11 ms·

The Death of an Adjunct

79 points by akeck 8y ago

jseliger 8y 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.... Academia is not a good industry to be in and people should stop trying to go. This is well known and has been for a long time: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university-2 https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-l....
- chubot 8y ago
  Yup... there's a very good analogy to being a programmer in the games industry vs. the rest of the software industry. In short, the games industry treats people like crap because there's a large supply of talented programmers, artists, and testers who want to work on games. In other words, because they can. Maybe this has changed in 15 years, but my first job was at EA, and I was part of the infamous (at the time) "EA Spouse" class action lawsuit. It was pretty bad back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_blog_post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_b... Luckily I didn't care as much about games as some of my coworkers, so I moved onto friendlier parts of the industry. More people should vote with their feet. (And I think that has happened, especially with the ability to self-publish, which really did not exist 15 years ago.) I realize that some people may have been "swindled" by romantic ideas about academia from decades ago, and it's hard to get off that path. But yes I would agree this issue is well known by now, and most people should stop. It's good that more people are writing about it though, just like it was good that EA Spouse wrote about the games industry.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Self publishing is certainly a way out, working in other fields another No dream, especially those where you're working mostly for other people, is worth your health or sanity. I might have worked in more boring areas, and there might have been some crunch time, but nothing like I couldn't leave under threat of firing or taking me to the limit.
- btrettel 8y ago
  Nice posts. I've nearly completed a PhD in engineering. A while back I decided that academia is likely a dead end unless you win the lottery. If the adjunct situation won't improve until people stop taking those jobs, I'll do my part. I'd like to periodically teach a class or two, but I would never adjunct as my sole source of income.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Yeah. There are good jobs in academia. Get tenure at an elite university and it's a pretty good life. (Although not as rosy as it probably seems from the outside with politics, pursuing grants, etc.) But that's a pretty tiny proportion of the positions PhDs hope to fill.
    - jostmey 8y ago
      People don't understand how hard it is to get tenure. You have to win grants from the NIH to get tenure. Why? Because for every grant the NIH gives to scientist, the Universities tack on indirect costs (whatever that means) allowing them collect upwards of 50% of the grant for the University. Research grants are a cast cow, and it's really f* up
      - colechristensen 8y ago
        They take 50% and spend it on flashy buildings and ballooning administrative salaries.
        apathy 8y ago
        It’s adorable that people think a research university would settle for just 50% indirects. Try 90% and almost all of it goes to the football coach or the dean’s legal fees.
        newen 8y ago
        What university takes 90% of grant money for overhead? 30-50% for overhead is what I familiar with.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Pretty sad too because the adjunct teachers were actually the best teachers I ever had in college! They were good because they had real world experience and were there because they actually wanted to teach. I would even say to completely avoid any tenured teachers unless they have a really good rating on rate my professor.
thatoneuser 8y ago
It's pretty simple - the product universities sell ("education") is highly inflated. Thus universities can have someone hardly trained in their field (a current grad student) to instruct it. (Of course if you're being taught by what is an older classmate then how much value are the classes really?) I feel so much for my colleagues who are in this path.
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
I just don't get it. Where does the money go? Students pay ridiculous amounts for tuition, while schools try to get away with being as cheap as possible by hiring adjuncts, using ridiculously cheap food vendors, giving less and less aid, etc. For regular corporations I'd cite shareholders and profitability, but nominally, schools don't have that. Some people cite administration, but I'm not entirely sure of that either. Even the president gets paid maybe 4 million tops, which is 100 students tuition. And schools did just fine 50 years ago with less than a quarter of the tuition. My current theory is that administrators have figured out a way to get money out of the school in some form and are squeezing it like cash cows. Or they're just horribly mismanaging schools.
- pyrale 8y ago
  In my experience, people in academia were motivated by power. Money can be used for prestige things (such as a football team), or for vanity spending, etc. Sometimes, equipment is bought with no real use cases, sometimes purchases are duplicated because the people using it don't get along well, etc.
  - petronic 8y ago
    Most large (and thus expensive) athletic programs are more than self-funding due to ticket sales and alumni donors. The real sucking force is all of the administrative positions that now outnumber educators.
    - Footkerchief 8y ago
      Nope, the vast majority of college athletics programs are unprofitable, even large ones: https://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/dec/22/jim-moran/moran-says-only-20-colleges-make-profit-sports/ https://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/dec/22/j... > There are 346 Division I schools. Of them, 123 are classified as members of the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of sports competition. These are colleges and universities that are eligible to compete in bowl games and have average attendance of at least 15,000 at their home games. [...] "A total of 20 athletics programs in the FBS reported positive net revenues for the 2013 fiscal year."
