Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/

by nkurz • 12 years ago

311 273 12 years ago

goldfeld• 12 years ago

These basal, fundamental flaws in the educational system give me pause to awe, and a gut feeling the US is gonna get trampled many times over by the likes of China within some decades. So little regulation and such harsh capitalism is eating its heart out bit by bit. I guess what keeps America bright at this point is a legacy from the past century, that's slowly eroding, and the brain drain sucked chiefly out of Asia and Eastern Europe--at least the same hands-off market attracts those people with today a stronger educational background than the average educated American, but how sustainable is it to keep importing talent? Is the power of capital enough to keep the american infrastructure and investment momentum on american grounds indefinitely?

programmarchy3• 12 years ago

Such little regulation? What about Common Core, and the long history of ineffective state mandates to "improve" the education system? The education system is highly regulated, and nearly entirely state-run (not counting those few who are able to afford private school tuition on top of school taxes or the time to homeschool). Many, if not most, schools in the U.S. resemble prisons. Top-down. Hierarchical. Rigid. Compulsory.

And if you look at the history of the state education system, it was largely modeled after the Prussian education system, set up by the king, which "attempted to instill social obedience in the citizens through indoctrination [...] The purpose of the system was to instill loyalty to the Crown and to train young men for the military and the bureaucracy." [1] And I would argue that the school system serves a similar function today.

Based on the goals of social obedience and instilling loyalty to the state... Well, I think in those terms our education system is doing quite well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

jonhinson• 12 years ago

How is Common Core, a set of standards that can voluntarily be adopted by states, equivalent to regulation?

briantakita• 12 years ago

Based on the goals of social obedience and instilling loyalty to the state... Well, I think in those terms our education system is doing quite well.

Teacher wages approaching subsistence level is just the next step in the McDonaldization of education. Even the teachers are just another brick in the wall.

r00fus• 12 years ago

Just amazing that you and goldfeld are both right - the US education system is at once inadequately designed, and also being sieged by corporate interests as well. Doesn't hurt that some school administrators don't reasonably respond/engage with parents except those who have lawyers, which parents unfortunately engage without trying to engage the school first.

Ultimately though, I think the sad state of schools in this country is a (big) symptom of society's greater ills. Rampant corporatism, anti-intellectualism, and creeping authoritarianism from a runaway security industrial complex have been happening for decades... and schools are just one aspect of the decay of the social fabric.

TrainedMonkey• 12 years ago

I disagree, while there are glaring problems within U.S. educational systems there are two significant factors mitigating how crippling they are long term.

1. Opportunities, there are tons of opportunities in U.S., if you want to learn you will find a way to despite all the flaws.

2. Immigration, there are a lot of highly educated people immigrating into U.S.

Additionally we still cannot anticipate how whole MOOCs business will turn out.

So yes the are problems and they are very bad, but not as crippling as you might expect.

jdreaver2• 12 years ago

Such little regulation? Harsh capitalism?

Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government. Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government. Most university students go to public schools. Students get ridiculous loans they can't default on, courtesy of the government.

Harsh capitalism would be harsh on the universities who cling to a dying lecture/exam model that hasn't evolved for centuries. It would punish universities who don't produce results, instead of giving them students with free loans from the taxpayers. Harsh capitalism would see universities that can't evolve disappear.

I feel like blaming things on capitalism and lack of regulation is so overplayed and fashionable that people can't take a second to think that maybe regulation and government caused the problem in the first place. Everything the government does right is lauded while everything it does wrong is blamed on "corporate interests" and capitalism.

esrauch• 12 years ago

Is it actually better for students that they can't default on their loans? I usually hear it the opposite way, that even after bankruptcy proceedings you still have your student loan debt following you around.

tehwalrus2• 12 years ago

Government (university) administrators can be (forced to be) heartless capitalists too, you know.

liveoneggs• 12 years ago

what, exactly, is better than lectures and exams?

rdtsc6• 12 years ago

Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government.

Obviously not propped enough if this professor died in poverty and students need 6 figure loans to graduate.

Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government.

As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed".

Students get ridiculous loans they can't default on, courtesy of the government.

The problem is not to just stop giving loans, but let people go to universities without needing loans. If Universities are public, they should admit based on merit. And instead of cycling money through govt to student to university, just subsidize the university and make sure it doesn't spend money on admin assistants, triple layers of bureaucracy, new gyms with lazy rivers and other crap that is not needed. Maybe if it is too hard, just increase % of admitted students based on merit, some that couldn't quite make it and are rich perhaps could buy their way in.

maybe regulation and government caused the problem in the first place.

Can you point to an example of an attested and well functioning higher learning system not regulated and propped by a government?

pjmorris• 12 years ago

'cling to a dying lecture/exam model that hasn't evolved for centuries'

It dawned on me this week that Y Combinator itself is structured more like this 'dying lecture/exam model', set in a physical place where 'students' and 'instructors' can interact directly rather than being intermediated by some app, screen or paper. If there is any group in any place who would be more likely to disrupt education by the application of high tech, I'd be surprised. That they adopt a model you say is dying suggests that there may be more life in it that might be expected.

spikels• 12 years ago

Your ideology is getting in the way of clear thinking. Good luck on your prediction on China's future prowess in the education of non-Chinese students. Lack of government regulation (and financing) is probably the opposite of the problem in the US (do you realize that most US colleges are run by state governments?).

