15 ms·

Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

• qaq 9y ago
  The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.
  • xythian 9y ago
    I'm not sure why you're downvoted. This is a real problem that is palpable for anyone that has worked in higher ed since the 1980s as most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. The reasons for this move are complex, and one result is a rise in well-paid administrators and low-paid adjuncts with a decline in tenured faculty. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/30/academic-bureaucracy-rise-managers-higher-education https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/30/academic-b... https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argues_bloated_administration_is_what_ails_higher_education https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argu... https://www.agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-workforce https://www.agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-wor...
    • pm24601 9y ago
      > most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. At my alum mater, the state cut support to the state universities to practically nothing. Voters saw how much money the big universities were making on college football. They consistently voted to cut the money to the university system. Only problem? Most state supported universities did not have a football program. My university: * turned to Chinese/Indian nationals (no financial aid/full price) * raised everyone's tuition (went from low-cost school to higher-end) * raised other fees My university is in a part of the US that has low cost of living. So at the very least, the profs are unlikely to be homeless - yes even at the wages specified.
      • xythian 9y ago
        You basically typed out what I would have typed, but got lazy and just said "reasons are complex." There's something of a joke/quote in university circles about how universities went from "state funded to state supported to state located." When you get <= 5% of your budget from the state, the state support means nothing and this is the situation for most big state unis. Also, you forgot the Saudi Arabian nationals whose govt fully funds their US education (though this program is becoming more restrictive in recent years with the Saudi govt selecting specific eligible degrees). I'm not trying to start a flame war here, but my personal experience is that many of these Saudi students struggled deeply, this fact was known by the administration, but the giant full-price checks were essential to keeping the lights on. Other Fees: Yes, the rise of fees that are starting to rival tuition. Fees are a convenient way to lower the sticker shock of tuition while keeping the total cost the same. My former uni made a big promise about "freezing" tuition for years at a time, but all they ended up doing was jacking up the fees to compensate.
        • asenna 9y ago
          > My personal experience is that many of these Saudi students struggled deeply. I'm just curious, could you elaborate on this? Are you referring to them not being able to cope up academically? Or the cultural difference or racism. I've known a couple of these students back from my college and they seemed to be doing alright.
      • brightball 9y ago
        This sounds like something people could perceive about Clemson so I'll use them as an example. In SC funding went down while tuition went up and lottery scholarships went up. The university budget is around $800 million / year and the athletic department across all sports is about $80 million / year. Of that budget, it's entirely self sustained but it's also almost entirely spent. It's performance has no impact on the rest of the university except for alumni engagement/excitement. Even if it were making a $20 million dollar profit it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the total university budget. At the same time, applications are through the roof and there's not enough room to take everybody (but they are investing in new buildings to increase capacity). The ratio of in state to out of state has always remained close to 60/30 though. Admin costs have increased but the prestige factor has gone up significantly as well. Clemson went from being the #70 something PUBLIC university to a top 20 in the span of 2 decades.
    • gerbilly 9y ago
      > most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. I think this reflects a larger trend. Most institutions are taking on the rituals of the dominant organizing principle in society: the corporation. I believe this is why church groups are having "annual general meetings" and that formerly not for profit institutions are mimicking the organizational structure of corporations: meetings, hierarchical teams, layers of administrators etc...
      • sliverstorm 9y ago
        Well, naturally. Your organization has a revenue stream (donations). It has expenditures (church upkeep). To avoid embezzlement, wasteful spending, & getting scalped by necessary services, you conduct group review of budget goals & the books.
      • cortesoft 9y ago
        Isn't that just how large organizations are run? How else would you run a large organization except with layers of hierarchy and meetings?
        • losteric 9y ago
          Competent self-managing sub-organizations. Big corporations do require bureaucracy, but smaller entities use bureaucracy as a substitute for competency and autonomy.
          • cortesoft 9y ago
            A 'sub-organization' is just an alternative description of a heirarchy. Those sub-organizations will have to come together to make macro decisions, like which departments need more funding, how to handle building expansion and shared facility use, etc.
            • losteric 9y ago
              In my experience, smaller flatter organizations rarely require a synchronous large meeting for those issues.
  • spectrum1234 9y ago
    Exactly! http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-... "...some of this probably relates to a difference between personal versus institutional risk tolerance."
  • yardie 9y ago
    I wonder what percentage of the admin is dedicated to chasing money. While I was working as an undergrad assistant the grant writing process was insane and I rarely saw the professor overseeing research. He was walled off in his office writing grant proposals. I learned that for the budget of most research projects, 50% was administration. That is 50% wasn't for researchers, the lab, labor, or equipment. Part of the 50% administration budget was paying for the oversight of said budget. I am no longer amazed when government projects go severely overbudget anymore. Its designed to do that. Not just the contractor but the government itself. Budget a project, get the vendor, project goes over, create a department to track costs, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, budget goes over, create another department to track budget, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, ad nauseum.
    • xythian 9y ago
      In my experience (former PhD student and instructor and my spouse is a full-time faculty and program director), if you're a tenured faculty member at a R1 university, then grant writing is your job. You're expected to be self-funding and the only way to do this is to grind out grants and pass the work onto graduate students and staff. And, you pay a ~50% tax on your grant award as 'overhead' to the university, so you have a lot less money to work with than the sticker value that gets awarded. At the university level, arguably the second most important person in the administration is the President of the Foundation and they don't even technically work for the university as the foundation is a separate legal entity. This person has a massive private army of fund-raising staff that shakes the alumni money tree looking for gifts large and small. But, that doesn't mean that universities don't also have money chasers. My former uni had a special division in the recruiting/admission office that focused on high-value future alumni, aka, children of rich and famous parents. These kids were brought in for tailored events, private meetings with faculty and admins, and received a general red carpet treatment to try and lure them to the university. Related, Malcom Gladwell has done some great work dissecting the money making machines of the administrator class who go after $100M+ gifts (far more money than 99.99% of researchers could acquire in a lifetime of grants). And, how this gift giving continues to pile on at elite schools while starving everyone else of gifts. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...
  • empath75 9y ago
    It seems like there should be a market for low overhead small schools with high paid teaching staff.
    • moduspol 9y ago
      They were looking at doing this at my last job (small private university). We already outsourced custodial and food service. Do student accounts and financial aid really define us as a university? Are they part of our core competency? Do we do them particularly well relative to competitors? Of course not. So why not outsource them?
    • gipp 9y ago
      For the university "market", the only game in town is prestige, which teaching quality plays into very little, if at all.
      • criddell 9y ago
        That's especially true for some professions (like law) but less true for most others. For other fields, school prestige can help you get that first job, but the value of being able to say you were educated at X drops quickly once you start working. Once you've been working for a while, your portfolio, social skills, professional network, and track record are far more important than the issuer of your degree.
    • chibg10 9y ago
      Right? I've thought about this as well. My guess is that: 1) Nearly all university students are making their decision when they're 18, so a lot of them are mostly interested in non-academic aspects of their school 2) It seems really hard to actually start a new university. Anecdotally, every university I can think of is quite old. 3) This is probably related to (2). The benefits of universities aren't really dependent on good professors. The advantage of top schools in both educational progress and student outcomes can probably mostly explained by signalling, filtering out weak students before they arrive, university culture, and networking. None of this has much to do with professors.