Footkerchief 8y ago
> She had a number of ailments that bothered her—her asthma, her heart—and the rigors of being an adjunct added to them. > Two deaths occurred back to back. First, Cooper, her companion. Then, a few months later, her mother, Grace. > If Thea had a tenure-track job and access to proper health insurance to be appropriately diagnosed, she might still be alive, they said. The factors in her death -- work stress, health issues, life tragedies, and a lack of health insurance -- don't seem more strongly linked to the job of adjunct professor than to any other low-status job.
- romwell 8y ago
  The times we live in, when university professor is considered a low-status job.
  - pwinnski 8y ago
    I have a friend who was an adjunct professor for a number of years, and I would describe him as barely above homeless most of the time. He never knew whether he would have a job in the fall, and the pay was barely above minimum wage. He was planning to give up and move back to his hometown before this year when he was hired as a full-time professor. I learned a lot about modern higher education from him, and I would absolutely describe adjunct professor as a low-status job.
    - romwell 8y ago
      I don't disagree; that's why I decided not to try the academic job market after getting a degree. But it's a remarkably sorrowful state of affairs.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Adjuncts aren’t university professors. They’re part time teaching staff. Anyone who cobbles together enough part time hours to theoretically be working full time is manfully struggling against admitting that they played the academic tournament and they lost. The system spat them out. Adjuncts bear about the same relation to professors as a doctoral student teaching their own lecture course. No one is going to call them professors.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
thorwasdfasdf 8y ago
At least she had the opportunity. Some people through academia their entire lives without ever getting tenure: "The gig was ideal: It was tenure-track, it was in her field" She actually had a tenure track position (that's pretty rare and not something to be thrown away). But she felt insulted because a few people had mistaken her for the janitor (and a few parents called the school to complain about her), so she quit.
- idiot900 8y ago
  Agreed. Her story is tragic but it's hard to feel sorry for someone who threw away a tenure track position, didn't want to leave NYC, didn't want to leave academia for the sake of her health. All of her self-imposed requirements were ridiculous, and lack of insight is no excuse. Adjunct professorships are a real problem but this article is below the Atlantic's usual standard.
  - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
    Actually getting tenure can be pretty tough and very political. Presumably she estimated that her political circumstances were bad and it that it would be better to start fresh than try turning things around, which is a rational decision that many assistant professors should make but do not.
    - idiot900 8y ago
      The article certainly doesn't make it look that way. She joined in 2004 and left in 2006. Way too short even for a five year tenure clock, especially when she very much needed the health insurance.
      - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
        It's pretty easy to figure out who's on your tenure committee, who the competition is, and which bridges have been burned
rayiner 8y ago
> If Thea had a tenure-track job and access to proper health insurance to be appropriately diagnosed, she might still be alive, they said. This is a bizarre take-away from this story. What about all the people who weren't fortunate enough to attend Columbia University and live a life of learning? Shouldn't they be able to get a check-up that would have caught fluid build-up in their lungs? This story could've been written about an Uber or Lyft driver, and the take-away would have been the same: America needs a better health-insurance story for people who aren't poor, but who don't have consistent full-time work. The adjunct angle just adds an ugly layer of classism to that point. ("Oh, this person had a degree from Columbia, she shouldn't have faced the same struggles as an Uber driver.") Everyone should be able to get a regular checkup, regardless of their job. Beyond that, if the market values historians similarly to Uber drivers, well, so be it.
- woodandsteel 8y ago
  The article is not arguing against universal health care, it is arguing against the terrible state of employment for university teachers. You know, it is possible for more than one thing to be wrong in society at once.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    The implicit premise of the article is that university professors shouldn’t be brushing up against the floor of society. That’s odious. The societal baseline must be adequate, and the tragedy here is that it’s not. But nobody is intrinsically entitled to a better life than the baseline just because of their education.
    - watwut 8y ago
      Effectively you: "do not talk about this instance of someone having it bad as long as other people have it bad too".
    - Bamafan 8y ago
      My takeaway is that most people assume a university professor never "brushes up against the floor of society" (as you put it). This article is good for enlightening people that this is far from the case.
chrisseaton 8y ago
I don't understand how someone can get a professorship but not be tenured. Why would an institution give a chair but not be prepared to give tenure? How would you get close to the point of being considered for a chair and not pass through the point of being tenured?
- loungelover 8y ago
  In the USA professor is just what they call a lecturer not the same high status as in the uk
- amyjess 8y ago