Ideological blindness aside there is something wrong when education costs more and more but the instructors are paid less and less.

tolmasky• 12 years ago

So our lack of regulation will leave us susceptible to... China's notorious lack of regulation and corruption? Most of China's "advantages" in the last decades have been thanks to e.g. their ability to pay slave labor wages (vs our minimum wage laws), their ability to have horrible work conditions (vs our regulations), etc etc. We may "lose" to China, but I assure you it won't be because we're less regulated of more capitalistic.

jerf• 12 years ago

Are you sure this is the defense you want to muster? Universities are basically where liberalism/progressivism comes from. It is where it is in its strongest power. Government money everywhere; tuition, research grants, special projects, tax breaks. Administrative staff benevolently administrating massive diversity programs of every kind. 90%+ of the staff are progressives/liberals. Not being progressive/liberal can be pretty much reason to be drummed out. It is the very beating heart of the anti-"capitalist" regime, the blueprint by which they would remake the rest of the world.

And it's still under assault by "little regulation" and "harsh capitalism"? If it's so frail in the real world, then pack it in; the philosophy has no hope of success. It will never find any more fertile ground than it has there. If you don't like the result of decades of liberalism/progressivism's control, perhaps it's time to find a new governing philosophy.

_delirium• 12 years ago

There is a lot of government involvement in American universities, but in weird pseudo-market ways, like grant programs (to institutions) and subsidized loans (to students). They're not a good example of the non-market model, which is much simpler: public universities, funded by tax money, staffed by civil servants, charging no tuition. Some U.S. states had this model through the 1970s, and it worked fine. Parts of Europe still have it, and it works fine, too.

I've been at both American and Danish universities, and the American universities today really do not seem progressive to me. Many professors will claim to be left-ish, sure, but structurally the universities are not run according to a traditional public-service model, and are not internally egalitarian. Their structure, with tons of administrators, large pay differences, odd systems of performance reviews, people job-hopping for pay raises, administrators desperately looking for revenue, etc., reminds me of American corporations more than it reminds me of public service. Just the pay inequality in itself is shocking, more like corporate levels than civil-service levels. An American Dean's salary might be twenty times or more what a PhD student is paid, and professors' salaries might differ by 2-4x even within just the tenure-track segment. In Denmark the entire range from "highest paid professor" to "lowest paid PhD student" is maybe 2.5x, and professors' salaries are on a boring civil-service scale with about 30% variation. This already makes the American environment much more like a company: competitive, hierarchical, not really egalitarian, big focus on revenues (for the institution) and salary/advancement (for the employee).

There are admittedly things the American university model does do well; it's well regarded in research, for example. But one thing it is not, is a straightforward public system along the lines of what a social-democratic government might run. (One might say the same about the healthcare system, for that matter.)

eli_gottlieb13• 12 years ago

It is the very beating heart of the anti-"capitalist" regime, the blueprint by which they would remake the rest of the world.

I have never heard any self-proclaimed socialist ever utter these words. Do you get your entire concept of the Left from right-wing strawmen?

tn136• 12 years ago

The very reason US education (higher education) is better is because government has kept its dirty nose out of it. American Public schools are pathetic.

carsongross• 12 years ago

The education meat grinder destroys adjuncts, it saddles many students with crushing, non-self-liquidating debt and it outpaces inflation faster than any other major cost category:

http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/April/130430/6C71...

A bad product, the employees and customers are treated poorly, and prices are skyrocketing. Hmmm.

mabhatter• 12 years ago

It begs the question "where the hell is my tuition going?"

I was taking at a private "degree mill" part time classes at $180 per credit hour. The school required 7 students to teach a 4 credit class during normal hours. So at the minimum number of students the school was just making enough money for overhead... Most clases were 10-15 students. It was a private school, so tuition covered almost all their bills, no state funding.

Now ask where sutdents in State Funded Colleges money is going when there are 50 students (and more!) in a class? Where the hell is the undergrad tuition money going if the school only pays "minimum wage" for adjunct or grad school staff?? Where is State and Federal dinging going if Undergrads are paying more than their share of the university bills? It's not gping to TEACHING... And it's not going to "student contact" professors either, and its not "healthcare" or "retirement"... There's a giant money hole in the system.

nmrm2• 12 years ago

You sound like you're trying to justify a bad decision...

Outside of the top-ranked flagship state schools -- which carry as much prestige as an ivy in some fields (e.g. in CS uiuc, u.w., austin, etc.) -- state schools are actually by far the best bang for the buck around.

For example, $180/cr is actually not far off from what most non-flagship state schools cost. In fact, there are schools in my state that cost within $10 or so of that. Crucially, all these institutions have quite good reputations in the region, no one perceives them as diploma mills, and they all have great CS departments with a sense of continuity.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

I did some reading about the subject when I was still in college, and I gathered that tuition was used to pay the interest on loans the university system took out to fund expansion (e.g. buildings & development) in order to attract more students.

soup10• 12 years ago

So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??

cheepin2• 12 years ago

Research, Sports, executive salaries. There are a lot of costs besides teacher's salaries.

dec0dedab0de• 12 years ago

I thought sports were mainly profit centers.

wldcordeiro• 12 years ago

The latter two are the one's that should be most limited.

pkaye• 12 years ago

I thought research was funded through grants and sports was self funding?

dustcoin3• 12 years ago

I doubt executive salaries make up a significant portion of any school's budget. Overpaid non-executive administrators are a much larger cost in aggregate, because there are so many of them.

umanwizard• 12 years ago

Isn't "research" mainly professor and grad student salaries? What's the difference?

DennisP3• 12 years ago

Meanwhile, Coursera has 677 courses available for free, many of them excellent. You don't get the diploma, but if the diploma is backed by lower-quality classes and grade inflation, that's going to matter less and less.