  • leggomylibro 9y ago
    "Don't worry, we can have an adjunct professor do it on the cheap." And then they come to us for tax dollars, while also slashing their involvement with local communities. Why should education tax money go to universities that are so woefully inefficient and bloated with money when it could be spent on primary and secondary education, or better access to preschooling?
  • hashberry 9y ago
    I dated someone who worked an administrative position... she would complain of coworkers who would do nothing all day. She said her job was being done by three people when only one was needed. The lack of oversight and actual work being done was alarming. Who administrates the administrators? No one.
  • jseliger 9y ago
    The admin staff is a problem but does not seem to be the main problem: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m....
  • Glyptodon 9y ago
    I work for a university and while I think there's some justification for increases in some roles - many universities desperately need internal equivalents of an 18F/US Digital service type entity among other things. Other situations are complex - grants/external funding impose substantial administration requirements (while being larger and larger shares of revenue) or require substantial administrative expertise, often require things like outreach programs which PIs don't want to deal with, etc. But at the same time, I think administrative salaries are frequently unconscionable.
  • asabjorn 9y ago
    Universities are like dictatorships where only staff has a vote on if the top executives should stay in their job. Since professors are tenured and are therefore not beholden to anyone, the top executives are highly incentivised to increase the pool of voters that they have leverage over in order to create a stable coalition. This pool is administrative staff. This problem is further aggravated by the fact that students often choose Universities based upon reputation and are therefore rather insensitive to price increases, so extra spend on administrative staff is easy to find. In addition to this the government gives away student loans that matches rising tuition costs and because you can't get rid of student loans in bankruptcy it is an attractive asset class even for private lenders.
• akeck 9y ago
  So, where's the $150K per student in tuition going?
  • monocasa 9y ago
    The administration
  • ceejayoz 9y ago
    Fancy dorms, athletic facilities, big houses for the university president, endowments...
    • sixQuarks 9y ago
      true, the highest paid employee at most large universities are the sports coaches.
      • greedo 9y ago
        Most coaches are paid out of profits from sports, not from tuition.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
        • ecshafer 9y ago
          Most Athletics programs do not return a profit, so this is demonstrably false. Source from ncaa: http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...
  • rgrieselhuber 9y ago
    Endowment funds and administration.
• TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Students exchanging their body for a place to stay during university years seem to be a commonplace thing today. I guess economic hardships move upwards, so it's time for university staff too.
• thearn4 9y ago
  How does the academic bubble in the U.S. break? Knowing quite a few career adjuncts, I have to wonder if their situation will only be getting worse.
  • Overtonwindow 9y ago
    Reform the tenure system and place caps on university administrators pay.
    • vkou 9y ago
      Tenure's not the problem, the problem is that in their academic career, a PHD will produce X new PHDs. Where X is substantially greater than 1. Until this is fixed, it doesn't matter if academic jobs are for life, or are contracts that get renewed (or not) every 8 hours. This pyramid scheme was fine while demand for PHDs was increasing (By industry, and growth of academia), but now its really not (Industry doesn't want to pay, academia can't grow anymore). Universities must start greatly restricting their grad school programs. Of course, this will absolutely kill the practice of using underpaid grad students to do research... And would have to be offset by public increases to research spending.
      • thearn4 9y ago
        As a PhD who never went into academia, I can easily take the pledge not to have any (academic) children.
        • vkou 9y ago
          Alas, while that saves us having X^2 PHDs for each PHD position, it doesn't stop us from having X PHDs for each position. You aren't training new PHDs - your teachers were, and still are.
      • SubiculumCode 9y ago
        I will say that those who can do research probably dont become adjuncts, but continue as a researcher on soft money or go in industry. The more liberal arts, philosophy, turn to adjunct positions.
• jacquesm 9y ago
  Reminds me of the former Eastbloc countries where you will find scientists as janitors and living in terrible conditions. Not that people who are not scientists don't live in terrible conditions but you would never expect a maths or physics professor to be unemployable. Even here in NL there are niche websites that pretend to be dating sites but that actually are sites where students are hooked up with 'sugar daddy's' effectively prostituting themselves to be able to finish their academic education. This is a hot topic in the news here right now.
  • yardie 9y ago
    Don't even need to go east. Cuba is that way right now. Bartenders, cab drivers, and prostitutes with PhDs.
    • pacala 9y ago
      The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. There are a few lucky winners, and a vast army of overspecialized people with little real-world options.
    • gipp 9y ago
      Don't even need to go anywhere. https://gizmodo.com/5671062/there-are-5000-janitors-in-the-us-with-phds https://gizmodo.com/5671062/there-are-5000-janitors-in-the-u...
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • david927 9y ago
    In Eastbloc countries that was done as a form of punishment, often for not toeing the party line. It was true across disciplines: medicine, law, etc, when otherwise they would have "good" jobs. (I'm clarifying, not justifying.) I thought in The Netherlands that higher education was effectively free.
    • jacquesm 9y ago
      > I thought in The Netherlands that higher education was effectively free. But life is not.
• KirinDave 9y ago
  For those who have university degrees, this should be a difficult read. Next time you say to yourself, "Sure, I went to college. I know that's a privilege, but I worked hard there and made it because of my hard work and nothing else!" Remember this article. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it's a phenomenon that's becoming more acute. Even if we ignore the adjuncts, the brilliant folks who taught us all what we know subsist on less than half of the median wage for our professions, with increasingly mediocre benefits. These are the same folks who's amazing research work is powering our industry, often with a 10 year lead time.
  • aaron-lebo 9y ago
    It's not just the adjuncts, it is graduate students, too. I've got friends who are working on their PhDs while teaching 4-5 classes (at other locations). I considered being a TA a few years ago, but you couldn't have a second job. The stipend as a TA was $1300 a month + tuition for 40 hour weeks (may have actually been "20" hour weeks, not certain). Yeah, right. It's pretty screwed up. It's a privilege to be in higher education but it is also pretty crushing and you've got to be a soldier to deal with it. The worst part is I've almost never met anything but great people who willingly put themselves through it. It's why as an overeducated graduate student, I'm against expanding education more and more (like free community college for all). The incentives are way off currently, not sure what the solution is, but it has to change.
    • legitster 9y ago
      If it includes room and board and some insurance plan, $1300 a month isn't bad? My brother had a something like that at his university and ended up saving most of it because you really don't have a lot else to spend it on. Sure, I wouldn't start a family on that, but it far surpasses what I lived off of right after college. EDIT: It looks like the article was about people late in their careers. I was assuming that adjunct faculty positions were only entry level or for grad students.
      • GlenTheMachine 9y ago
• adamnemecek 9y ago
  Bernie can't come soon enough.
  • jjawssd 9y ago
    Perverse incentive structures will not be repaired with a power grab
    • wwweston 9y ago
      Being able to reshape incentives implies power. "Grab" seems like it's just a pejorative. Ways to fix perverse incentive structures: * civic power generally reshaping incentive structures * build something else parallel around different incentives, avoiding all the misteps that caused similar institutions to bake in the perverse incentives they have now Neither one sounds particularly easy to me. Let me know if I left anything off the list.
      • jjawssd 9y ago
        Trump is the modern face of civic nationalism whereas Bernie epitomizes big government and the bureaucratic nanny state with opaque decision making processes. I see this as a power grab compared to the decentralized approach championed pushed by Trump. That is all.