  A few things: * Colloquially, we use the term "professor" to refer to anyone who teaches at a university, but it's probably not her actual job title. For example, at my alma mater, non-tenure-track instructors typically have the title "Senior Lecturer", but everyone calls them professors. * There is a difference between "tenure" and "tenure-track". It's possible to not have tenure but still be in line to receive it upon a future promotion. If your position isn't tenure-track, though, then you will never get tenure unless you leave your job and find a tenure-track position elsewhere. As there are few tenure-track positions open, this is harder than it looks. * For actual professors (i.e. tenure-track jobs with "Professor" in the job title), the entry level position doesn't carry tenure, and it comes with a promotion. They start out as an Assistant Professor, get promoted to Associate Professor, and eventually to full Professor. Tenure is typically granted with the promotion to Associate Professor.
seibelj 8y ago
Many years ago my neighbor was a woman in debt up to her eyeballs with a sociology degree, who dreamed of working in the nonprofit sector. She got a series of (unpaid) internships with nonprofits around Boston but could never land a permanent position. She wound up taking a job at a local sandwich shop. Domino's Pizza managers make over $40,000 and don't require a college degree.[0] They also have benefits. In 2007 when I worked at Dominos the manager was salaried and worked about 50 hours a week, but he was an ex-convict and really enjoyed his job. He was a super nice guy who made us excited to work there. There is no need to pay $200,000 for a worthless degree to make minimum wages as you are overworked and stressing yourself to death. If that was me, I'd go back to Dominos, it was a pretty fun place to work. [0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Domino-s-General-Manager-Hourly-Pay-E2770_D_KO9,24.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Domino-s-General-Manage...
- impendia 8y ago
  > There is no need to pay $200,000 for a worthless degree In general, and certainly in my field (mathematics), Ph.D. students don't pay tuition, and they get a modest stipend (around 20K) in exchange for being teaching assistants.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mac01021 8y ago
    I think the discussion here is mainly of undergraduate degrees.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Ph.D. students outside top tier programmes in the humanities and social sciences often get admitted without funding and enrol as students. They might get a teaching assistantship or they might go into enormous debt. Then if they graduate they’re competing for jobs against people from graduate programmes in their field that are well known and respected. Most of those people don’t get tenure track jobs. The ones from no name programmes are just screwed. Fredrik deBoer got a Ph.D. in English (Rhetoric) from Purdue, applied to more than 300 tenure track jobs and gave up, eventually becoming an administrator at NYU. Unfortunately he’s deleted the essay along with most of his blog but he said that the tenure track job hunt was the worst thing that ever happened to him and he’s an orphan. That’s someone with statistical and programming skills graduating from one of the top programmes in Rhetoric.
black_13 8y ago
Make it a right and make it universal stop splitting hairs on careers.
black_13 8y ago
Make it a right and make it universal stop Splitting hais on nature of career.
dang 8y ago
A similar story from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429457
TheOperator 8y ago
This happens due to administrators trying to get around racial quotas.
distant_hat 8y ago
I did the whole PhD gig, few years as a post-doc and then obtained a tenured position only to quit it and go to industry. While I don't regret all of it, I wish I had quit for industry sooner. Industry is far, far nicer than academia. The amount of time one puts in for massive amounts of bullshit meetings and form filling and constant justification of how what you are doing is beneficial for society is insane. What I realized was that, in many ways, academia is not that different from the glamour world. Young, naive people see superstars at the top, receiving adulation and sex, and see no reason why they can't be one of them. The superstars are relatively accessible and you meet them and they tell you all you need is talent, hard work, and all of this could be yours too. Grad school, at least in fields like Physics, Math, etc is cheap as long as you don't have family or other dependents. It is an artificial environment with its own rules, and you get sucked in hard. It actively encourages you to not care for yourself or anyone else around you and just focus on research (read, what gets your advisor publications and awards). Over the span of my PhD I saw two suicides, almost every person who was married divorced, and practically everyone was on anti-depressants. This doesn't end after getting your PhD. Since academic jobs could be anywhere and because the typical post doc grants come for 2-4 years, you can't really settle down and start a family. There is crippling uncertainty about everything. While your peers at this time have had kids, you are still wondering _whether_ your academic career will happen. The senior folks who got their PhDs in the golden period in 70s and 80s are at best oblivious to how things are now, or actively feed you lies because you continuing to work in this system for as long as possible is in their best interests. When I walked away from the tenured position after going through all that, everyone was like who does that. But, personally, it was a huge relief to me. My first salary in the corporate world was 4x what I was offered in academia (am a physicist, transitioned to AI/ML). Ironically, I have more time to read research papers and actually think about research now.
purplezooey 8y ago
Decades of state tax cuts. Prop 13 and similar in other states. Higher ed took most of the damage and just raised tuition to compensate.