Avshalom2• 12 years ago

And we don't have to pay any teachers.

dccoolgai• 12 years ago

Thatks where I see huge potential for disruption to higher ed; I think some trusted or recognized source will make a lot of money by offering credentialing... I saw something about 'nanodegrees' from Udacity (or one of those). When the situation reaches the tipping point where it's a signal of mental paucity that you decided to take on 200k of debt for something you could have gotten for a lot less, I wonder what will happen...or how close we are to that point.

AnimalMuppet• 12 years ago

Coursera + the CLEP exams = real, tested learning, and college credit on the cheap. (Not that you can get a full degree just on the basis of CLEP tests, unfortunately...)

tammer• 12 years ago

It's very clear where it's going. The number of administrative staff at colleges and universities have skyrocketed in the past 30 years.

Just like in the corporate world, corruption and the proliferation of unnecessary management have sucked revenue to the top.

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...

jjoonathan3• 12 years ago

I took a look at CMU's financials and it definitely looks like the money is going towards salaries. They don't offer a breakdown between the different kinds of salaries, naturally. Does anyone know of a representative dataset (by "representative" I mean "not the UC system, not an ivy with >$10b endowment, etc") that would include this information?

https://www.cmu.edu/finance/reporting-and-incoming-funds/fin...

sogen• 12 years ago

sounds like education in Mexico

bilbo0s2• 12 years ago

Just to point out what may not be so obvious... a lot of the administrative and non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "management".

For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically... it is the department for all of the IT people at the University. It is enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that is just one of the operations level bureaucracies that the University needs. There is Facilities. There is Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.

These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. Be that as it may, honest people CAN debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the cost rises being discussed.

[Edited for grammar]

zacinbusiness• 12 years ago

And don't forget sports teams. Almost all football programs, for instance, actually cost the university more money than they bring in. This includes revenue from sports memorabilia. Source: friend worked in athletics at my uni and they were extremely proud when they started breaking even.

ryguytilidie• 12 years ago

Isn't this the same as most businesses? The price of good is going up, salaries are stagnant or falling. Where is all of this extra profit going?

mitosis• 12 years ago

University administrators, mostly. They outnumber faculty at many universities, and their salaries are rising fast.

a3n• 12 years ago

It takes a lot of administrators to figure out how to keep contingent lecturers at just under full time employment.

HarryHirsch2• 12 years ago

To the taxpayers. The share of state and federal funding (both direct and through grants) has been declining steadily over the last twenty years. Your student loan debt may be crippling but aren't you glad that you get to pay lower taxes?

steven777400• 12 years ago

This is anecdotal only. I used to be a full-time college instructor, and I still teach there occasionally part-time and interact with my former colleagues. Since I've left, the college has added a number of full-time staff to media and eLearning (e.g. maintain the LMS, setup video recording and conferencing systems, etc) and, for every dean, there is now an assistant dean to help with administrative workload.

Meanwhile, whole programs at the college are being shutdown or targeted for shutdown, with the corresponding faculty laid off.

noonespecial• 12 years ago

The problem is simple. Teachers teach because they want to teach, administrators "administrate" for the money. And that's where it goes.

The market won't work right for teachers because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat. To fix it will take more than administration. It will take leadership.

zanny2• 12 years ago

because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat.

Then I fail to see what the problem is. Obviously, there is an oversupply of teaching staff, or else wages would be higher since good professors would be a scarce commodity.

That obviously is not the case, thus wages fall. I guess when you have an excess of a generation going to college on false debt, you get an excess of teachers too. I'd imagine of the college going populace instructors make up a significant fraction.

aidenn0• 12 years ago

It's going to pay for things that the state used to pay for.

The cost (to the school) of education at a state school has not gone up a lot versus inflation, but fraction of it paid for by the state has gone way down.

lurkinggrue• 12 years ago

Wall Street?

jckt• 12 years ago

I think another problem (though probably minor compared to the bloated bureaucracies everyone else is mentioning) is that the teaching quality doesn't matter as much to students these days.

This is a UK source, but I think it reflects the view of most students in the West:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14616788

I feel bad for saying something like "kids these days" (I'm one of them, admittedly) but "fun" seems to be a big factor in a student's choice of a school today. Admittedly, this is mostly based on anecdote and stereotypes (I think there's a reason why "college life" is commonly associated with parties and frats). I won't say that the social aspect of education is unimportant, but it seems that rather than making the education itself more "fun", universities in the last few decades have gradually increased funding for recreational buildings, big events, frats, and sports [1], etc. Of course, I don't know how significant these costs actually are, and I'm happy to be convinced by some budgetary data if this is actually a non-issue.

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athleti...

Double_Cast2• 12 years ago

Wealth does not pass three generations.

- Chinese proverb

(Disclaimer: I'm one of them darned kids too.) I've only become aware of recently [1][2], but I've started to get the feeling that this "fun phenomenon" is something endemic to Generation Y.

[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u...

[2] http://ejmas.com/pt/2012pt/ptart_tong_teacher24-1210.html

tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.

I haven't really investigated this theory in detail. But it agrees with my anecdotal experience and has a lot of explanatory power.

ekimekim• 12 years ago

I would say education quality dosn't matter because, in my experience, it's universally bad. Why should you care if your useless years spent buying an accreditation is 98% useless or 99% useless? You have to self-educate either way.

tn136• 12 years ago

People do not get paid based on how much money the business makes. On the other hand they get paid based on how much value they add.

Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes. I will not be surprised that a lot of college teachers teaching skills of no use are finding it hard to make enough money.

jjoonathan3• 12 years ago

On the other hand they get paid based on how much value they add.