    • adamnemecek 9y ago
      Power grab? No, but maybe people will be paid a livable wage.
  • virmundi 9y ago
    For Bernie to work, we have to restructure education to be more from the 1980s and 1970s. You won't have private rooms with private baths. You won't have school creating new pool and phsycial fitness megaplexes. You will have 2-4 people per room with a common shower. I'm not saying this is wrong. I'm saying that the quality of life will have to go down. When you picture a Bernie school, you need to picture Animal House. School becomes focused on school. Anything else the students have to come up with.
• GuiA 9y ago
  “I feel committed to being the person who’s there to help millennials, the next generation, go on to become critical thinkers,” she said. “And I’m really good at it, and I really like it. And it’s heartbreaking to me it doesn’t pay what I feel it should.” Sadly, there are more people with that kind of deep calling and sense of duty to the next generation willing to put it above a better salary than universities need, so as long as that will hold true, universities will be able to get that highly educated labor for very cheap. I have several friends who are adjuncts making barely more than I used to make as a grad student, and who are living in borderline poverty (fortunately for now they are young and dependent-free, so it's not too much a sacrifice). I can very much relate to them, as I miss teaching terribly - but I refuse to give cheap labor to what many US universities have become, ie investment firms with an education themed PR front (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/business/dealbook/harvard-endowment.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=14&pgtype=sectionfront https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/business/dealbook/harvard...).
  • conjectures 9y ago
    This. It should be pointed out that for individual decision making for someone in this situation that opting out may not only improve their own prospects, but also benefit those still hanging on in this career.
  • pickitupsnake 9y ago
    This is probably most of it for lower tiered schools and for libarts. I know several adjuncts that teach law/business and they are largely indifferent to their adjunct pay - a drop in the bucket. The title 'adjunct lecturer' confers high-valued benefits of prestige, networking, and depending on the course, specialization signaling that helps fuel their practices.
• pwaivers 9y ago
  There is only one academic who turned to sex work in this article right? Unless I missed some one else the article mentioned. This is a very specific example and paints with a broad paintbrush.
  • tkyjonathan 9y ago
    Are you saying that this news article is anecdotal and incorrect about the actual situation? It seems to me that as a whole, the situation with adjunct teachers is quite bad..
  • showmetherec 9y ago
    Are you arguing life for adjuncts is improving?
    • dekhn 9y ago
      No, they're arguing that using a single anecdote which may not be representative. Coupled with the placement of that in the title of th article, it's a framing anecdote that's used to shock the reader into thinking the problem is more dire than it is (the situation is bad, but I claim that few academics are becoming sex workers to remain as academics).
    • dqpb 9y ago
      It's reasonable to ask why the title is plural - "academics turn to sex work" - while the anecdote in the article is about a single person turning to sex work, and then there is no other information about how common this is. The closest it gets to statistics is: Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness. A quarter of part-time college academics (many of whom are adjuncts, though it’s not uncommon for adjuncts to work 40 hours a week or more) are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs such as Medicaid. Which says literally nothing about how common it is for adjuncts to turn to sex work. On the other hand, I would argue that it is unreasonable (or at least intellectually dishonest) for you to ask: Are you arguing life for adjuncts is improving?. Obviously the OP is not arguing that. Your intent with this question is to shame the OP for asking clarifying questions that might weaken the articles case. If you were intellectually honest, you would be in favor of accurate information.
• _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  With companies no longer requesting university degrees, online learning (like watching Harvard courses) becoming more popular and in some countries university being outragous expensive, the future of universities is bleak because people will stop going there. And that of acadamics teaching is even worse. The internet will cut all middleman, and teachers being the middleman between you and knowledge, or gatekeepers to degrees. If people do not add value - and empty classrooms show many teachers do not add value, in my theoretical CS and math classes professors only wrote proofs on the blackboard for 1.5h and then left - the internet elimates you.
  • aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I very strongly doubt that. The market for a piece of paper is way too strong. That's why this stuff is expensive. Everyone can do this stuff, so the surest (and most advertised) way to get a leg up in the economy is by getting a piece of paper. That effect only seems to be growing. That said, certainly do agree with you in principle.
    • _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
      "The market for a piece of paper is way too strong." Penguin, PwC and EY have already dropped university degrees as a requirement. "The move comes just months after accountancy firm Ernst & Young, one of Britain’s biggest graduate recruiters, made a similar announcement, saying in August that it would no longer consider degree or A-level results when assessing potential employees" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditches-the-need-for-job-seekers-to-have-university-degrees https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditche... "It found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken." http://www.ey.com/uk/en/newsroom/news-releases/15-08-03---ey-transforms-its-recruitment-selection-process-for-graduates-undergraduates-and-school-leavers http://www.ey.com/uk/en/newsroom/news-releases/15-08-03---ey... Also related "Goldman last year also made other moves to help it identify strong candidates who may not attend Ivy League schools by scrapping first round interviews on college campuses in favor of a video platform." http://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-hiring/goldman-to-use-personality-test-for-hiring-decisions-idUSKBN1AP2J7 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-hiring/goldm...
• javaPro 9y ago
  Academia, has become a big business, it's no longer about the actual academics but keeping the gigantic snowball moving, gathering snow as it rolls until finally it crashes in the bottom of the hill. I hope the admins and boards of the colleges and universities get hit worst. This isn't the fault of professors or their tenure, this is a greedy and disgusting late-stage-capitalist culture that has completely warped academia. The entire administration of academia and the groups associated with it are parasitic burdens on society.
• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  A friend of a friend is an adjunct. His college has put him and 20 other adjuncts into a single classroom to serve as their offices..open floor plan? When students come in to talk, they must do in a room filled with other students and adjuncts. As we know, these conversations often include quite personal details. After complaining to the dean, the dean responded something to the effect, "I realize that you don't have access to the big picture, so let us worry about the big picture and feel assured that this is necessary." Outrageous.
• wehadfun 9y ago
  I would like to know which universities these people work at. Are they Billion dollar universities or are these lower tier schools. Regardless schools care more about money then education and enslave their students in debt, send their athletes on the road for week missing class, and literally pimp out there professors.
• Afforess 9y ago
  This is the result of entirely understandable forces, with no solution in sight. High school students (and their parents) select Universities based on status first (or second), and education quality nearly last. Worse, this is entirely sensible. There is an implicit understanding better ranked Universities are a prerequisite for higher-status jobs, moving up in the economy. Employers making the decision to favour high-status graduates is also rational: with a glut of credentialed applicants, _why_ would you choose a lower-status candidate when an equally good high-status one was available? That's leaving money on the table. Every part of this slow-motion disaster is explainable. Every individual actor is making the best choice available to themselves. And yet, Moloch wins. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  • moduspol 9y ago
    It wasn't always this way, though. Tuition rates outpacing inflation has only been over the last few decades. You're right that each actor is making (more or less) rational decisions, but federal subsidies for student loans are what throws a wrench into the mix. Previously, the decisions were all the same, but consumers had much more limited capital and were far more price sensitive. Now they can get bigger loans much more easily, and sure enough, they're willing to pay higher prices. The less the consumer knows / cares about the price of something, the faster that price will increase. See also: health care in the US.
