8 ms·

I have worked at three universities. This is pretty insanely accurate. You left out one item though. The main role US institutions are trying to fill right now

• kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  There are schools that don't allow grad students to teach.
  • anonuser123456 5y ago
    That’s a shame, because sometimes graduate students are better teachers than research faculty.
    • Retric 5y ago
      You can also go to a school where professors are employed for their ability to teach. Choosing to go to a research institution seems like such an obviously poor choice it’s strange people get suckered into it. But it’s clear education is a low priority for both students and collages.
      • bachmeier 5y ago
        Not really. Small liberal arts colleges offer the chance to be friends with your professors and small classes. Research universities can offer classes that just aren't going to happen at a SLAC. For example, majors in our department have the option to take graduate courses before they graduate.
        • Retric 5y ago
          Many small to midsized universities with masters programs aren’t research institutions. Higher education is very competitive with a wide range of business models. One of them is to have tight collaboration with industry to have undergrad and masters programs around Mining, Manufacturing, Medicine, etc focused on employability. Some are focused on night classes for government employees who get an automatic pay raise with a higher degree irrespective of what it’s in. Others are focused on continuing education requirements. The high prestige research institutions can be a good fit, but aren’t the only option outside of small liberal arts schools.
      • ModernMech 5y ago
        > Choosing to go to a research institution seems like such an obviously poor choice it’s strange people get suckered into it. The best educations happen in research labs. Undergraduates should get a good foundation years 1 and 2, and then find their way as a junior research assistant years 3 and 4 if they want to make the best of their University years. These days you can follow along with any course you want on YouTube. At University you are paying to get access to top researchers and the work they do.
        • nostrebored 5y ago
          Strongly disagree with this for CS. At top universities, you’re paying for access to similarly interested/capable students and top internship programs. Having done undergrad research, it was both underwhelming and worse experience than my friends who did internships at FAANG.
          • leetcrew 5y ago
            I think GPs perspective is not wrong, but assumes (or maybe hopes) that students are at least considering graduate+ level education. like you suggest, I think this is mostly not true of undergrad cs students. if you have no intention of going to grad school, industry internships are a much better use of time outside of class. as a bonus, the internship is a lot more likely to pay enough that you can actually pay bills while in school.
            • ModernMech 5y ago
              > (or maybe hopes) that students are at least considering graduate+ level education. I'm not necessarily assuming that. I think there seems to be an assumption here that the choice is research or internship, but not both. That is not the case. Students do research with me during a typical semester, and when they are done the school year, they often go and get industry internships over the summer at top companies around the world. We train them to pass the Google-style whiteboard coding interviews; our students are very prepared for those. I don't know of any students who do internships during the school year. Most of my students who do research with me do not go on to do graduate studies.
    • popcube 5y ago
      better on teach content of text book. But if someone want to learn how to research, they should learned it from who actually research each day
  • jhbadger 5y ago
    Primarily at what is known as PUIs (primarily undergraduate institutions), colleges and universities that either don't have grad students or have such a tiny graduate program that relying on them for teaching roles is unfeasible. In theory this is better for the students because the professors just care about teaching, but the down side is such institutions do little to no research and so the professors may be decades out of touch with current developments in their fields.
    • throwoutway 5y ago
      Not doing research doesn’t mean they are decades out of touch. What gives you that conclusion?
      • jhbadger 5y ago
        If you are doing research you have to be up to date or you don't get things published. I'm sure there are some professors who don't do research who make it a point of personal pride or something to keep themselves updated, but there's zero pressure to do so.
        • snowwrestler 5y ago
          No, there is tremendous pressure to be up to date with your teaching because if you’re not, then your students don’t get accepted to highly ranked graduate programs, and that is a significant factor in undergrad college rankings. > If you are doing research you have to be up to date or you don't get things published. Only within the boundaries of your particular field of study, which in most cases is far narrower than the scope of undergrad classes.
          • DiggyJohnson 5y ago
            I personally think the truth is somewhere in the middle, but do you see how this explanation is based on a very loose relationship between action and evaluation?
      • 5y ago
• mattkrause 5y ago
  The grants are even crazier than that. Most of the actual work is done by trainees who are a) learning how to do <cutting-edge thing> for the first time and b) may never actually do it again because they're going to move onto something else. The profs are, at best, managing them and even that's often a bit iffy. Everybody's obviously got to learn somewhere, but universities and research funders are oddly weird about experience and expertise.
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    I remember (this would have been in the 90s) my father getting crap from his peers because he listed his grad students before himself on research papers. In his words, "Why would I not? They did most of the work."