Nope. That only happens if they're scarce. If they aren't scarce (or are otherwise deleveraged) they get paid minimum wage regardless of the value they create.

Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes.

You seem to be awfully certain of that. Unless you meant to assume what you set out to prove (French lecturer is poorly paid => there isn't demand => poor pay is justified) I don't understand your argument. Clearly there is demand: sum up the price paid for the French credit by all the students in the class. There's just a middle man that skims a tremendous amount from the tuition paid for those credit hours before the money reaches the teacher / support staff.

delucain• 12 years ago

Generally, the cost of college tracks inflation. It's where the funding that is changing that makes it appear to increase. 40 years ago state funds paid for most state college costs (hence the name, "state" college"). Now, most states are broke and rapidly withdrawing most of the funding support from their universities, shifting costs to the students.

Administrative staff costs are rising as well, but the tenure track professors are expected to do less and less administrative work, theoretically allowing them to teach more classes. I don't know how much this works though.

prostoalex2• 12 years ago

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/07/31/14406/three-c...

In America, an institution of higher learning is not respected until they have a few sports teams with coaches, athletic directors, supporting staff, facilities staff and subsidies in the form of athletic scholarships.

btbuildem• 12 years ago

Administration - top admins make orders of magnitude more than lecturers.

milesskorpen• 12 years ago

A lot of it is going to rising labor costs — while wages have largely been stagnant, health care, facilities, and insurance costs have not.

hershel• 12 years ago

Teachers would probably have bigger problems.

According to clay christensen , the guy behind "the innovator's dillema" , more than 50% of colleges will go bankrupt soon(until 2020/2024).

DennisP3• 12 years ago

I found that pretty startling, so I googled and found this article:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-14/small-u-s-colleges-...

steveklabnik• 12 years ago

I was once offered an adjunct position to teach a class at my alma mater. They were excited to let me know I'd be paid $3,000 for teaching the class.

I had to turn them down, as I was already doing private corporate trainings, where we charged $3,000/day.

I didn't get paid that much, obviously, but I thought it was really amusing that the amounts lined up.

danso• 12 years ago

This doesn't invalidate the OP's message in a meaningful way, but if you're interested in the opening anecdote, a reporter from Slate delved deep into the circumstances of Ms. Vojtko and found a more complex story than one just of woe: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/20...

pattisapu• 12 years ago

Good point on how the pay problem for adjunct faculty is intertwined with the "everyone gets a trophy" problem for students:

“I knew the instructor was an adjunct, and that she taught at several places to cobble together a living. I told the students that she was an adjunct, and that the class was easy because she was afraid of losing her job.” Adjuncts are often evaluated solely based on student evaluations. As Rebecca Schuman put it in her Slate article “Confessions of a Grade Inflator,” “popularity is the only thing keeping them employed.”

crpatino4• 12 years ago

I'd up-vote you twice if I could.

Students may pay for the privilege to receive a higher education, but the real customer is society. The product is competent graduates that will keep society moving forwards.

Once you start asking the opinion of the raw materials in your assembly line, everything goes downhill.

keithpeter3• 12 years ago

Your third paragraph implies a model of education and preparation for leadership that will actively work against the goal articulated in the last sentence of your second paragraph.

PS: what meaning are you attaching to the word 'society' here?

rdtsc6• 12 years ago

Saw that happen.

Adjunct instructors went out of their way to be friendly, and non-confrontational. They would let stuff slide, exam do-overs, class meetings held at coffee shops etc etc.

Tenured professor not giving a damn about teaching, or being at least socially cordial. Some are just complete assholes.

Even saw the the behavior change when a professor got tenure. It was a pretty sharp switch to "don't give a fuck about anything" in a matter of a semester.

I am saying this as an average pattern I noticed, at one particular place, there are exceptions of course...

Steuard• 12 years ago

Interestingly, I saw more than one fantastic teacher get denied tenure in my graduate department (a top research university), and there was always a rumor floating around that it was because they spent effort on teaching that could have instead gone to research. (One of them had written a textbook, and was told pretty explicitly that doing so had been a major mistake.) I've never heard of anyone getting denied tenure there or in any similar program for mediocre teaching evaluations.

Meanwhile, at the private liberal arts college where I teach, most of my senior colleagues are just as committed to good teaching as my junior colleagues are. (The younger folks may be more innovative, but by and large they don't care more.) I've never seen someone's teaching go downhill when they get tenure; if anything, the research pressure eases up a bit at that point and they feel free to focus a bit more on the classroom.

So maybe what you've observed about tenure is accurate in some places, but it's at odds with the places I've been.

xrange• 12 years ago

“The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.”

So it is unusual now, but it is going to become more common in the future?

So adjuncting is decidedly not a middle-class job. But it does sound like one, probably because, before the adjunct bubble, it was.

..."Professor" sounds like a middle-class job. I'm not in academia, but when I was in college in the 90's, adjunct sounded like a grad student on a stipend.

nmrm2• 12 years ago

I'm not in academia, but when I was in college in the 90's, adjunct sounded like a grad student on a stipend.

This attitude was perhaps more appropriate a decade ago, before adjunct faculty were covering a significant portion of the course load and students could reasonably expect most of their courses to be taught by people with the word "professor" in their job title.

__xtrimsky5• 12 years ago

At my computer science university (private university with HQ based in France) in downtown San Francisco, teachers were paid between 100$ and 300$ / hr, which I find decent.

100$ was mostly for teachers with not much experience, mostly students that graduated last year and were helping out as teachers.

ryen• 12 years ago

Do you have a source for these numbers? $100/hr is highly suspect for "students that graduated last year and were helping out as teachers".