• paapi__gudiya 9y ago
  What is the inherent value that lecturers offer anyways? All the material they teach in classes has been available online for the last 20 years. It makes sense (going by market needs) that they have been driven to such levels of poverty. The only value universities offer is that one can meet other like-minded and driven people at universities. If some other social structures can offer the same, i.e. a place where one can meet such people, universities will be obsolete too. The only question is when? And are there any organizations out there that already offer such services?
  • Clubber 9y ago
    >What is the inherent value that lecturers offer anyways? Not so much lecturers but curriculum. I can't tell you how many developers I've met that don't know much about designing relational database models, which is arguably the most important, if not the longest lasting part of business application development. When you are self taught, the stuff you decide to learn, you can really master. It's the stuff that you decide to put off that is actually important that hurts you.
  • Torwald 9y ago
    There are different learning styles. Universities could stay relevant by offering environment for specific styles or a combination thereof, that no other place does. In other words, for some people a given university would be the best way to learn. Second, shared resources like laboratory equipment or an auditorium can be of value. A university could develop unique offerings there, that other entities wouldn't willing to provide.
  • Larrikin 9y ago
    If you sit in the back of the class on Facebook the entire lecture the classroom setting still offers the invaluable information of evaluating how well you actually understand the material at the end of the class. Even in project based classes, getting guidance and suggestions of improvements from people that know a lot more about the subject than you is always invaluable. Obviously if you engage in class you often get immediate clarity on issues that you may have had to research for hours in a different source than your online material. If you're not taking advantage of the lecturer, then it is on you, and obviously you won't get much more out of it than an online course with little to no feed back
• eric_b 9y ago
  I'm surprised to see adjunct's make so little. When I was in school the full-time professor's salaries were public (since it was a public university). They were all making over 100k/year, and this was some time ago. Many were high 100's or low 200's. Even the lecturers were pulling in 70k or more, and this was in a midwestern state with low cost of living. Why do the adjunct's put up with this? You can make more being a high school teacher, and get better benefits. Is it because the adjunct approach is the best way to get in to a full time position? If I recall, the tenure-track "associate" profs at my university did not go the adjunct route, but perhaps things have changed? Anyways, disheartening that tuition is through the roof, and many instructors are being paid subsistence wages.
  • searine 9y ago
    The difference between an adjunct and a full professor is the difference between a Temp and a rockstar developer. Adjuncts are a cost for the university, their salary is a liability on the budget line. Professors are a net positive. They have high salaries but they bring in millions of dollars in grants and attract talented students who can be paid worse than adjuncts (and teach classes). Adjuncts are space fillers. When a university can't goad a professor, post-doc, or grad student to teach the 101 class they farm it out to a Adjunct. The skills needed to teach the entry level courses are basic, so there is a wide field of individuals who can fill that role. As a result the pay is not great.
    • scott_s 9y ago
      Agreed, but with one disagreement: professors in science and engineering bring in millions of dollars of grants. Those in the humanities tend not to bring in nearly as much grant money.
  • GlenTheMachine 9y ago
    In engineering, at least, adjuncts often are teaching in their free time and working a full-time engineering job. They do it because they enjoy the teaching, or because in a few cases they appreciate the extra money. Several of my colleagues do that; my office is next to the guy who teaches advanced undergraduate and graduate level astrodynamics at the local state university. But he is working full time as a civil servant and pulling that salary, plus the adjunct pay on top of it. You can get away with paying those adjuncts a pretty low wage. But then it drives the cost of adjuncts down across the board. The problem really comes in when you are in a field that doesn't afford you full-time non-academic employment, such as the arts or sciences such as archaeology etc. and are teaching full time to pay the bills (or not, as the case may be).
• troupe 9y ago
  It seems more and more people value "going to college" over "getting an education." This leads to a focus on all the niceties around the college experience rather than the actual education. When the education isn't the part that is being valued, the professors aren't going to be valued.
• jsonhero 9y ago
  You might be better off just throwing your college fund into bitcoin. The financial risk is about the same at this point.
  • troupe 9y ago
    Most people can go to a junior college and get a two-year degree debt-free between working a part-time job and non-loan financial aid. Transfer into an inexpensive 4-year school to complete your undergrad degree and if you are careful you can graduate with less than $5,000 of debt...maybe no debt at all depending on how much financial need you have and how valuable your skills are. I don't think that skipping college and putting the funds you have into bitcoin is anywhere as risk-free as going to college in the scenario I outlined.
• khawkins 9y ago
  The fact that the article features an English professor is unsurprising. This is a supply-side problem--liberal arts degrees are in relatively low demand, but institutions continue to graduate students at unsustainable levels. No one is telling the students that they're spending 4-12 years getting an education which is worth less than what they're paying for it. For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools. Even so, we're graduating people at rates comparable with STEM fields. With so much supply, the price of the work is driven far down. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cta.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cta.asp
  • chrisseaton 9y ago
    > For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.
    • Moto7451 9y ago
      This is true for occupations like sales where the litmus test is professionalism and the ability to stick to goals. However, you will lock yourself out of occupations with degree requirements for credentialing and those with domain knowledge you gain through school like Chemistry. I live in LA and, surprise surprise, there are a lot of writers, artists, and other folks who want to work in Liberal Arts oriented industries. Most of my Liberal Arts degree equipped friends are in sales while dabbling in their art on the side. A few of them sell a book or script every 3-5 years. The rest of them went back to school for a Law Degree or an unrelated Masters degree.
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      You can be a soldier without ant college education (and qualify for a direct path to Officer Candidate School with a two-year degree or equivalent credits, IIRC), so giving “soldier” as on option with 4-year English degree is literally suggesting that it is worth the same as no college education at all.
• rossdavidh 9y ago
  Clearly unsustainable. One thing I don't see examined is, if we fix this by giving colleges some reason to employ full-time profs instead of multiple part-timers, this would make those jobs middle class jobs but actually reduce the number of spots available. Which might be the right thing to do, but won't help most of these people.
  • lmm 9y ago
    Well, it might help them if it was the kick they needed to leave academia. As the article concludes, for many of these people the problem is that they keep chasing the dream of being an academic, long after the reality is that it's not a livelihood that can support them.
• TheMagicHorsey 9y ago
  How come nobody asks whether what these people are teaching is actually useful stuff. I mean useful in the sense that someone would voluntarily pay money for it with full knowledge of the benefits. I have not been impressed with the colleges in the Bay Area and Sacramento. Except for some programs in the UC system and Stanford, the vast majority of educational programs seem to be run for the benefit of administrators. Neither the teachers nor the students reap many benefits. The career offices for many programs practice deception to hide the ball when it comes to the prospects of alumni of their programs. Many programs teach a curriculum that is irrelevant to employers, and when challenged claim they are "teaching you to learn". What a hollow fucking claim. How do we test that claim? They are teaching us to learn INDEED! Why don't they teach themselves how to teach something useful first! As a Senior in college I TAed an intro engineering course at an Ivy League school. A couple decades later a friend of a friend, who was dean of students at a for-profit, needed a teacher at the last minute for a subject I'm an expert at, and so I helped her out by teaching a night class after work, two days a week, for a semester. The latter experience was eye-opening. Most of my students should not have been there. They were paying $25,000 a year or more in fees. They were hardly prepared to tackle high school material, much less 4th year college material. The for-profit institution was happy enough to continue taking their money while delivering nothing tangible. Most of the teachers there were living hand to mouth themselves. Some of them former students. It was a scam through and through. Nothing useful was being taught. There were no employers lining up to hire these kids. Basically, federal student loans are being funneled to "teachers" that should probably not be teaching, because they don't have anything useful to teach. We have to shed this societal delusion that it costs $25,000 per year to read books in a room with a person leading the class. It does not cost that much. It should not cost that much. This is doubly true if the books being read/taught are non-technical. We really need a Universal Basic Income. Most of the people involved in this educational industrial complex are just unemployable. Let's not allow them to pass on the same unemployable skill set to another generation because they need to have a salary to live. They should just be paid off and it should be a separate exercise from education.
