4 ms·

which estimates are you contesting? as someone involved tangentially in academia, none of these even raise an eye brow. you might as well be asking for sources

which estimates are you contesting? as someone involved tangentially in academia, none of these even raise an eye brow. you might as well be asking for sources that the sun will rise tomorrow. if you really want hard numbers, pick your favorite public university. poke around. their faculty salaries will be public record. also, the student feedback on faculty will be public record. you should be able to figure out the average number of courses taught, and the average salary in about 10 minutes after you find the relevant excel spreadsheets. a 3 credit hour course will involve at least 3 hours of work per week (you've got to transport your body to the room the students are in). a minimum of 1 office hour per week. you've got to come up with homeworks, and grade them. even if you look at 25 students' homework for only 1 minute each, that'll take about half an hour. so it takes 4.5 hours each just to do the bare minimum possible work for a class. google for "average college tuition" to cover that part. what's left?

tokenadult 17y ago
you've got to transport your body to the room the students are in Commuting time wouldn't be counted if we are comparing jobs in academia to jobs in other sectors of the economy. average college tuition Most students attending most colleges pay no more than list price for tuition, and at some colleges many students pay considerably less. (This fact, of course, partly goes against some statements in the original article, but it also goes against the statement in the grandparent comment that a student enrollment of x in a class necessarily generates a revenue stream for the college of x times the enrollment.) That's why I'm asking for specifics. Someone here made factual claims. At least one of those claims is implausible to me (that any one professor develops massive revenue for his college by his classroom teaching activity). I base that on my college experiences, and on my current experiences in other teaching occupations. But with more specifics, we will all have a better sense of how comparable academic employment really is to other forms of employment.
- sigstoat 17y ago
  er, didn't mean commuting. i meant, you have to be in the same room as the class you're teaching. and you have to stay there, for the scheduled time. the course is going to run 9AM to 10AM, and you, the professor, don't get to go somewhere else during that time. even if there is distance teaching, you have to stop what you're doing, turn on your video conferencing program, and pretend to address the course material for 1 hour, as opposed to doing whatever else it is you want to do for that hour. and even if a particular student is themselves paying less, any loans originated by non-university sources, or scholarships from outside the university, etc become university income. only grants, loans, work studies, etc, originated by the university itself wouldn't be new income. so, yes, the average income per student will be less than the advertised average tuition, it will also be higher than what the average student is paying. (huzzah, upper and lower bounds!)
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  Which of these estimates do you disagree with? A. Top school tuition (U.S.): $40,000 per year B. Average course size: 25 C. Number of courses taken by average student: 10 D. Price per course (A / C): $4,000 E. Revenue generated per course (B * D): $100,000. This doesn't mean that each professor is "worth" $100,000 for each course, because there are administrative costs for the university. Given this, a reasonable cut for the professor might be 30-50%-- this assumes that for each professor, you need 1-2 educational staff. However, let's consider the following: Not all courses are taught by full professors; many are taught by postdocs making less than $60k/year. Let's generously assume that the average college teacher makes $90k (although I'd bet against it being that high). Let's further assume that half his job is teaching and half is research (although research is expected to be a full-time job, and teaching is fairly part-time). So he's being compensated $45,000 for his 5 courses per year, or $9,000 each. That's 9% of what he brings in-- a tiny fraction.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Average course size: 25 This is at a "top" school? Even at the non-top college that I attended for my undergraduate degree, I had many classes with a smaller class size than that. (To be sure, in my professional school nearly all the classes were a good bit larger than that, but that is what I am trying to figure out, what is typical and best illustrates how showing up to teach a college class well prepared compares to showing up to do any other kind of job well prepared.) So, if I may, could I kindly have an authoritative source cited for the statement that average course size is 25 at the echelon of colleges we are talking about (those with tuition of $40,000 per year)? For you and several onlookers, I will note that everyone who looks at how well workers are compensated for their work looks not only at salaries, but also at all fringe benefits and other employer costs for compensation of the worker. One would look at funding of health insurance, paid vacations, sabbaticals, retirement benefits, and so on to see which jobs are comparable to which other jobs. I have not recently heard that jobs in academia are notorious for having meager fringe benefits in relation to salary, but rather the contrary.
    - ericd 17y ago
      I went to a top school pretty recently, and many courses in the first two years had 200-300 people in them. There were also courses higher up in the course foodchain that had fewer than ten. I would say 25 is a reasonable average figure.
ibsulon 17y ago
"Publish or perish." The dirty secret of universities: the job of most faculty isn't to teach, it's to research and bring prestige to the university. In the sciences, research is a byproduct of bringing in money, so research grants are the most important part. Thus, on top of those three classes (two at the university I live near) they're expected to put in full time work on their research. From what I see, it's about a 60 hour average week in the social sciences. That dips to 35-40 in the summers.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  My point is that professors aren't overcompensated, because they "bring in" about $100k per class of tuition, which is about $667/hour-- although obviously deductions need to be made for administrative costs, classes are the main service-- assuming 150 hours of work per class, but are paid substantially less. The fact that they also do research as a full-time job means that they're even less overcompensated (by which I mean, "more undercompensated").
- mklg1266 17y ago
  Professors work. A lot. Maybe not the ancient tenured ones, and not all of them, but the majority. It is far from a 40-hour job. And in the hard sciences/engineering/computer science, they could definitely be making more money in industry.
tokenadult 17y ago
The Common Data Set figures are gathered by a standardized methodology (dictated in large part by the methodology of reports colleges are required to make to the federal government). Here's a pretty comprehensive list of publicly posted Common Data Set filings for colleges. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/76444-links-common-data-sets-posted-colleges.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection... (Go to near the end of this long thread for the latest updated alphabetized list.) The tuition revenue per professor indicated in the HN comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268063 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268063 is simply too high. That was a wild guess, not a statement based on actually doing research.

