for it. But instead we have a society very opposed to these basic pillars of ongoing civilization.

Re:Administrators

[drinkypoo]

the fact that college is too expensive doesn't mean you need to turn college into merely a stepping stone to a job. That's misguided.

Misguided is believing that people can afford to do anything else. If it doesn't make them money, they can't afford to do it, because they haven't got money.

Re: Administrators

[Ol Olsoc]

Take away all government guarantee such and subsidies for student loans and make the debt dischargeable in bankruptcy and watch the price for college crater over night. It was only 15 years ago I could go to my State college and pay for books and tuition with a summer job.

Related note. Many or most universities now start Fall semester before labor day. The nasty result of that arrogance has been to make it almost impossible for American students to take a summer job at some ot the traditional places, like the shore. You'd work hard for those three months, but pocket a fair bit of money. NOw you are back in school for the biggest weekend of the summer, so you don't get the job.

Now? Eastern European college students tend to come over and take those jobs. Whenever I hear one of those charming accents, I'll ask where tehy come from. Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, and the Ukraine are some of the students who probably are paying for their education this way.

The guaranteeing of loans for anyone with a pulse has allowed demand to basically go to infinity and allowed for the double digit tuition increases. What lender in their right mind would lend an 18 year old 100k with no assets and an out with bankruptcy? This would bring prices back into the land of reason and benefit everyone but the leeching administration email staff and builders of luxury stadiums.

Yes. But the thing I hate when these things get out of hand is the massive disruption when the correction happens.

One more side note - they are now talking about actually paying Football players, along with their superior food, housing and "education" they receive free of charge.

Re:Administrators

[rtb61]

Greed drives stupidity. Hence no matter what is claimed about psychopathic greed by psychopaths poor decisions are the natural normal result of greed. Greed is not the same as self interest, that is the lie of the psychopath. Self interest is I'm hungry and need a loaf of bread, psychopathic greed is If I get all the loaves of bread I can starve everyone else into obedience and force them to obey me as slaves as I abuse the, mwah hah hah and it really is that sick and pathetic. To be ready is to eliminate the psychopath and prevent the problem form ever occurring.

Re:Administrators

[quetwo]

Here is the dirty little secret -- there hasn't been a huge influx of money. It used to be that most public schools got a majority of their funding from the state they reside in. Back in 1990, the public schools in Illinois got approximately 70% - 80% of their budget from the state. In 2010, this number is now 20%. Many states have also capped the school's ability to increase tuition to help back-fill this huge reduction in funding. The cost of things like power, water, gas, food, insurance, etc all continue to go up, and in most cases, the corporate donations to schools that used to fund research has gone down. Demand for increased enrollment has gone up (because every child NEEDS to attend school).

What you have is a case where there is much more pressure applied to each dollar that walks in that door. In response, schools have been cutting everywhere -- including the amount they spend on faculty.

Re:Administrators

[david_thornley]

In any situation where there's far more applicants than positions, the responsible department is going to look for some way to thin the herd. Given applicants with and without college degrees, there's a plausible expectation that the one with the degree is going to be better. Therefore, if you've got ten times as many applications as you need, you pick out the ones without college degrees and dump them. There's no requirement to be fair to the jobseeker, and the HR department's ostensible goal is to come up with not too many candidates to pass along.

Now, a highly successful business should come up with some better filtering methods, but I'm not sure who does and what they do.

Profit

[LookIntoTheFuture]

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?

Re:Profit

[Irate Engineer]

This. Anybody who thinks the primary goal of college is education is mistaken. It is a profit-driven enterprise, pure and simple.

In the U.S. most employers demand at least a 4 year baccalaureate degree in something as a bare minimum job qualification. So if you want a job, you need to get a degree. Colleges charge as much as the market will bear and outsource the teaching to part-time and full-time adjuncts who are paid a fraction of what a full-time tenure-track faculty member would require to teach the same course load. And, by the way, they have no tenure protection so the administration has the adjunct faculty by the short hairs. Ouila! A cheap and nervous workforce - a corporate executive's wet dream!

Oligarch's Game

[lawnboy5-O]

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.