  • contact_fusion 9y ago
    I think you're definitely right. Most programs out there are not worth paying anything for in the first place, much less $25,000 a year. The problem, at least in my diagnosis, is that there is a huge disconnect between the "ideal education" and education in practice. Even at elite institutions known for the quality of their teaching, half or more of the work is done by screening their applicants and admitting only those who are equipped to succeed. In other words, the summa cum laude graduate from a state's flagship school would probably be a summa cum laude graduate anywhere. The same phenomenon is seen in charter schools, who pad their statistics by choosing only excellent students, and then claim that their better outcomes demonstrate the superiority of their management. A useful concrete example is my academic department. We are well known for the quality of our teaching, and even provide graduate students with specific and well tested training in pedagogy, which is extremely rare in a STEM field. (This isn't to say we slack in research; this is a top school in the field. In other words, our graduates go to prestigious postdocs almost without exception, though in recent years its been getting harder and harder.) Nevertheless, we are ultimately limited by what we have to work with. If you have motivated students, you can teach excellent classes covering difficult material. If your students are unmotivated and without preparation, there is simply a limit to what you can teach them. People who work in higher ed in less than prestigious institutions do not have the advantages we do. Their students are often (but not universally) less motivated and prepared than ours, so they have to work much harder to teach the same material. The problem is that everyone is already working as hard as they can, so in the end they are probably doomed to fail. They will retreat onto statements like "teaching how to learn." Yes, in theory, that is what the value of a liberal arts education is - you learn not only the curriculum but also acquire the attributes of an educated mind: how to think and reason; how to acquire more knowledge when needed; how to communicate both verbally and in writing. This is the "ideal education." Nevertheless you will simply never acquire this if you lack the tools necessary to do so - and if you have these tools, you will acquire them regardless of where you go. The answer is that, frankly, college is pretty useless for most students. If you can make education work for you, you are very likely to succeed anyway. Personally, I cherish my education. I benefit tremendously from it, and at this point, my education colors my entire existence. Nevertheless, most of my high school classmates - even those who did relatively well in class - were woefully unprepared to take advantage of a college education. A corollary to this is that, no matter how much you value the academic lifestyle, it is extremely irrational to continue working in it unless you are a "winner."
• wfo 9y ago
  Say it with me friends and colleagues, Union. This is the future for all of us, when programming becomes commoditized just as teaching has. When our salaries are pushed to the bottom. We are not owners, we are not capitalists, we are not bosses, we are people with a skill you can learn on the internet and a corresponding talent for it. Either a) this will happen to us as programmers, b) we have credentialing and gatekeepers to keep supply low c) we have a union to collectively bargain, or d) radical changes in the government save us from this fate. In the U.S. (d) seems impossible. Programmers as a group seem to be virulently opposed to (b). So choose, unions or barbarism.
  • microDude 9y ago
    e) You will no longer be able to call yourself a "full stack" developer that can work in any field. Employers will only look for developers that are good at programming, and a expert in a niche field. For example, bioinformatics.
    • collyw 9y ago
      Your example makes me laugh, having worked with bioinformaticians. A lot of their stuff is just counting stuff from moderately large data sets and making some graphs out of it.
  • comicjk 9y ago
    The word "barbarism" is quite an exaggeration. Teaching salaries are low relative to education level because lots of people are socially pushed toward teaching (obvious example: many people's mentors are teachers). Programming doesn't have this dynamic. I'm not opposed to unionization - I joined the new grad student union when I was getting my PhD. But I think you should focus on programmers' specific problems, like long hours and low vacation time, not on problems from other jobs which have low relevance.
    • wfo 9y ago
      We aren't there yet, things are still much better for us than teachers, yes. But I'm proposing we do something about it now, while we are in demand and have power instead of waiting until it gets that bad. Programming and teaching are similar; they are prestige positions (for now) that mark you as one of the professional class, people who do them are by and large hugely passionate and would be unhappy if forced to do something else (many programmers I know started before school because they loved it, do it in their spare time, etc). Passion in capitalism gets taken advantage of and exploited, since dispassionate economic assessment is how a 'rational' actor works in economic models; passion is a weakness from the perspective of wealth accumulation and economic success. The thing that links the fields in my view is passion.
• petra 9y ago
  One thing i didn't understand from the story: those are smart people, motivated people, with good people's skills. All the things our economy loves. Why don't they say "fuck it" and change profession, to something more decent ? it would be hard, but is it possible ? And i say this without judgement, just out of curiosity.
  • sgt101 9y ago
    Because they have a vocation - to help young people to become educated. This is a socially productive vocation that we should capitalise on as a society, to exploit it is demeaning for all of us and eventually destructive of our social fabric.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • handsomechad 9y ago
    This is honestly the question that pops into my head as well. The sibling comment doesn't give an answer, just restates that the status quo is suboptimal for society. That very well may be the case, but parent is asking why people aren't reacting to these incentives on an individual basis.
  • bachmeier 9y ago
    As an academic (but not in those fields), let me offer the following: Some of them believe that the only way to avoid being a failure is to work at a university. Some of them believe non-academic work is worse than what they are doing already. Some of them only want to live in their current town and this lets them do it. Some of them have difficulty changing fields. Having a graduate degree, especially a PhD, in a humanities field can make it hard to get a job in another field. A few of them are just not suited to doing other work. Most employers simply wouldn't want to hire them.
  • geebee 9y ago
    I think this article is very insightful http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4484... I was once an underemployed English major seriously considering applying for grad programs in literature[1]. Instead, I went back to school to build up the necessary math and CS and ended up getting an MS in engineering. Many years later, I was startled with how accurately this article explained what was going on in my head when I was trying to figure out what to do. This article really does an amazing job explaining why people do go into these fields when the market is practically screaming that they shouldn't. [1] this was in the recession of the early-mid 90s, and I was in SoCal which had been very hard hit by government cutbacks. I noticed that humanities majors who graduated just five years later, at the start of the first dot-com boom, did far better. To expand on this a bit - it really showed me how much the conditions you graduate into make a difference! As a new grad, in a recession, you're competing with people with much more experience for entry level jobs. In a boom, those more experienced people are moving into higher level positions, and are often looking to hire new people themselves. If you get one of these jobs, you can build a critical few years of experience. Eventually, a recession will come along, but you're in a far better position to weather it if you graduated into a better economy and got some more experience under your belt. Had I graduated into a better economy, and found better work as a lit major, who knows? My career path might have been dramatically different. This leads to another thing I've noticed - think of your career path as a vector field. What happens with the first couple of arrow can make a massive difference in where you are a decade or more later. Some degrees and majors are more resilient than others. For instance, I've read that graduates of Harvard are less affected by the economy the graduate into than people from less prestigious universities. This may be because the reputation and network provides you with multiple re-entry paths - in short, you can always find an up arrow in that vector field, even if you have to wait a few years to get it. Other graduates who start on a down arrow may get caught in a downward current. Five years later, when things improve, they're competing with recent grads for entry level jobs, and employers prefer to go straight to the schools than hire someone who seems to have floundered for the last half decade. I think engineering and other in demand majors are also a way to get on to an up arrow on the vector field. Even in a recession, the engineering students still seem to get decent jobs - they may not rocket upward right away, but they get into an updraft to the point where they're positioned to advance once the conditions emerge. They don't get stuck in the underemployment rut that can afflict people with less desirable majors from lower ranked schools. There really is quite a bit of randomness and luck to career paths. You can do great with a lit degree from a relatively unknown college, but some degrees are much more resilient than others.