__xtrimsky5• 12 years ago

I had a family member working at the school. She knew all the salaries. I was often asking, and getting heart attacks when crappy teachers were getting paid 300$ /hr.

bsder2• 12 years ago

Define "hour". Hour in the classroom? Possibly. Assume a 12 week semester and 6 hours per week. Last time I taught a semester, I got about $5,000, so that is nominally $70 per hour.

However, that doesn't count time answering student questions. That doesn't count office hours. That doesn't count making up homework or tests and grading them.

For me, each class I teach is about 40 hours of work per week. If that is your number, then I got paid about $10 per hour. And I would have been better off at McDonalds as I would have gotten benefits for being full-time.

For those of us who like to teach, this is a Catch-22. It is good for students to have teachers who have been in industry--however, the pay is lousy relative to that same industry. At the same time, I would also be providing cheap labor to the university who should be paying someone a reasonable amount of money.

clintonc2• 12 years ago

This article is about adjunct instructors, who are not paid per hour -- they are paid a fixed amount per course. Average pay is $3000 per course [1]. Teaching four courses in a semester is a full-time job; this gives $24,000 per year, usually without benefits. Institutions tend to limit the number of courses assigned to each adjunct in order to avoid the adjunct being classified as a full-time employee.

[1] http://chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Project-Shows-Wide/1364...

ForHackernews3• 12 years ago

Slightly ironic, but Guernica Magazine has a "jobs" page on their site: http://www.guernicamag.com/jobs/

If you click through, you'll find that all of their positions are unpaid. It seems that magazine editor is no longer a middle-class job, either. You have to be rich enough to be able to work for free.

santaclaus• 12 years ago

Do college rankings take the percentage of classes taught by tenure track professors into account? US News should dock schools with greater than X% of courses taught by adjuncts.

cpwright2• 12 years ago

From a student's perspective that doesn't necessarily make sense. Tenure track professors could be great researchers, but that doesn't mean they are great teachers. Instructors, adjuncts, or graduate students can all teach well, oftentimes as well as a tenure track professor.

aosmith• 12 years ago

And college is viewed by some as having dubious value. I know plenty of kids who racked up $200k in loans and can't find a job for the life of them.

CurtMonash• 12 years ago

There's a deeply-established credentialing systems that would blend very well with MOOCs and the like. That said, it's not the US undergrad one, and there's a worldwide belief that US university credentials are a big deal.

I don't know what things are like now, but in my grandfather's day European universities had a very different credentialing system from US undergrad institutions. In lieu of course credit, course-based grades, etc., they simply had a battery of (oral) examinations at the end.

US grad schools can be much like that. In essence, there were no course requirements for a PhD in mathematics at Harvard, but rather a three-day Qualifying Examination, a Minor Thesis (don't ask), and a traditional dissertation. Much the same was true of a physics PhD at Princeton then (the 1970s), except that there was an experiment in the mix (even for theoreticians). And in the Princeton math department, the joke was that students were asked the first day "Does anybody wish to submit his thesis?", and the record was 3 months.

x00545• 12 years ago

It is stunning that a public school teacher apparently makes almost 2x what a college teacher makes, at least in California. Mind you, I am not arguing that school teachers should make less, collage profs should make more. This is amazing though, were is the money going.

Anecdotally, I think a lot of the money is spent on outside services through a corrupt bidding process. Back in 2008 I used to run a document scanning company. We did large contracts for the state of California and the Four Seasons Hotel chain. We had glowing recommendations from all of our customers, including a lot of large businesses in San Diego. So, foolishly, we thought we could toss our hat into the ring when UCSD started looking for a company to do their document management. Our bid was (based on what we could find out) roughly 1/2 of the winning bid. We had all the required bonds, same quality, faster turnaround time, and we offered more services. We didn't get the job. So UCSD paid twice as much for the same document scanning service, meanwhile some poor adjunkt professor is eating cat food! Great!

sitkack6• 12 years ago

All of those bids and the result along with the findings should be public, as in published.

nugget• 12 years ago

I saw examples like this over and over when I worked with Government, and it's ultimately what pushed me to embrace libertarianism. Government usually has great intentions, but those intentions are often overwhelmed by the perverse micro incentives of the human beings, driven by basic human nature, who run everything at the ground level.

rst• 12 years ago

Last I checked, most colleges were private institutions, and the public ones (state schools and community colleges) tended, in general, to be a lot more frugal (and cheaper, and more cost-effective) than private ones.

kaonashi• 12 years ago

Any sufficiently sized human institution has those problems.

gone35• 12 years ago

But it is precisely that inescapable fact --that perverse micro-incentives at the individual level, driven by basic human nature, run everything at the ground level-- that often creates the need for institutions like government in the first place! Whenever there are tragedy-of-the-commons like externalities / collective action problems, in many cases it is provably superior to have even highly deficient government-like institutions than fully unconstrained individual action[1].

Think, for instance, any of today's failed states to see what total lack of basic governance actually looks like.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

majika7• 12 years ago

Smaller governments (i.e. less power, shallower hierarchies), good voting systems, and an informed public are the answer; not avoiding government altogether.

Libertarianism (i.e. absolute belief in the capitalist market and private property) doesn't work, because the markets don't reflect negative externalities like pollution, over-harvesting, misinformation, or antibiotics misuse. States need to exist to manipulate markets to reflect those things.

There are many industries where the profit motive is contrary to the public interest, like education, health, media, banking, prisons, military, drugs, junk food, gambling, etc. Either [a] the state should be the sole player in the industry (prisons, military), [b] the state should provide a public service in that industry to set a baseline for private competitors (education, health, media), [c] the state should impose regulations/taxation that prevent/discourage activity contrary to the public interest (banking, junk food, drugs), or [d] the state should outlaw the industry entirely (gambling (IMHO)).