    • gwd 5y ago
      That must depend on the field. In my field (operating systems), the primary professor was always listed last; so you knew the first author was the grad student who did the most work, and the last author was the prof who oversaw the whole thing.
      • Fomite 5y ago
        This. It depends very much on field. Pretty much every paper I didn't solo write in the past three or four years has had my grad students first (Epidemiology).
  • beambot 5y ago
    The professor job is an absurd ask: - Enterprise sales rep with a $500k-$1M annual quota (aka grants). - R&D manager of a team comprised almost entirely of junior employees - Lecturer and administration for teaching. - Administrator & volunteer within the department, chair roles for key academic conferences, and editor on major journals -- all to check the "service" box for tenure. - Because they aren't a proper CEO, they don't even have the ability to push back on obscene G&A costs (ie 50%+ of grant contracts going to university overhead!). It's a labor of love (esp in STEM!), and I feel bad that many are caught in this morass.
• bachmeier 5y ago
  Important to note that you have a STEM perspective. Nothing's changed in that respect, since that's always been the case in grant fields. However...that's not at all a good representation of the rest of the university. Maybe the very best research universities don't care about teaching. There aren't many though if you're not in a grant field. > That thing the actual customers are paying us for If you're in a grant field, the grant agency is the customer, not the students. Teaching is something you do on the side. And not very much compared to non-grant fields.
  • Fomite 5y ago
    At my institution, arguably my customers are the People of $State, followed by my grant funders. Indeed, "The student is the customer" is the source of a lot of really pretty flawed reasoning about how universities can and should work, including things like "Am I obligated to pass you because you really, really want to go to med school?"
• ModernMech 5y ago
  > Teaching? Never heard of it. This view is starting to become outdated. Plenty of schools now have a role known as "Teaching Professor" that focuses on teaching, with no research expectation. They have all the same qualifications as any faculty hired for the role, like a Ph.D. in the field. At UPenn at least they can even get tenure.
  • wyclif 5y ago
    How does that work now at UPenn?
    • ModernMech 5y ago
      So this is based on what a colleague told me who left my institution for UPenn. The position is "Teaching Professor" or equivalent where the idea is you spend most of your time teaching, with zero expectation of research, although you might want to engage in research about teaching. That kind of introspection comes naturally. Usually this role is without tenure, but universities are trying to make this position more attractive and so some, like UPenn, have attached the potential promise of tenure to the role (although I'm not familiar with the specifics of the promotion process there).
      • wyclif 5y ago
        Thanks, this is a helpful explanation since I'm considering a UPenn degree programme at the moment.
  • Fomite 5y ago
    Indeed I have a position without a teaching obligation (though I do teach a bit because I want to), and it's vanishingly rare to find one of those in my field outside of a medical school.
    • ModernMech 5y ago
      They've just added this position to our school called "Research Faculty". They are soft money supported and have no teaching load. Often they will be attached to some research institute.
• hinkley 5y ago
  I recall the foundation I worked for was getting charged rent by the University like they were doing us a favor instead of giving us one of the worst buildings on that side of campus - after they knocked down the actual worst buildings to build a library. Then took a cut of all grants and a very large chunk of patent and IP royalties. I don't think the fact that they were making money on either was what surprised me or anyone else, but that they were making money on all of them at the same time. Apparently that building is still standing, 20 years later, though I don't know who is using it now.
• biztos 5y ago
  Once you have tenure, what’s stopping you from just getting off the grant treadmill? A friend of mine got on it after tenure (art school) because he could finance cool projects of his own design that way. But even in a research university isn’t tenure supposed to protect you from being pushed around by the administration?
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    You cannot be fired with tenure, which is nice. But you can still move up and down in status. The grants provide supplemental income. You can do work you love enough to take a lower wage than you probably could get in the private sector. There are benefits.
  • scheme271 5y ago
    Salary mainly. You may keep the job if you're tenured but without the grants, you may not get much in the way of salary. Also, your grad students, postdocs, and resources (lab equipment, computing time, etc) are being paid through grant money so without it you don't have a lab group. Finally, without funding, your department and/or the university can make life exceedingly difficult. Extra teaching, more admin tasks, etc.
    • chrisBob 5y ago
      It is common for the university to pay a partial salary (9-months) and then the faculty can pay themselves another 3 months from grants if they have the funding. At University of Michigan the 9-month salary is spread out over 12 months, but you get a nice summer bonus if you have grant money. The publicly listed listed salaries are the 9-month salaries, so faculty pay isn't quite as bad as it looks at first glance. If you have funding, most grants also REQUIRE the professor to take salary money from it, otherwise they assume you aren't actually putting in any effort on that funded project.