Re:Oligarch's Game

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

There are certainly plenty of schools that now take the "big business" attitude towards higher education. However, don't be melodramatic... There are plenty of Universities in the USA who maintain a more traditional and dedicated academic environment. When I was in high school choosing a college, I did plenty of research on all my options to find the place that would give me the best education and I found that there were plenty of public and private schools that do this. I had an extremely difficult time deciding where to go to college because there were so many good choices in the USA. Yes, some are expensive but they do come in a wide range of prices so anyone can get what they are looking for. I ended up paying more to go to Tufts, but I had a very stimulating and rewarding intellectual experience in both my major and required courses. I even minored in a foreign language, which I never imagined myself ever being interested in doing. Going to college with similar creative and like minded peers has paid dividends in my professional life as well. My high school friends who only went to college with the attitude of getting a piece of paper ended up being the ones who now complain college is pointless and a waste of time. They also seem to be the ones who are stuck in soul less corporate jobs.

Re:Oligarch's Game

[sandytaru]

I also sat down when considering colleges and looked at my choices. Due to income levels, Ivy Leagues were out for me, as was any private school. That left state schools. In-state tuition is cheaper than out of state, so that left local state schools. I wanted something bigger and better than a small community college or tech school, so that left the Research I and II schools.

I narrowed it down to four state universities, and was accepted to them all. In the end, I went for the slightly more expensive Big State U because I could move away from home (loved my parents but I was being suffocated) and because the brand name on the school would look good on my resume as long as I stayed in the same state. (Huge alumni network here.)

The ROI on whole schools and on individual majors should absolutely be a point of discussion with high school seniors, and parents need to be frank about it. But it isn't the state schools that are the cause of the student loan crisis, it's the for-profit schools that prey on those who CAN'T get accepted to the state schools.

Re:Oligarch's Game

[AthanasiusKircher]

I also sat down when considering colleges and looked at my choices. Due to income levels, Ivy Leagues were out for me, as was any private school. That left state schools.

I don't know when you went to school, but this is actually not true nowadays for very talented students. Most of the Ivy League schools have exceptional financial aid available for poor or even middle-class, sometimes making them even cheaper than state schools. For example, Harvard has a policy that students with family incomes below $65,000 pay NOTHING for tuition, and those with family incomes up to $150,000 are not expected to contribute more than 10% of that income. Other top schools may not be quite as generous, but they will often offer significant aid to those who really can't afford to go there.

It's really the "mid-level" private schools and smaller private colleges that charge the ridiculous tuitions to just about all students. I agree that most people can't really afford them (and end up with ridiculous loans if they try).

So -- if you're a talented student and have a chance at an Ivy or other top-tier school, I'd seriously suggest you check into their aid policies before deciding it's "unaffordable."

Pathetic

[The Grim Reefer]

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

Re:Pathetic

[the eric conspiracy]

Depends on the school. The top research universities are apparently still the best in the world in terms of the quality of the work they churn out. At least some of the rankings say so.

http://www.timeshighereducatio...

Lower tier and the for-profits not so much. These have mediocre instruction and lots of students that fail to graduate and lots of students in majors that don't qualify them for meaningful employment.

I just want to know

[pooh666]

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?

Re:I just want to know

[whoever57]

If research is paid for by outsiders, if sports pay for itself, then where is this ever growing cost of education coming from?

1. Sport only pays for itself in a very limited number of institutions. The claim is that somehow the sport gets almuni to gift more money, but I doubt that there are any studies that have investigated this claim.

2. While the pay of the teachers has been going down, pay for administrators has been going up.

Re:I just want to know

[Enry]

I've worked in IT at two major East Coast Universities for the past 12 years. There is a boatload of bureaucracy to be sure at almost all levels. Then again, some of it is warranted. Gone are the days of a researcher just getting a grant and spending it all on the research. You need to have grant administrators to make sure the grant is written properly and meets the needs of the funding agency, then you need them afterwards to let you know if you can spend the money you got on the things you want - these grants often times have strict rules on them.

Then there's all the federal regulations. Are you in a lab that got private (not public) money for doing stem cell research? Awesome! Just make sure that any equipment you use (staff payroll, PCs, consumables, anything) hasn't been paid for by a federal grant. So now you have to buy everything twice and make sure you don't cross the streams.

Even if you get a $500,000 grant, anywhere up to 2/3 of that goes immediately to the university you work for for overhead. Aforementioned administrators, physical space, power, cooling, IT...hey, so let's talk about IT for a bit.