• dv_dt 9y ago
  With a glut of underpaid adjuncts in a waiting pattern to become professors, and huge tuitions, it makes me wonder how difficult it would be to start a small university.
• shams93 9y ago
  Yeah my first girlfriend was adjunct faculty and was escorting to get her food being a starving student myself I wasn't in a position to help her out. That was 1991 I can't imagine how bad it is today.
• woahhvicky 9y ago
  “I feel committed to being the person who’s there to help millennials, the next generation, go on to become critical thinkers,” Said the person unable to use critical thinking to avoid becoming a prostitute.
  • token_throwaway 9y ago
    LOL. Yeah she's blatantly choosing to do it, her income puts her at twice the poverty line figure for a family of 4. God knows it's tough out there but come on. Get a cheaper flat and take responsibility for your choices, lady...
  • sctb 9y ago
    This kind of predictable snark falls way short of the standards of discourse for this site. Please review the guidelines and stop posting like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • woahhvicky 9y ago
      This wasn't snark. It's pointing out a real problem with the premise of this article. It's creating a narrative of adjunct professor exploitation based on anecdotal cases. For all we know, these anecdotes are outliers and their situation isn't due to their profession or its pay. I could have said all that or I could have been concise. Is being concise snark?
• nickpeterson 9y ago
  Obviously the answer is to tear down colleges and erect large statues of President Trump. Made of copper.
  • sctb 9y ago
    Would you please comment substantively, like the guidelines ask? It helps us have the kind of conversation we're here for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• happy-go-lucky 9y ago
  > an adjunct professor of Romance languages > precarious academic jobs > a teacher of English composition > teaches history > teaching English composition and critical thinking > began teaching English composition > published a poem > with one novel under her belt, is working on a second I see a pattern. I think those jobs are not much in demand.
  • scandox 9y ago
    > Romance > Critical Thinking > English composition > poem > history The good things in life are unpaid
    • lucozade 9y ago
      > The good things in life are unpaid At the risk of being somewhat obtuse: poetry, English composition and history can be exceptionally well paid. Ask Taylor Swift, JK Rowling and Hilary Mantel resp. Now, if you mean poetry, English composition and history that no-one is particularly interested in reading, well. I would have to agree with you.
  • tudorconstantin 9y ago
    Couldn't they try and do some copywriting? Wouldn't they be paid better for that? They definitely have the formal training to do it.
• falcolas 9y ago
  Six courses, $40,000 in pay; about $7,000 per course. If we make a few rough assumptions based on the $1500 rent figure, and 3 credits average, the college is probably charging around $1,000 per credit, with a 30-40 person attendance per class. So for one of those courses, the college is pulling in an estimated $90,000, and paying $7,000. Huh.
  • dvvc 9y ago
    That's way too much for an adjunct. The article refers to 6 courses per semester, so she's probably pulling 12 per year at around $3k per course (assuming she's not teaching in summer). Just so you have an idea, 4 courses per semester amount to what would be a full time job (if done right). In my experience most adjuncts / instructors have to teach up to 6 courses per semester, which results in them either being overworked, or doing a shitty job at teaching. Not that this invalidates your conclusion, I find the difference between what the school charges versus what goes into the teachers' salary mind boggling.
• dxbydt 9y ago
  am not sure if this article and the recent naval tweetstorm are in any way pertinent to stem. i understand the value of phds in romance lit & english & so forth is zero. but in a stem phd, the timelines are 4-5 years, the educational content is substantially rigorous , seriously cannot be acquired by self-study of textbooks or youtube vids, and job prospects outside of academia are 200k+ in the bay area, thanks to the resurgence of computationally hard careers like ml/ds/ai . it is definitely worthwhile to pursue grad school in stem; worst case you can always fall back on react 24 or jquery 48 or whatever shitty version is out 4 years from now.
• aklein 9y ago
  Worth a read: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-larry-summers-blog-secular-stagnation-twitter-421a69ed84c8 https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-larr... In particular: "SUMMERS: Not enough people are innovating enough in higher education. The place to start is, General Electric looks nothing like it looked in 1975. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford look a lot like they looked in 1975. They’re about the same size to within a factor of two, they’re about the same number of buildings, they operate on about the same calendar, they have many of the same people or some number of the same people in significant positions. The main thing to say is that, for something that’s all about ideas and for something that’s all about young people, the pace of innovation in higher education is stunningly slow. We’re still on a system where the break is in the summer. The reason we’re on that system is that when everybody went to pick the plants, that was the natural way to organize school, and it’s still going that way. The potential action in higher education is probably heavily through distance learning and artificial intelligence in learning technologies of various kinds because, if you think about it, the unique capacity that online education has is that, on the one hand, they’re huge economies of scale. Once the lecture’s filmed, 100,000 people can watch it at the same cost as 100 people watching it." Not a favorable trend for the subjects of this article.
• danso 9y ago
  It's fitting that the lengthiest non-anonymous example is the English teacher at San Jose state. Her salary might seem normal in other parts of the country, but it's very skimpy in San Jose/Silicon Valley/Peninsula http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=ellen+Penney+&y= http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=ellen+Pe... For comparison's sake, here are what physical education teachers in Palo Alto Unified make: http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-districts%2Fsanta-clara%2Fpalo-alto-unified&q=physical&y= http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-d... Here's San Jose Unified teachers (they don't seem to have P.E. in the job titles): http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-districts%2Fsanta-clara%2Fsan-jose-unified&q=teacher&y=2016 http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-d... Not singling out P.E. teachers or K-12 in general -- look up any Palo Alto area job type (police, technicians, etc), and they're all in the same range. And living in this area myself, I completely believe that scale of salary and benefits is needed if you want employees who can live within 50 miles of Palo Alto.
  • sureshv 9y ago
    I'm not sure this is sustainable for either PAUSD or SJUSD given the pension obligations.
  • sjg007 9y ago
    Dang, better money than the average software engineer.