79 points by akeck 8y 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.... Academia is not a good industry to be in and people should stop trying to go. This is well known and has been for a long time: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university-2 https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-l....

chubot 8y ago
Yup... there's a very good analogy to being a programmer in the games industry vs. the rest of the software industry. In short, the games industry treats people like crap because there's a large supply of talented programmers, artists, and testers who want to work on games. In other words, because they can. Maybe this has changed in 15 years, but my first job was at EA, and I was part of the infamous (at the time) "EA Spouse" class action lawsuit. It was pretty bad back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_blog_post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_b... Luckily I didn't care as much about games as some of my coworkers, so I moved onto friendlier parts of the industry. More people should vote with their feet. (And I think that has happened, especially with the ability to self-publish, which really did not exist 15 years ago.) I realize that some people may have been "swindled" by romantic ideas about academia from decades ago, and it's hard to get off that path. But yes I would agree this issue is well known by now, and most people should stop. It's good that more people are writing about it though, just like it was good that EA Spouse wrote about the games industry.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Self publishing is certainly a way out, working in other fields another No dream, especially those where you're working mostly for other people, is worth your health or sanity. I might have worked in more boring areas, and there might have been some crunch time, but nothing like I couldn't leave under threat of firing or taking me to the limit.
btrettel 8y ago
Nice posts. I've nearly completed a PhD in engineering. A while back I decided that academia is likely a dead end unless you win the lottery. If the adjunct situation won't improve until people stop taking those jobs, I'll do my part. I'd like to periodically teach a class or two, but I would never adjunct as my sole source of income.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Yeah. There are good jobs in academia. Get tenure at an elite university and it's a pretty good life. (Although not as rosy as it probably seems from the outside with politics, pursuing grants, etc.) But that's a pretty tiny proportion of the positions PhDs hope to fill.
  - jostmey 8y ago
    People don't understand how hard it is to get tenure. You have to win grants from the NIH to get tenure. Why? Because for every grant the NIH gives to scientist, the Universities tack on indirect costs (whatever that means) allowing them collect upwards of 50% of the grant for the University. Research grants are a cast cow, and it's really f* up
    - colechristensen 8y ago
      They take 50% and spend it on flashy buildings and ballooning administrative salaries.
      - apathy 8y ago
        It’s adorable that people think a research university would settle for just 50% indirects. Try 90% and almost all of it goes to the football coach or the dean’s legal fees.
        newen 8y ago
        What university takes 90% of grant money for overhead? 30-50% for overhead is what I familiar with.
anonymous5133 8y ago
Pretty sad too because the adjunct teachers were actually the best teachers I ever had in college! They were good because they had real world experience and were there because they actually wanted to teach. I would even say to completely avoid any tenured teachers unless they have a really good rating on rate my professor.