So each researcher thinks they're the best thing to ever hit the institution and the way they do things is right. Forget the fact that your IT staff has way more experience and would be happy to help you design whatever you need - they're idiots! So you go off and design your own system and have the grant pay for it, but you ten forget that you don't have any IT staff, so you have a few postdocs take care of it until you realize they're spending all their time working on that and not doing research, so you call up the CIO and yell at him for a while. An IT person shows up and starts identifying problems with your design and why didn't you consult him when you were writing the grant but that's not your concern. So now you're telling the researcher you need a blue Hadoop cluster and you need it right now otherwise you'll take your entire lab across country where their IT staff is apparently more organized than yours. So the IT guy is building the blue Hadoop cluster, burning through IT budget since the CIO promised you they'd take care of it. IT is now underfunded and can't afford the $3 million for a new storage array since every other researcher is doing the exact same thing. But now there's a bigger problem - you ran out of storage space! Where are you supposed to put the 75TB of data you just remembered you needed a postdoc to download? Those stupid IT guys, saying that storage is $.50/GB. I can go to Best Buy and get a 2TB drive for $100! Why can't they just use those drives?

Hmm...I seem to have gone off on a rant. Anyway, a former director described one location as "land of 1000 CIOs". In a way it's true since it's the researchers that are bringing in money, way more than the students. So the researchers generally get their way or else they'll take off elsewhere and take all that research money with them.

And where's my blue Hadoop?

Re:I just want to know

[oursland]

Even if you get a $500,000 grant, anywhere up to 2/3 of that goes immediately to the university you work for for overhead.

I worked on a military funded research project and the Army Research Labs contract administrators balked at the 40% (!!!) mandatory overhead costs. They felt it was exorbitant as they had their own people who oversaw nearly every aspect of the contract. The only thing the university had to provide was a space for us to work.

Re:I just want to know

[whoever57]

Citation needed on point 1

Let me trump your vague "everything" with some actual reporting:

Nearly every university loses money on sports. Even after private donations and ticket sales, they fill the gap by tapping students paying tuition or state taxpayers.

Or how about this:

A recent NCAA report stated that only 14 of the 120 athletic programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision made money. .....At the same time, however, only 57% of football programs reported being profitable. Thus the other 43% of football programs are still part of the problem.

So, there are your citations. What do you have?

Re: I just want to know

[mcleland]

A couple reasons that may overlap with others: 1) administrators getting bigger compensation, 2) regulations - there are whole units in colleges and uni.s dedicated to collecting and managing data and generating reports for federal and state agencies, private organizations (U.S. News), etc. - these are regulatory compliance jobs, not teaching, 3) student perks - nicer dorms, nice fitness center, better dining options (how many of you had a dorm with one big communal bathroom for the hall? Has any university built one of those lately?) all of which raise the cost of tuition, 4) related is the array of student services - staffing centers to support x, y, and z group or interest. 5) related to 2, policies and regulations have become so complex, we have to hire managers for things that faculty used to be able to handle as part of their jobs. I.e., distance education is heavily regulated so there is an office to manage it all now.

Re:I just want to know

[ndtechnologies]

I work at a state university in TN. We are having this issue. Administrators are sucking up all the funds, wasting it on crap we don't need (like remodeling the President's office for a 3rd time in the last 10 years), or spending it wastefully ($7500 for software that we can't even fully utilize). Sure it may sound like sour grapes, but IT lives in the basement of the 60 yr old former Admin bldg, with asbestos in the walls, ceilings, and floor tiles. While the administration is paying to have the ground floor, and 2nd floor renovated (asbestos abatement with everyone still in the bldg), the basement, where we the bulk of our enterprise is housed, will not be touched. We don't even have properly functioning generators. Meanwhile, our football coach just received a 100k salary increase (to almost 700k/yr) for having a 7-5 season in Conf USA. Our President is taking the entire western half of the 2nd floor for a PERSONAL OFFICE SPACE, instead of moving our development staff out of the basement and into a more conventional location. Don't forget that our President has already had his current office re-furb'd, at least twice already with plans for a 3rd...needless to say, it's insanity. People are leaving left and right. I hate it here...sadly, this is where I chose to go for my BA...over 10 years ago. They're running it into the ground as fast as they can.

Any chemistry or physics adjunct could explain

[russotto]

It's because colleges and universities are natural collectors of Element 0 -- Administratium

Different Type of Bubble

[wisnoskij]

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.

Wrong question

[pubwvj]

"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.

Supply and Demand.

[ggraham412]

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.

Re:Somebody's Getting Paid More

[cashman73]

The football and basketball coaches are doing great!

It depends on the field

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:It depends on the field

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

False. I am an assistant professor in mathematics at one of the top universities in the world. Many associate professors here do not have tenure and have no hope of ever receiving tenure. They certainly have not been "guaranteed their salary for life". They can be fired at any moment.