There are many "markets" that are inherently monopolistic, or where private competition is nonsensical, like public spaces (parks, lakes, rivers) and public infrastructure (roads, telecoms, trains, airports).

Companies and markets are only good at medium-term thinking (at best). Google employees avoid thinking about the kind of society they're creating for their grandchildren, but that's the job description of elected representatives (in accountable governments).

Finally, but most significantly, there's that whole thing about capital accumulating to the top. Income and capital gains taxation is in the public interest, because equality and a well-financed state is in the public interest.

I feel like many Americans tend towards libertarianism because they feel that their governments are unaccountable, unrepresentative and corrupt. I think the problem in the US is the size and power of its government - not the concept of government itself. I think the federation of the US should be abolished (as in, all federal law). States could sign up to federal institutions/programs (central bank, defense, immigration, ...) when and how they please.

Personally, I think any moderately-populated area should have a single level of government spanning no further than 2-4 km from its parliament (i.e. within walking distance). Each of these states can assume common administration of adjacent sparsely-populated areas. If the states agree to a common legislative process, there's no duplication of effort in passing common legislation, except for each parliament voting on it or amending it as they want, which is democratic!

Libertarianism really grates me, but I enjoy debating it because I see that libertarians want the same things I do: liberty and equality for everyone.

Aqueous• 12 years ago

Yes. I worked for a university briefly as a staff member. Our university sung far and wide about how it just raised $400 million for its endowment in its most recent fundraising campaign, and yet, it couldn't afford to pay me more than a $25,000 salary in the IT department. How on earth is this possible? It's probably in all the unseen costs they pay out in contracts to subcontractors. But another clue might be this: during the time of my employment, there were several ongoing, large construction projects.

Universities are obsessed with the rankings of US News. And for some reason, they feel that campus renewal and renovation construction projects are the secret to mastering them. So instead of paying a decent wage to the people who actually comprise the "college experience" for their students, they pay outsized amounts to further improve their already glittering campus so that it looks better on the 15 minute admissions tour that prospective students take.

Somewhere the priorities are out of whack. I think if universities stopped spending so much money gaming the rankings, they might realize that paying their staff more and paying their faculty more would translate into a better, more involved college experience for their students. And that, in turn, would make their students evangelize to other prospective students about how much they love their college...

Improve the product, not the marketing.

zaroth• 12 years ago

I imagine that they pay what they have to in order to fill the number of positions they need filled. How could they pay anything less than the market rate and still fill the positions?

I guess a revolving door supply of cheap labor is what lets them fill an IT position while only offering $25k. You said you worked there briefly, I assume you found a better job and moved on.

Clearly the product is not the problem with enrollment meeting quota and certainly no downward pressure on tuition cost... I say that tongue in cheek -- this is the university's (business') perspective.

SoftwareMaven• 12 years ago

Once upon a time, administration was 20% of college budgets. It's now 50% (guess who does budgeting?). You need look no further than that to find your answer.

ScottBurson• 12 years ago

So we need to get the word out to high school students that they should look at a college's budget before applying to it.

carlob• 12 years ago

This thing you point out about construction is what has always struck me as an European. The first American university I visited was Princeton and you'd expect it to look very good and have wonderful facilities (and it did). On the other hand I visited small local university like Curry and Bentley, which have absolutely no academic clout and I really don't should have such nice campuses, when the quality of courses is pretty low.

Your comment really is illuminating to me: news outlets, and possibly parents doing touring when college shopping only really care about the surface.

autokad• 12 years ago

staff are generally thought of as costs and universities try to pay them as little as possible expecting high turnover. at least that's my assumption based on their actions.

with adjuncts it depends on the major and class. the whole idea is that they are not full time, so if a person chooses JUST to do that , then I am not surprised they have a hard time getting by. I have a full time job and adjunct (the adjunct position pays pretty good), but from what I observed adjuncts make more for their time than joining the reserves.

I dont know how the hours and the workload worked out for the french teacher, but usually a class is either 13 3 hour courses or 26 1.5 hour ones. thats about 40 hours for the semester. the outside of class time really varies on subject, years of teaching the course, the students, etc. I generally expect to spend 1-2x the time of the class with outside of class time.

billyhoffman• 12 years ago

there were several ongoing, large construction projects

This seems obvious to me. When someone donates millions of dollars to a university, they want their name on a building. The Thomas J Somebody Architecture Building. The Susan C Millar Library.

Nobody wants the Frank T Frankhauser IT Department payroll fund.

neolefty2• 12 years ago

Question: Is a typical adjunct professor qualified to teach in a public school? And related, would they want to if they could?

I teach overseas, and I would never qualify to teach in an American school -- I have a college degree, and some teaching experience (from when I was in college), but no teaching credential.

alttag• 12 years ago

Yes and no.

An adjunct typically has a PhD or a masters degree combined with real-world experience.

Public school only require a bachelor's degree, but technically, teaching public school in most states also requires a teaching credential (especially with the No Child Left Behind law's "highly qualified standard), which is not part of most content (that is, non-teaching) programs. However, many districts are purportedly willing to hire a masters/PhD candidate and then back-fill coursework necessary for a credential (e.g., curriculum design, classroom management) as well as guide toward content certifications. These additional courses and certification exams are paid by the teach out-of-pocket, of course.

So, as with many things, YMMV.

barry-cotter2• 12 years ago

〉Is a typical adjunct professor qualified to teach in a public school? And related, would they want to if they could?