thatoneuser 8y ago

It's pretty simple - the product universities sell ("education") is highly inflated. Thus universities can have someone hardly trained in their field (a current grad student) to instruct it. (Of course if you're being taught by what is an older classmate then how much value are the classes really?) I feel so much for my colleagues who are in this path.

_hardwaregeek 8y ago

I just don't get it. Where does the money go? Students pay ridiculous amounts for tuition, while schools try to get away with being as cheap as possible by hiring adjuncts, using ridiculously cheap food vendors, giving less and less aid, etc. For regular corporations I'd cite shareholders and profitability, but nominally, schools don't have that. Some people cite administration, but I'm not entirely sure of that either. Even the president gets paid maybe 4 million tops, which is 100 students tuition. And schools did just fine 50 years ago with less than a quarter of the tuition. My current theory is that administrators have figured out a way to get money out of the school in some form and are squeezing it like cash cows. Or they're just horribly mismanaging schools.

pyrale 8y ago
In my experience, people in academia were motivated by power. Money can be used for prestige things (such as a football team), or for vanity spending, etc. Sometimes, equipment is bought with no real use cases, sometimes purchases are duplicated because the people using it don't get along well, etc.
- petronic 8y ago
  Most large (and thus expensive) athletic programs are more than self-funding due to ticket sales and alumni donors. The real sucking force is all of the administrative positions that now outnumber educators.
  - Footkerchief 8y ago
    Nope, the vast majority of college athletics programs are unprofitable, even large ones: https://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/dec/22/jim-moran/moran-says-only-20-colleges-make-profit-sports/ https://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/dec/22/j... > There are 346 Division I schools. Of them, 123 are classified as members of the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of sports competition. These are colleges and universities that are eligible to compete in bowl games and have average attendance of at least 15,000 at their home games. [...] "A total of 20 athletics programs in the FBS reported positive net revenues for the 2013 fiscal year."

Footkerchief 8y ago

> She had a number of ailments that bothered her—her asthma, her heart—and the rigors of being an adjunct added to them. > Two deaths occurred back to back. First, Cooper, her companion. Then, a few months later, her mother, Grace. > If Thea had a tenure-track job and access to proper health insurance to be appropriately diagnosed, she might still be alive, they said. The factors in her death -- work stress, health issues, life tragedies, and a lack of health insurance -- don't seem more strongly linked to the job of adjunct professor than to any other low-status job.

romwell 8y ago
The times we live in, when university professor is considered a low-status job.
- pwinnski 8y ago
  I have a friend who was an adjunct professor for a number of years, and I would describe him as barely above homeless most of the time. He never knew whether he would have a job in the fall, and the pay was barely above minimum wage. He was planning to give up and move back to his hometown before this year when he was hired as a full-time professor. I learned a lot about modern higher education from him, and I would absolutely describe adjunct professor as a low-status job.
  - romwell 8y ago
    I don't disagree; that's why I decided not to try the academic job market after getting a degree. But it's a remarkably sorrowful state of affairs.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Adjuncts aren’t university professors. They’re part time teaching staff. Anyone who cobbles together enough part time hours to theoretically be working full time is manfully struggling against admitting that they played the academic tournament and they lost. The system spat them out. Adjuncts bear about the same relation to professors as a doctoral student teaching their own lecture course. No one is going to call them professors.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

thorwasdfasdf 8y ago

At least she had the opportunity. Some people through academia their entire lives without ever getting tenure: "The gig was ideal: It was tenure-track, it was in her field" She actually had a tenure track position (that's pretty rare and not something to be thrown away). But she felt insulted because a few people had mistaken her for the janitor (and a few parents called the school to complain about her), so she quit.