And they don't make "well north of 10K dollars a month". In fact, if you look at the statistics online

http://ams.org/notices/201406/rnoti-p611.pdf

you'll see that the tenure-track assistant professors at large public universities make around 83K per year on average. The assistant professors who aren't tenure-track make even less, of course.

Re:It depends on the field

[David Jao]

Well, that's the trade-off of working at a top university. The top universities have no problems attracting top talent, and they can get away with underpaying their professors. People will still compete for those jobs because of the prestige. As a rule, the phenomenon of associate professors without tenure exists only at a few elite universities. Even if you get denied tenure at these places, it still looks good on your CV. The mathematics community understands that you can be extremely strong and still not meet the standards for tenure at these places.

Once you get below the very top, the GP is basically right, all the way down to at least liberal arts institutions (at community colleges, the situation is again different). I'm an associate professor of mathematics at a very good but not absolute top university (Waterloo). All associate professors here have tenure. I make north of 10k gross per month, although perhaps not well north. I'm very happy where I am. I could make more money in private industry, but tenure is worth more to me than the salary difference. In more technical fields than mathematics (such as computer science or engineering), the salaries are higher, as they have to be, to compete with Google and engineering firms.

All of the above applies to tenure-track professors only. Contingent faculty positions are much more financially precarious.

We need more respect for trade schools

[TarPitt]

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.

Re:We need more respect for trade schools

[rcoxdav]

The issues with the trades is not pay. Take a look at how much a plumber or electrician can make in the Chicago area. Here is a link showing how much they make. A 5th year apprentice would make about $70k a year working full time.

The problem is that the trades are totally dismissed by the school counselors. We don't need so many people in traditional colleges. We need more people in the trades. Another example is in lower level IT. Basic help desk and level 1 support people need vocational training, not a BS or BA. We need to re-align higher education.You do not need a BS in CS to maintain a network.

Re:We need more respect for trade schools

[rcoxdav]

I am not saying to shove everyone into plumbing. And, btw, those are union prices set to a large degree by the union. In a state like Illinois, where I am from, for a lot of projects, companies do not have a choice.

There is a shortage of plumbers, electricians, welders and other skilled trades people due to the extremely low number of people going into the field. Here is an article describing the problem

What I am saying is that we need to get a balance. Don't dump everyone into trades. Put more people into trades, and less people into college programs that have little to no workforce demand, and/or help the people that drop out of college. It is a societal problem that has made way too many people, especially in major urban areas (talking to you Chicagoland) feel that trades jobs are beneath them. Just because I have a BS in Electrical Engineering means I know how to automatically safely wire a house (though I could read up on it) or do a good job doing it. We need skilled trades people and not have the people driving their luxury cars look down on those people.

Re:Not to be snarky

[TarPitt]

*Not* being a college graduate is a certain guarantee of a lifetime of poorly paying jobs.

Worked at a major university

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Could be Worse

[Stormy Dragon]

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.

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.

I just want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Professors are disposable

[physicsphairy]

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.

Re:Republicans view them as servants...

[Stormy Dragon]

That is why the Republicans that control education in this country

Wow. You really think Republicans control education in this country?

Re:When will the left ever learn?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Where the money goes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

blame HR and the schools the tech schools drop

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Because we reward administrators and not teachers

[ekrst]

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?

Re:Administrator = Manager

[timeOday]

It's the same trend as in America in general, top managers take an ever-larger share of company earnings.

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!

Re:When will the left ever learn?

[NicBenjamin]

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.

complaints of the privileged

[stenvar]

[Academic year] salaries for full-time faculty averaged $73,207. By rank, the average was $98,974 for professors, $69,911 for associate professors, $58,662 for assistant professors, $42,609 for instructors, and $48,289 for lecturers. Faculty in 4-year institutions earn higher salaries, on average, than do those in 2-year schools. In 2006–07, faculty salaries averaged $84,249 in private independent institutions, $71,362 in public institutions, and $66,118 in religiously affiliated private colleges and universities

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.

Re:complaints of the privileged

[buswolley]

you miss the point. They are not hiring full faculty. They are hiring adjuncts, with pay scales around 20-30k. Also there is the post-doc hell.

Mary Margaret Vojtko

[David Jao]

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.

I just want to know

[ekrst]

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?

Sports

[Princeofcups]

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.

And as a university professor in a non-USA country

[gwolf]

...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.