• dogruck 9y ago
  Market dynamics at work. Reminds me of Bukowski: Born like this Into this As the chalk faces smile As Mrs. Death laughs As the elevators break As political landscapes dissolve As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
• semi-nontechncl 9y ago
  I was an adjunct for a year at a well-known arts college in the US. Some programs were made up almost completely of adjuncts with only one or two full-time professors. Since this was an arts program those adjuncts were working in the field. While it was good for students to have professors who were working professionals, it does mean that those professors are less invested in the program as a whole and since they aren't full-time/ tenured they don't have a lot of sway to influence the program since they can easily be fired. On the other hand, the program I taught in was made up almost exclusively of full-time professors who were basically tenured. Many of the full-time professors were really great, but a lot of them hadn't created any real professional work in their field in a very long time. The tenured professors had been teaching at the school for decades, some for forty years. I quickly left the school the school when I realized I would have to wait for someone to die in my program before I would find a full-time teaching position. My conclusion after teaching for a year as an adjunct was that: 1) Adjunct teaching is basically a side gig that you do outside of your full-time job 2) All the money the school was bringing in is going to administration or facilities/buildings, which are constantly growing 3) Full-time professors who finally retire will be replaced with adjuncts, which consolidates the administration's power. 4) College feels outdated to me. Teaching a bunch of students to use photoshop in a classroom is really inefficient compared to video tutorials where everyone can learn at their own pace and rewind the video as needed. 5) College is way too expensive, especially for students pursuing the arts who may struggle after they graduate.
• noonespecial 9y ago
  Academia is one place where a UBI would make a huge difference. These are people who obviously do what they do for motivations other than a paycheck. Organizing society so they don't have to live in their cars in church parking lots to do it would be an unalloyed win.
• mrleiter 9y ago
  It is fascinating how no top rated comment tackles the inherent ethical issues of sex work.
• Wintamute 9y ago
  The value of a college education has been vastly inflated. People have associated a college education, often in nebulous useless subjects, with upwards social mobility but the truth is most should never have gone to college - i.e. side step the debt, headed directly for work or vocational training and got a 4 year head start in the job market. It's sad when people wash up like this, and the fault isn't theirs, rather they've just been sold a false promise. Taken together with the free speech and ideological eco-chamber issues we're seeing on campus, along with the crazy town crippling debt, my prediction is we're going to start to see a rapid devaluation in the cultural collateral of a college education. Or at least in the national ambition for a democratised universal college education for all.
• jseliger 9y ago
  Universities treat adjuncts like they do because they can: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjuncts-like-they-do-because-they-can/ https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc... . When adjuncts stop accepting offers, prices will rise. I'm puzzled that more liberal arts profs don't teach high school: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/ https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo.... I teach as an adjunct because I like teaching and have a real job, so it works for me. But I worry about many others, especially the ones who are thinking about going to more grad school because they don't know what else to do.
• tinduck 9y ago
  We should move more research to lower cost cities like Memphis or Detroit that have affordable housing. In addition, we need to prioritize funding to our middle tier Universities. I don't understand how people expect us to subsides wages in high cost cities. It's not the only problem, but we do have a prestige issue.
• iamgopal 9y ago
  Why tons and tons of online course are not making any difference to how University works ?
  • daxorid 9y ago
    Online courses don't offer the all-important experience of getting obliterated at fraternity parties, nor do they deliver the critical piece of paper at the end. So long as diploma issuance is still tightly controlled by the educational cartels, MOOCs will make next to zero difference.
• balls187 9y ago
  Yet another case for universal basic income.
• rayiner 9y ago
  If someone had written an article about struggling actors turning to sex work and sleeping in cars, nobody would blink an eye. Acting pays little for the same reason being an academic pays little. Lots of people want to do it, but there is limited demand, hence only the really exceptional folks make any money doing it. Obviously, people shouldn't need to sleep in cars. But the answer to that is a basic income. It's not treating a specific group of people specially just because they have college degrees and are more relatable to the elite than folks who work at Wal-Mart.
  • slmyers 9y ago
    Basic income without universal housing, healthcare and education is more-or-less a poverty sentence.
  • phkahler 9y ago
    >> Obviously, people shouldn't need to sleep in cars. But the answer to that is a basic income. Here we go again. Please show evidence that it works. Oh right, there isn't any. Please point to a reasonably complete economic model that shows it will work.
    • rayiner 9y ago
      Substitute basic income with whatever form of safety net you prefer. My point is that the government shouldn't be intervening specially on behalf of adjunct professors, because we have an easier time relating to folks with college degrees than to ones working retail or food service.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • wallace_f 9y ago
      It works. Why wouldn't it? In the US, we spend roughly 4-10k* per capita in welfare, housing and transfer payments. That means we already spend enough to instead give 4-10k/person/year in BI. In NY, homeless people cost the city over $40,000 per person! And there isn't even much to show for it! Wars on and Poverty and Drugs have spent billions, also without improving living conditions of the most vulnerable economic group! At what point can we say enough is enough? And here is some proof for you: Experiments in 'just give people money or housing' have proven more successful than traditional social services(1,2)! BI is more fair, more efficient and has an added benefit of removong incentives for crime or other deviant behavior. Besides, it is more morally just. We are all here in this world where most of the wealth was created before we were even born. Everyone is entitled to at least a small portion of it. *Depending on which programs you include in this category, namely SS, medi- caid and care. www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/22/552850245/episode-796-the-basic-income-experiment https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/04/17/the-surprisingly-simple-way-utah-solved-chronic-homelessness-and-saved-millions/?sw_bypass=true&utm_term=.821d65a66fb2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/04...
• BeetleB 9y ago
  This may be unpopular, but: 1. She has more than $200K in student loan debt which is her doing. I've met many who do not want to take responsibility for their student loans - they'll prefer to go to schools whose tuition is over $40K/yr over schools that are under $10K/yr. And then they'll insist on going for several years to a grad school without funding (hence more loans). I always tell people: If you cannot get funding for grad school (or at least after the first year of grad school), then get out or change schools/departments. 2. When I was in grad school, no matter how much people gave advice, most grad students refuse to consider their ability to earn money based on the degree they are pursuing. The few wiser ones in liberal arts would work towards gaining marketing skills (often in software, but not necessarily) and did fine. Same goes even for tech fields - consider if what you're doing a PhD in will get you a job. I do agree there is a problem with exploiting adjuncts, but adjuncts also need to own their station in life. Over 15 years ago, when I was in school, I knew adjuncts who were struggling as much as is shown in the article (having to travel to different towns to teach in multiple schools to eke by), so this has been a known issue.
• ProTurist 9y ago
  Tuition and fees keep going up, but the quality of education is heavily determined by the quality of professor. We aren't getting the best professors, because somehow despite record profits for universities, their pay doesn't seem to go up. An adjunct professor, which I personally know people who have been adjuncts for 10 years, average $42k. That's so ridiculously low as every university that I know of is having huge buildings erected.
• bjd2385 9y ago
  I don't understand why this is such a big story. It's not localized to academics.
  • hi41 9y ago
    It is newsworthy because the educators who give society sacred education are having to prostitute themselves to have a roof over their head.
• drderidder 9y ago
  It's sad that in an academic workplace you'd be better of as a janitor than a prof. The facilities workers where I studied were unionized and seemed to manage alright. The abuse of part-time positions is such a scam.
• emodendroket 9y ago
  This is the predictable result of our turn to seeing the academy as a consumer product and vocational school meant to train white-collar workers.
• amalgan 9y ago
  This is the number one reason for endowment reform. Many universities have the GDP of small countries tied up in endowments, but cry poverty when state and fed budgets are cut. Unlocking endowments will free up money so that universities can be held accountable for tuition and salaries.