idiot900 8y ago
Agreed. Her story is tragic but it's hard to feel sorry for someone who threw away a tenure track position, didn't want to leave NYC, didn't want to leave academia for the sake of her health. All of her self-imposed requirements were ridiculous, and lack of insight is no excuse. Adjunct professorships are a real problem but this article is below the Atlantic's usual standard.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  Actually getting tenure can be pretty tough and very political. Presumably she estimated that her political circumstances were bad and it that it would be better to start fresh than try turning things around, which is a rational decision that many assistant professors should make but do not.
  - idiot900 8y ago
    The article certainly doesn't make it look that way. She joined in 2004 and left in 2006. Way too short even for a five year tenure clock, especially when she very much needed the health insurance.
    - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
      It's pretty easy to figure out who's on your tenure committee, who the competition is, and which bridges have been burned

rayiner 8y ago

> If Thea had a tenure-track job and access to proper health insurance to be appropriately diagnosed, she might still be alive, they said. This is a bizarre take-away from this story. What about all the people who weren't fortunate enough to attend Columbia University and live a life of learning? Shouldn't they be able to get a check-up that would have caught fluid build-up in their lungs? This story could've been written about an Uber or Lyft driver, and the take-away would have been the same: America needs a better health-insurance story for people who aren't poor, but who don't have consistent full-time work. The adjunct angle just adds an ugly layer of classism to that point. ("Oh, this person had a degree from Columbia, she shouldn't have faced the same struggles as an Uber driver.") Everyone should be able to get a regular checkup, regardless of their job. Beyond that, if the market values historians similarly to Uber drivers, well, so be it.

woodandsteel 8y ago
The article is not arguing against universal health care, it is arguing against the terrible state of employment for university teachers. You know, it is possible for more than one thing to be wrong in society at once.
- rayiner 8y ago
  The implicit premise of the article is that university professors shouldn’t be brushing up against the floor of society. That’s odious. The societal baseline must be adequate, and the tragedy here is that it’s not. But nobody is intrinsically entitled to a better life than the baseline just because of their education.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Effectively you: "do not talk about this instance of someone having it bad as long as other people have it bad too".
  - Bamafan 8y ago
    My takeaway is that most people assume a university professor never "brushes up against the floor of society" (as you put it). This article is good for enlightening people that this is far from the case.

chrisseaton 8y ago

I don't understand how someone can get a professorship but not be tenured. Why would an institution give a chair but not be prepared to give tenure? How would you get close to the point of being considered for a chair and not pass through the point of being tenured?

loungelover 8y ago
In the USA professor is just what they call a lecturer not the same high status as in the uk
amyjess 8y ago
A few things: * Colloquially, we use the term "professor" to refer to anyone who teaches at a university, but it's probably not her actual job title. For example, at my alma mater, non-tenure-track instructors typically have the title "Senior Lecturer", but everyone calls them professors. * There is a difference between "tenure" and "tenure-track". It's possible to not have tenure but still be in line to receive it upon a future promotion. If your position isn't tenure-track, though, then you will never get tenure unless you leave your job and find a tenure-track position elsewhere. As there are few tenure-track positions open, this is harder than it looks. * For actual professors (i.e. tenure-track jobs with "Professor" in the job title), the entry level position doesn't carry tenure, and it comes with a promotion. They start out as an Assistant Professor, get promoted to Associate Professor, and eventually to full Professor. Tenure is typically granted with the promotion to Associate Professor.