tokenadult 17y ago

you've got to transport your body to the room the students are in Commuting time wouldn't be counted if we are comparing jobs in academia to jobs in other sectors of the economy. average college tuition Most students attending most colleges pay no more than list price for tuition, and at some colleges many students pay considerably less. (This fact, of course, partly goes against some statements in the original article, but it also goes against the statement in the grandparent comment that a student enrollment of x in a class necessarily generates a revenue stream for the college of x times the enrollment.) That's why I'm asking for specifics. Someone here made factual claims. At least one of those claims is implausible to me (that any one professor develops massive revenue for his college by his classroom teaching activity). I base that on my college experiences, and on my current experiences in other teaching occupations. But with more specifics, we will all have a better sense of how comparable academic employment really is to other forms of employment.

sigstoat 17y ago
er, didn't mean commuting. i meant, you have to be in the same room as the class you're teaching. and you have to stay there, for the scheduled time. the course is going to run 9AM to 10AM, and you, the professor, don't get to go somewhere else during that time. even if there is distance teaching, you have to stop what you're doing, turn on your video conferencing program, and pretend to address the course material for 1 hour, as opposed to doing whatever else it is you want to do for that hour. and even if a particular student is themselves paying less, any loans originated by non-university sources, or scholarships from outside the university, etc become university income. only grants, loans, work studies, etc, originated by the university itself wouldn't be new income. so, yes, the average income per student will be less than the advertised average tuition, it will also be higher than what the average student is paying. (huzzah, upper and lower bounds!)
pw0ncakes 17y ago
Which of these estimates do you disagree with? A. Top school tuition (U.S.): $40,000 per year B. Average course size: 25 C. Number of courses taken by average student: 10 D. Price per course (A / C): $4,000 E. Revenue generated per course (B * D): $100,000. This doesn't mean that each professor is "worth" $100,000 for each course, because there are administrative costs for the university. Given this, a reasonable cut for the professor might be 30-50%-- this assumes that for each professor, you need 1-2 educational staff. However, let's consider the following: Not all courses are taught by full professors; many are taught by postdocs making less than $60k/year. Let's generously assume that the average college teacher makes $90k (although I'd bet against it being that high). Let's further assume that half his job is teaching and half is research (although research is expected to be a full-time job, and teaching is fairly part-time). So he's being compensated $45,000 for his 5 courses per year, or $9,000 each. That's 9% of what he brings in-- a tiny fraction.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Average course size: 25 This is at a "top" school? Even at the non-top college that I attended for my undergraduate degree, I had many classes with a smaller class size than that. (To be sure, in my professional school nearly all the classes were a good bit larger than that, but that is what I am trying to figure out, what is typical and best illustrates how showing up to teach a college class well prepared compares to showing up to do any other kind of job well prepared.) So, if I may, could I kindly have an authoritative source cited for the statement that average course size is 25 at the echelon of colleges we are talking about (those with tuition of $40,000 per year)? For you and several onlookers, I will note that everyone who looks at how well workers are compensated for their work looks not only at salaries, but also at all fringe benefits and other employer costs for compensation of the worker. One would look at funding of health insurance, paid vacations, sabbaticals, retirement benefits, and so on to see which jobs are comparable to which other jobs. I have not recently heard that jobs in academia are notorious for having meager fringe benefits in relation to salary, but rather the contrary.
  - ericd 17y ago
    I went to a top school pretty recently, and many courses in the first two years had 200-300 people in them. There were also courses higher up in the course foodchain that had fewer than ten. I would say 25 is a reasonable average figure.

ibsulon 17y ago

"Publish or perish." The dirty secret of universities: the job of most faculty isn't to teach, it's to research and bring prestige to the university. In the sciences, research is a byproduct of bringing in money, so research grants are the most important part. Thus, on top of those three classes (two at the university I live near) they're expected to put in full time work on their research. From what I see, it's about a 60 hour average week in the social sciences. That dips to 35-40 in the summers.

pw0ncakes 17y ago
My point is that professors aren't overcompensated, because they "bring in" about $100k per class of tuition, which is about $667/hour-- although obviously deductions need to be made for administrative costs, classes are the main service-- assuming 150 hours of work per class, but are paid substantially less. The fact that they also do research as a full-time job means that they're even less overcompensated (by which I mean, "more undercompensated").
mklg1266 17y ago
Professors work. A lot. Maybe not the ancient tenured ones, and not all of them, but the majority. It is far from a 40-hour job. And in the hard sciences/engineering/computer science, they could definitely be making more money in industry.

tokenadult 17y ago

The Common Data Set figures are gathered by a standardized methodology (dictated in large part by the methodology of reports colleges are required to make to the federal government). Here's a pretty comprehensive list of publicly posted Common Data Set filings for colleges. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/76444-links-common-data-sets-posted-colleges.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection... (Go to near the end of this long thread for the latest updated alphabetized list.) The tuition revenue per professor indicated in the HN comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268063 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268063 is simply too high. That was a wild guess, not a statement based on actually doing research.