I was a professor at four universities. I still couldn’t make ends meet

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/03/06/i-was-a-professor-at-four-universities-i-still-couldnt-make-ends-meet/

by Perceptes • 11 years ago

117 96 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

bloataway• 11 years ago

It's an unpopular sentiment, but room for faculty like this can in my opinion be made pretty easily by firing a lot of administrators. In my department alone there are thirty staff whose responsibilities can be grouped under "corporate communications/contracts/fundraising". Each are paid six figures. If there was some tallying up of their money spent on salary alone vs. the amount of donations or research gifts they were responsible for, they would be far in the red. Yet for some reason, they have been allowed to persist for years. Back-of-the-envelope calculations say that we could get about $5,000,000 by doing a little belt tightening in our department alone (and they would not be missed).

Why do we need so many provosts, deans, and vice presidents? They don't bring in research money (professors do, writing grant proposals) and they don't bring in alumni donations (nobody knows what does that). In the scheme of things the larger problem is reduced state and federal spending on higher education but in the short term it seems that the logical action is in front of us, but we would instead prefer to milk the little people until they die.

pacala• 11 years ago

The signs of the post information revolution world. Most work is automated, even the work of automators. There are simply no more good honest jobs. The competition for honest jobs is so fierce, the market has driven the price of these jobs into the ground.

But the automated system keeps spinning! There is wealth to spread around. There is a make believe economy of paper pushers and loud talkers, who promote each other into cushy positions. Nobody dares to speak out. We're all the emperor, and we're all naked.

Welcome to the brave new world.

auxym• 11 years ago

Except administration is what should be mostly automated. Or at least, with computers, it should take far less people than when secretaries were banging on typewriters and financialists and accountants were sliding slide rules.

I can't see research and teaching become automated.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

I will go a different, likely even more unpopular direction.

The article stated the problem clearly, there are too many graduating with the proper credentials who want these jobs. Resorting to union representation is the sign of a system where oversupply being met with stubborn resistance to that fact.

This is not to say that schools are not middle or top heavy. Education as a whole has become far to expensive for the value of the education provided. This is because of the simple fact money is loaned nearly without question to what studies the students want or receive.

The real fix is reigning in the loans. Set costs either at the class or degree level and have colleges comply with it to have students eligible to receive the federal loans to attend that school. The government already restricts cost in the payouts for medical treatments and such, there is little reason it cannot do this in the realm of education if its the one providing the funds. Just like how government money brings along rules with how students are treated so can it do with how degrees if not courses are valued.

Surely many colleges will step up to the plate to offer acceptable cost degrees. There is too much money on the table for them to ignore it.

Still as he points out, there is oversupply because colleges are not required to tell students that while there may be jobs they don't pay what students expect nor pay what they once did. Firing others to raise that pay is not the solution, the solution is guiding students into good careers adn reigning in the costs of obtaining the degrees necessary

stevesearer• 11 years ago

Are you saying that the government should put a cap on tuition costs? So instead of a student spending $40k on an English degree, that degree might be capped at $20k or something to that effect?

superuser2• 11 years ago

If you are offering elimination of credit availability as a solution to the oversupply of professors, fine, but let's be clear that you believe wealth of parents is a good metric by which to decide who does and doesn't get to be a professor. Let that sink in.

If you believe that colleges will lower costs to meet the lower supply of tuition money, then we'd be looking at an even larger oversupply - more people would be able to afford college.

Also, let's keep in mind that when you dump every liberal arts major into engineering and computer science, engineering and computer science graduates stop being hard to find and become worthless.

pXMzR2A• 11 years ago

Resorting to union representation is the sign of

organizing to get fair compensation.

Spooky23• 11 years ago

I'd say the issue at hand is that as a society we have an over saturation of universities and a lack of vocational training. We churn out 3rd tier MBAs and Attorneys by the dozen, but you cannot find a plumber with a clue under 50 to save your life.

wfo• 11 years ago

I would be shocked to find anyone other than an administrator who disagrees with the notion that there is far too much administrative bloat in almost every university. But administrators are the ones with essentially all the power in the university governance structure and they certainly won't fire themselves.

jerf• 11 years ago

No, they absolutely won't. Look for Universities not to fix themselves, but to be largely side-stepped by alternative education techniques, until such time as the Universities are simply unable to ignore the fact that they are no longer the only source of "higher education".