seibelj 8y ago

Many years ago my neighbor was a woman in debt up to her eyeballs with a sociology degree, who dreamed of working in the nonprofit sector. She got a series of (unpaid) internships with nonprofits around Boston but could never land a permanent position. She wound up taking a job at a local sandwich shop. Domino's Pizza managers make over $40,000 and don't require a college degree.[0] They also have benefits. In 2007 when I worked at Dominos the manager was salaried and worked about 50 hours a week, but he was an ex-convict and really enjoyed his job. He was a super nice guy who made us excited to work there. There is no need to pay $200,000 for a worthless degree to make minimum wages as you are overworked and stressing yourself to death. If that was me, I'd go back to Dominos, it was a pretty fun place to work. [0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Domino-s-General-Manager-Hourly-Pay-E2770_D_KO9,24.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Domino-s-General-Manage...

impendia 8y ago
> There is no need to pay $200,000 for a worthless degree In general, and certainly in my field (mathematics), Ph.D. students don't pay tuition, and they get a modest stipend (around 20K) in exchange for being teaching assistants.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mac01021 8y ago
  I think the discussion here is mainly of undergraduate degrees.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Ph.D. students outside top tier programmes in the humanities and social sciences often get admitted without funding and enrol as students. They might get a teaching assistantship or they might go into enormous debt. Then if they graduate they’re competing for jobs against people from graduate programmes in their field that are well known and respected. Most of those people don’t get tenure track jobs. The ones from no name programmes are just screwed. Fredrik deBoer got a Ph.D. in English (Rhetoric) from Purdue, applied to more than 300 tenure track jobs and gave up, eventually becoming an administrator at NYU. Unfortunately he’s deleted the essay along with most of his blog but he said that the tenure track job hunt was the worst thing that ever happened to him and he’s an orphan. That’s someone with statistical and programming skills graduating from one of the top programmes in Rhetoric.

black_13 8y ago

Make it a right and make it universal stop splitting hairs on careers.

black_13 8y ago

Make it a right and make it universal stop Splitting hais on nature of career.

dang 8y ago

A similar story from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429457

TheOperator 8y ago

This happens due to administrators trying to get around racial quotas.

distant_hat 8y ago

I did the whole PhD gig, few years as a post-doc and then obtained a tenured position only to quit it and go to industry. While I don't regret all of it, I wish I had quit for industry sooner. Industry is far, far nicer than academia. The amount of time one puts in for massive amounts of bullshit meetings and form filling and constant justification of how what you are doing is beneficial for society is insane. What I realized was that, in many ways, academia is not that different from the glamour world. Young, naive people see superstars at the top, receiving adulation and sex, and see no reason why they can't be one of them. The superstars are relatively accessible and you meet them and they tell you all you need is talent, hard work, and all of this could be yours too. Grad school, at least in fields like Physics, Math, etc is cheap as long as you don't have family or other dependents. It is an artificial environment with its own rules, and you get sucked in hard. It actively encourages you to not care for yourself or anyone else around you and just focus on research (read, what gets your advisor publications and awards). Over the span of my PhD I saw two suicides, almost every person who was married divorced, and practically everyone was on anti-depressants. This doesn't end after getting your PhD. Since academic jobs could be anywhere and because the typical post doc grants come for 2-4 years, you can't really settle down and start a family. There is crippling uncertainty about everything. While your peers at this time have had kids, you are still wondering _whether_ your academic career will happen. The senior folks who got their PhDs in the golden period in 70s and 80s are at best oblivious to how things are now, or actively feed you lies because you continuing to work in this system for as long as possible is in their best interests. When I walked away from the tenured position after going through all that, everyone was like who does that. But, personally, it was a huge relief to me. My first salary in the corporate world was 4x what I was offered in academia (am a physicist, transitioned to AI/ML). Ironically, I have more time to read research papers and actually think about research now.

purplezooey 8y ago

Decades of state tax cuts. Prop 13 and similar in other states. Higher ed took most of the damage and just raised tuition to compensate.