No more than you are. If they don't have an M.Ed. or B.Ed. they're unqualified. Assuming you have those you may also need to do a certain number of teaching hours post qualification to get a teaching licence/QTS.

The typical adjunct almost certainly doesn't want to teach public school. Even in the crappiest community college discipline issues are minimal compared to teaching in high school or middle school and you have way more autonomy than a public school teacher.

webhat3• 12 years ago

You can teach at an American school, depending on the current teacher demand. The US, as have many other countries, have in the past been easy on people with degrees and allowed them to teach while they were in the process of getting their M.Ed. or B.Ed.

With a masters you could teach in an American university, I believe the minimum requirement is a masters degree.

alexeisadeski34• 12 years ago

>meanwhile some poor adjunkt professor is eating cat food!

The median income in Mexico is around $10k (PPP adjusted). I wonder how much cat food they eat?

jameshart• 12 years ago

Teaching adults who are there voluntarily is a far lower level of responsibility than teaching kids who have no choice. Each child in a public school has, generally, one shot at each year's worth of curriculum, and if they don't get it it could set them back for a lifetime. Grade school teachers are being paid to contribute to the upbringing of the kids in their charge; college teachers' responsibilities basically amount to telling some people about some things they know.

re_todd• 12 years ago

I knew a professor who was an adjunct. She was nice, taught the class well, was very intelligent, and even wrote a textbook used by other universities. She still had trouble finding steady teaching work.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

This is a direct and entirely predictable result of the publicly-administered, nondischargeable-through-bankruptcy student loans. We can't have everyone going to college and also have all colleges be nice workplaces. Society has recently taken the former option, but one can imagine that decision changing.

worldpeace• 12 years ago

All of these brilliant people have driven their institutions into the ground chasing rankings and fads like diversity and prestige buildings. Universities have taken on mountains of debt, and just like the portfolios of those university trained traders on Wall Street that destroyed the world a few years ago, they are very susceptible to unthinkable events like young people no longer finding college worth the money. It will only take a small decrease in enrollment rates for the wheels to come off. Bankruptcy is all but guaranteed.

dgabriel• 12 years ago

Diversity is not a fad, and college entrance is more competitive than it has ever been.

tn136• 12 years ago

This just means that college teachers in certain cases are in high supply.

neolefty2• 12 years ago

One of the callout quotes from the article:

    Of course it’s possible to love what one does, be good at it, and still be exploited.

A job that people love, with a glut of qualified people. "I always dreamed of being a professor."

tn136• 12 years ago

The left liberals put themselves in high seats and decide who is being exploited and who is not. This is absolute thuggery. A Job and salary is the contract between two parties and everyone else should stay out of it.

xarien• 12 years ago

Let's change the terminology a bit here. A professor is someone with tenure is on a tenure track. A lecturer is someone who is not. The article isn't talking about professors, which in the USA relies on research, publishing, obtaining grants, and tenure. Yes, a lecturer teaching a low demand subject is going to have a hard time. Just like most positions, there exists a hierarchy. The reason why this doesn't exist for primary and secondary educators is because of unions and that can be argued either way.

jal278• 12 years ago

You would think with so many colleges in existence, that some of them would resist this sort of policy -- are there counter-examples to the trend towards increasing 'adjunctization'?

Also, if the cause of adjunctization is rising administrative costs in colleges -- are there any universities that have figured out that problem? That is, how to prevent a bloated bureaucracy of overpaid administrators?

baxterross• 12 years ago

dying industry, dying profession.

grimmfang• 12 years ago

Some of these contingent employees are full-time lecturers, and many are adjunct instructors: part-time employees, paid per class, often without health insurance or retirement benefits. This is a relatively new phenomenon: in 1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this percentage had shrunk to 33.5.

Would be interesting to know if college prices began rising at a higher ratio to the CPI around this time.

mgback• 12 years ago

It is stunning to me that such well educated and hard working people would want to work in such a corrupt system instead of striking out on their own for the betterment of society.

lilsunnybee• 12 years ago

A poverty wage is more livable than no wage at all; most adjunct faculty don't have the financial security to do some sort of revolutionary startup, and there are also only so many "radical" ideas that would attract investment from moneyed interests / hold the promise of huge profit.

TheMagicHorsey• 12 years ago

American education is such a mess. First, it feels like the majority of American college students graduate from college after spending four years on material that makes them no more appealing to employers. Second, there seems to be a thick layer of insulation between market signals and students, so that students can't even figure out what they should be learning, even if they were motivated to do so.

Third, colleges seem to teach whatever garbage they feel like, slap a "major" label on it, and charge a ridiculous amount for it. As institutions you would be hard pressed to find more inefficient organizations in the economy. I can't for the life of me understand where all the money is going. It shouldn't cost $100,000 to turn a bright high school student into a programmer in four years. In some European countries they do a better job in two years, with one third the budget, even though labor costs are higher (see Sweden).

We have to face the fact that a lot of college lecturers are zero value-add to their pupils. This is a big problem underlying the salary issue that is hardly ever discussed. Moving outwards, many college programs are zero value add too ... outside the stamp of a degree which they confer. Which if you think about it, you could get cheaper abroad.

Only a matter of time before India or some Baltic state makes cheap degrees available to US citizenship holders at cut-rate prices. I don't think American employers care much where your degree is from ... at least for engineers ... so long as you have the right to work in America ... which a citizen would have.

gaius• 12 years ago

I don't think American employers care much where your degree is from ... at least for engineers ... so long as you have the right to work in America ... which a citizen would have.