It'll probably be a twenty-year process, but as long as the Universities prefer to withdraw on their several hundred years of respect until that account is absolutely drained rather than become cheaper or better for the masses, no other outcome is possible. And at the moment I see no reason to believe the Universities will budge until they've run those accounts absolutely dry. The administrators will happily ride this ride into the ground... what else is in it for them?

(Look for ever more desperate appeals to the aforementioned multi-century "respect" account as they go down. Personally I'm more interested in the first derivative and it is clearly negative. Spend, spend, spend, it's all they seem to know how to do, for every account they can get their hands on.)

pakled_engineer• 11 years ago

My fave nonsense title at my old university is "Provost and Associate Vice-President Strategic Relations Management" who is paid $300k/year with full housing benefits and guaranteed 5 year term.

tsotha2• 11 years ago

It's a patronage job. Most of them are.

pmiller2• 11 years ago

firing a lot of administrators

As a data point, the university I went to grad school at has an administrator:faculty ratio of 1:1. This is not unusual.

jldugger3• 11 years ago

How do you count that? Just people who manage faculty? Or do you count HR staff, grounds keepers, admissions clerks, and such in that count?

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

It's definitely very bizarre. I used to work for a software company as a technical consultant, and one of my coworkers got poached by a prestigious private university in the area. They gave him a fancy job title and doubled his salary. We were talking the other day and he confided in me that the job is the easiest in the world and he doesn't do much.

I admit that part of me envies him. But I don't think I could do it in a position like that. Not only would I be terribly bored, I would also feel guilty for raking in so much money for so little work.

x0x0• 11 years ago

You'll find this data interesting: a graph of the growth of management vs faculty at the UC over time [1]. Apparently UC senior administrators now well outnumber faculty! Which is pretty fucking unbelievable. Money quote:

   For another comparison, the latest total number in this management category 
   (SMG + MSP) is 9,457 FTE (full time equivalent employees) while the number 
   of Regular Teaching Faculty is 8,657 FTE.

[1] http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2013/01/uc-administration-cont...

fiatmoney• 11 years ago

"Why do we need so many provosts, deans, and vice presidents?"

For one thing, compliance with extensive regulatory & reporting mandates.

Universities aren't really about "education" primarily. They're a bundle of a semi-autonomous community, grant-funded research labs, landlords, police departments, public health services, etc., with "running classes" as a small part of their overall portfolio. It's not surprising that when they try to do so much they need a lot of people to administer the effort.

nharada• 11 years ago

don't bring in alumni donations (nobody knows what does that)

Undergrads in call centers

personlurking• 11 years ago

This 4-minute video came out the other day, titled "What's It Like Being An Adjunct Professor? The sad, secret lives of community college teachers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQ4KIOqNic

ZanyProgrammer4• 11 years ago

Now being a full time community college instructor isn't bad-I remember looking up the salaries for my instructors at DeAnza College, and they were fairly respectable (high 5 figures salary plus bennies).

twblalock2• 11 years ago

De Anza is one of the better community colleges in an area with high cost of living. In other places, community college instructors make a lot less.

guard-of-terra• 11 years ago

Serious question: why don't they go overseas, at least some of them? Is situation equally bad everywhere? Even if it is, maybe there's a sweet slot or two for certified americans?

sampo• 11 years ago

At least European countries, they also have an oversupply of academic people.

declan• 11 years ago

I've taught as an adjunct or equivalent at three universities. Two public, one private. Two gigs were during the school year, and one was an abbreviated summer program.

I don't remember the summer program rate, but I recall the school-year rates were around $3,500 per course. That was fine if you had a full-time day job, as I did, and the classes were in the late afternoon or evening and your employer didn't mind your moonlighting.

I taught the classes because I enjoyed the experience, not for the money. I've met plenty of people in the same position: Peter Thiel presumably did not teach his now-famous Stanford course for the salary. So to that extent, the Trinity administrator quoted in the linked article is correct.