• kevmo 9y ago
  > “I live paycheck to paycheck and I’m deeply in debt,” she > said, including from car repairs and a hospitalization for > food poisoning. While there are many iterations, it is always this same story. Medical debt, job loss, and/or divorce precede something like 90% of consumer bankruptcies.
• hi41 9y ago
  This story breaks my heart. How come our society has come to a place where it has placed such a low value on education and the educators?
• ohyes 9y ago
  First off, I think this is a sensationalized article. My friends with liberal arts 'academic' degrees are finding jobs. Not always professor level jobs, some of them are teaching high school, others are adjuncting, one writes contracts for the DoD (her degree was in creative writing). 'College professor' is currently a middle-class job and it has been for a long time (since before I was born at least). What we have in this article are stories from people who are in the middle class and hit a bump in the road, and never recovered economically. This can happen to anyone, including you, the silicon-valley start-up STEM uber-programmer. It is just bad luck and highlights the lack of a societal safety net. In short, this is a shock piece describing something that is very common in the USA. It is shocking simply because our mental image of a 'College professor,' is a well-to-do clean-cut person in a tweed jacket scribbling on a chalk-board. You don't think to yourself 'homeless prostitute,' (the examples were clearly very specifically picked). The contrast is intentional. This isn't to detract from these people's plight. It is certainly a real one (maybe an example of one of the most real things that can happen to a person). The majority of us are a couple of unfortunate life events away from making the decisions that these people had to make. Lose your job and have an expensive illness at the same time, you'll pretty much be there. These people started behind because of massive college debt, for the most part, but it doesn't change that we're all close to this. I'm disheartened that this is being reduced to in economic terms 'a supply-side problem,' under the assumption that the economics of supply and demand actually apply to a person who is (for all purposes) not making a living wage and in debt to their eyeballs. It's bullshit if a person is employed 60+ hours a week and they aren't able to properly feed clothe and house themselves (and their family, for that matter). It doesn't matter what the job is. Honestly, it's bullshit that we have homelessness and hunger at all. At what point do we have a serious conversation in the west about attempting to become a post-scarcity society? I don't think we even know what is involved to make a society like that tractable.
• technofire 9y ago
  While I'm not trying to be gratuitously harsh, I ask what have any of the adjunct lecturers in this article really contributed to the world? Not much in my opinion. You don't need someone with a doctorate to teach a student critical thinking. These people are living in a fantasy land and are mentally ill; who becomes homeless, putting any children they have at financial risk, or lives in a car or a dilapidated mobile home with no shower, and doesn't get the clue that what they're doing is stupid and that they should get a real job and start working up the ladder? Can they not get a real job and teach evening classes as adjuncts like many of their peers do at community colleges across the country? Oh no, they're "dedicated to scholarship" and have "taken a vow of poverty." Give me a break. These people have superman complexes. We should stop glorifying them and glorifying academia. Lectures came about back when most people were illiterate and printed books were scarce and that was the most effective way to get the knowledge out to the students. We have books and a literate populace now, and of course the Internet. The United States is one of the only places that glorify and sentimentalizes higher education so acutely; visiting students from other countries have remarked that universities here are basically vacation resorts for rich people. Modern academia is a joke.
• gozur88 9y ago
  If you can't make enough money to survive doing what you do, you should probably look at doing something else. It's not like someone smart enough to be a college lecturer can't possibly learn a different skill.
• ycmimi 9y ago
  They should go to china to teach English. There is a very high demand of native english-speaking teachers. I bet they will have a much better life than in US.
• rabboRubble 9y ago
  The academic job market is topsy-turvy. Tenured professors should be paid less than adjunct professors. The adjunct professor who takes on future income uncertainty should be paid more to represent that income uncertainty risk. If the job market was functioning correctly and in a perfect world, salaries would be so.
• laughfactory 9y ago
  What intrigued me most about the article was that it played the whole "adjunct professors get paid like shit because university funding has fallen dramatically." The truth is that this is nothing new: adjuncts have always been paid peanuts and treated poorly. What is new is that universities have realized that they can hire a fleet of adjuncts for cheap, and have them do most of the teaching. It's a cost minimization strategy which leaves them more money for sports programs and hiring more bureaucracy (and more expensive star researchers). Modern universities survive under the auspices of existing to teach and nurture young minds, but they're as much of a big business as any. Sadly, most of my great professors in college were either adjuncts or associates. I.e., poorly paid.
• pdimitar 9y ago
  > “Most of my colleagues are unjustifiably ashamed,” she said. “They take this personally, as if they’ve failed, and I’m always telling them, ‘you haven’t failed, the system has failed you.’” While I sympathize with these people and I know in my heart they are treated unjustly, I still cringed at this quote. Was there a US president coming at your graduation and promising you a bright future if you pursued your academical ambitions? Were there crowds of businessmen coming there and assuring you all that you will get funding until the rest of your life? I'd reckon no. Let's put it bluntly: you failed to adapt and now it's finally coming to haunt you, and you most likely ignored many signs along the road. I know it's easy for me to talk being a programmer, and we are gonna be in demand for quite a while still. But I wasn't always well-paid. In fact, most of my career has been spend with very toxic employers, colleagues and freelance customers. At certain point of my life, I realized I had to make tough and big changes -- changes I was not emotionally okay with but I knew I had to do them because otherwise I'd end up on the street. And I did. And it hurt a lot. But I am not threatened by living on the street for a long time now. And years later, I am now proud of myself for having the courage to recognize it was time to move on from a few toxic / non-constructive areas of my older life. The writing has been on the wall for a LONG time that the educational jobs are on the decline. At least for 15 years now. (No I won't cite studies; I am talking about a general feeling related to the tone of many news stories over the years, plus tens of anecdata from people in the area I happen to be well-acquainted with, including my brother.) I will not make this into USA bashing but I can't help but notice that many Americans are finding themselves helpless after believing in "the system" their whole lives. Same goes for people I knew in Germany, UK, France, Netherlands and Sweden. This is much less so in Eastern Europe where I am from (although it still happens to quite a lot of people; percentage-wise though, it feels like they're much smaller group compared to USA). You have to believe more in your own abilities and trust less "the system". The system has been devised to help keep things in a relative order and nothing much else. The system doesn't stay awake at night, worrying if you will end up homeless. That's one of the harsh truths in life that many people, and a lot of them much older than me, refuse to accept and live their lives in accordance with.
  • SilasX 9y ago
    I agree with your general point, but: >Was there a US president coming at your graduation and promising you a bright future if you pursued your academical ambitions? Yes, it's pretty typical for a prestigious public official to speak at graduations and say basically that.
• kutkloon7 9y ago
  The things that are priorities in the USA have always puzzled me. Students pay an absolutely insane amount of money for an education that is very mediocre. It is clear that the American education is failing. About half of the population voted for a man who does not believe in science. But somehow, the main priorities for universities seems to be enforcing diversity and gender-neutral pronouns? I am not saying that thinking about this is wrong, there is just a deep disconnect with the realities that people live in, and many people seem to have a problem viewing things from another perspective.
• kazinator 9y ago
  In the 2011 Japanese film Koi no Tsumi, actress Makoto Togashi plays a university professor who works as a prostitute. (Not even remotely out of poverty though, but rather depravity or something like that.)