Sure they do. Try getting a job at Google without a degree from MIT/Stanford. The name is more important than even graduating, even "Harvard dropout" has a certain cachet.

eshvk• 12 years ago

Try getting a job at Google without a degree from MIT/Stanford.

I know a lot of people working at Google who don't even have degrees. There are over 5,000 Engineers in Google's American HQ. Thinking that everyone of them works there purely because of the brand name of whatever college they went to seems to be a rather self-limiting belief.

base6983• 12 years ago

Eh, I got a lot of attention from Google as did several friends and we are all from crappy state schools.

javajosh• 12 years ago

The first issue I'd like addressed is the outright fraud that is going on here: schools are hiring adjunct professors to teach class, and then don't pay them to grade papers or meat with students?

The other issue is the potential for market dynamics to correct these problems with college, if they exist: spending too much on admins, and skimping terribly on the teaching. Essentially kids are getting stiffed, and then employers are getting sub-par employees. If kids are going to college to get a better job, then these decisions on the part of schools are hurting them.

That said, if the economy really is all "bullshit jobs" (a sentiment that has floated around here recently) then the college admins know it won't matter how badly they educate the kids, and they'll never be found out. If that's the case, then I'd argue our larger concern is the fact that so many jobs are bullshit.

KoalaOnesie• 12 years ago

The author is correct, "adjunct" perfectly describes the fact that teaching is an add-on at most universities. Those institutions exist to obtain grants for research and donations from alumni. Educating undergrads is an unfortunately coincidence from the perspective of most tuition-gathering organizations.

webhat3• 12 years ago

I'm often sad and happy when reading this problem. Sad because it's the state of things, which sucks! And happy because the more that it's said the more chance there is that instructors will actually be paid well, and students can learn in an environment that doesn't treat their faculty as cheap throw away labor.

This addresses many of the issues that we are solving with our startup Oplerno.

crpatino4• 12 years ago

Exactly why do you think that discussing this issues in the open will automatically result in "instructors will actually be paid well, and students can learn in an environment that doesn't treat their faculty as cheap throw away labor."???

If the information in this article does not result in behavior changes (non tenured lecturers walking out of raw deals, or students requiring their University to disclose and guarantee a minimum percentage of courses taught by full time professors, or employers refusing to hire candidates coming out of degree mills) for a significant percentage of the incumbents, absolutely nothing is going to happen.

webhat3• 12 years ago

As a student, or parent, knowing that many universities are paying their adjunct instructors poorly meaning the instructors are turning their classes into popularity contests - by inflating grades and making the class 'easy' - to ensure that they have a job next year would worry me. I interpret it to mean that a degree from some 'reputable' universities might be as good as one of the degree mill universities. My hope is that this will worry people who are taking on huge debts for degrees which might turn out to be worthless.

The adjuncts in the article and the ones that have recently been in the news, such as the homeless professor in the NYT, are the tip of the iceberg. And without adjuncts talking about it in the open nobody would know.

The kind of behavior change you are suggesting doesn't happen overnight, and certainly doesn't happen without there being viable alternatives. This is why we are trying to create a viable alternative.

hibikir• 12 years ago

I think this is a natural result of having so many kids that have no idea of what to do in life.

Take a snapshot of the labor force of a country. Then try to figure out how many of those professions a high school kid understands. Do they know what those people find rewarding about their job? What they don't? Do they have any idea of how an entire career might look like? They don't. So when you ask one of those kids what they'll want to do when they stop formal education, they'll go back to the few things that they are taught are desirable, and the few other occupations that are close to them. One of which, for every single kid, is to teach, since they've been surrounded by them all their lives.

Keeping studying after getting a Bachelor's is also a very tempting option for kids that are afraid of change. Think of something very different from college, or get a master's? Go look for a job, or get a Ph.D? Inertia makes some people go for advanced degrees, even though they don't really understand the road they are getting into.

I know plenty of people who finished a Ph.D, started doing post docs, then realized that now their options had narrowed significantly, that the tenure track was not going to happen any time soon, so their options were to become adjuncts, study even more to consider teaching at a high school, or accept that 5-10 years worth of education was completely wasted. This leads to a major glut of qualified people, which then get paid very little.

I believe we should spend a whole lot of effort teaching kids what odds they are actually facing when they make their career choices. I still meet interns that are doing post graduate education at the same time that don't realize how terrible the odds really are, and that's with them working in a company that is one of the few industry outlets out there for people that went into Ph.Ds and then saw how scary the teaching market was, so it's not like they cannot hear plenty of stories.

Bad information just leads to bad resource allocation for all of us. We should help with that.

btown• 12 years ago

Passion is a weird thing. If a prospective adjunct walks up to you and says "I'm passionate about teaching in higher education," or "I derive what I judge to be a large amount of utility from the prospect of teaching in higher education," is it bad resource allocation for him or her to enter that market, because you think that if they had had a different set of inputs (information) earlier in their life, they may have become passionate about something else, or had a different weighting on their utility function? Who are we to say our ideas for what they should do are better?

By all means, we as a society should discourage people who don't know what they want to do from taking post-graduate education as a default choice, and we should discourage people who don't derive utility from teaching from being in the adjunct labor market. But I think that the majority of people in the adjunct labor market would actually say quotes like the ones above - they're not just "kids" without agency or passion for the work. And they would probably find it demeaning for the top post here to deign to "help" them to choose "rewarding... career choices." I'm pretty sure they've already chosen.

If we're going to spread information, let's focus on spreading transparency about hiring practices at universities to the students and grant-givers who fund their budgets.

Codhisattva• 12 years ago

RCA takes this back to Reagan's War on Education. It's ongoing and it's destroyed the most important institution in the nation.

Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

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