But I suspect most adjuncts do not have non-academic careers. So they're struggling, especially in expensive metro areas (in part because they're competing against people like me that might be convinced to teach a single seminar for virtually nothing if we get to pick the topic). But it's a bigger problem than that: as <bloataway> suggests, it's middle management bloat, coupled with an oversupply of qualified instructors, government-subsidized loans, etc. Not a simple problem.

caminante2• 11 years ago

I taught the classes because I enjoyed the experience, not for the money.

This point's key. People will do it for "free" out of personal-fulfillment, driving down costs.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

Also likely delivering a much higher-quality work. But this kind of better-work-lower-pay situation is not something you can plan for or base your business around. I can see this messing things up in interesting ways.

ZanyProgrammer4• 11 years ago

I remember off the top of my head two CS instructors at my community college being full time engineers. They certainly werent doing it for the money.

glial• 11 years ago

school-year rates were around $3,500 per course.

That's crazy. I've paid more than that to take a course from an adjunct, and I was one of 20+ students.

bsder2• 11 years ago

I don't remember the summer program rate, but I recall the school-year rates were around $3,500 per course.

That's the right range. And it creates a "damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't" situation.

Students deserve to have some industry experienced teachers. Many of my students got a lot more education about the corporate world than they expected.

However, if I take the job teaching for that, I'm contributing to the downward pressure on the salaries. And that makes their academic teachers worse.

caminante2• 11 years ago

"I taught as many as five classes each semester at four campuses in D.C. and Maryland, crisscrossing town by bike and public transportation during work days that sometimes lasted 13 hours. I never knew what my employment would look like the following term and constantly applied for part- and full-time teaching positions in case I didn’t get rehired."

That sounds like excessive churn for $27-35K/year.

I'm sympathetic to improving the adjunct eco-system, but how much of the blame should be placed on people taking on debt to finance careers with fading prospects? Maybe the folks who went in right as the system shifted get a pass, but have we passed a point (like with law schools) where you lose the ability to complain and should've known better?

frozenport2• 11 years ago

Not all disciplines are alike, for example a lecturer in Electrical Engineering at my Alma mater makes 80k.

redgrange• 11 years ago

What school? And is it for 9months or 12 months?

bachmeier3• 11 years ago

It's not uncommon for lecturers in high-paying fields to make more than tenured faculty in the low-paying fields.

rhino369• 11 years ago

Lecturers and adjuncts are not the same thing. The former is a fulltime job and the latter is a part time job. Lecturer just means you aren't tenure track and don't do research.

yzh• 11 years ago

I read the title as: I was a professor at four universes, which changes everything.

jkot• 11 years ago

Could someone confirm what "professor" exactly means in this case? In Europe it is very prestige academic position. Professor at four universities would be something like winning Nobel price.

frozenport2• 11 years ago

An adjunct professor in Europe would be a part time lecturer. In CS fields the post is rare, and usually reserved for practicing developers who teach a class on the side or engage in research out of a company.

bachmeier3• 11 years ago

The terminology is chosen selectively to deliver a provocative headline. At most US universities, the title "professor" is the highest academic rank (there are chaired professors, but that is just a full professor with the benefits of a chair). "I taught classes at four universities" doesn't draw the same number of clicks.

jfoutz2• 11 years ago

In the US, there's the internal title system [1] that varies from university to university. Sometimes adjunct is synonymous with lecturer, sometimes lecturer is above adjunct.

Few undergrads really pick up on the internal ranking, and just call their instructors professors. Anyone outside of academia is just going to call somebody who teaches at college professor, even if they're not a Professor. it's kind of like talking to a paleontologist about dinosaurs, or complaining to an astronomer that pluto should be a planet. You know, it's internal technical jargon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_(United_States)

TheCoelacanth• 11 years ago

In the US "professor" means anyone who teaches at a college level. The usage is very different than in Europe.

ZanyProgrammer4• 11 years ago

In my experience, instructor is a more popular term at the community college level.

Steuard• 11 years ago

As a formal title, "Professor" in most US institutions is the highest academic rank, above "Associate Professor" [frequently granted along with tenure after about 6 years and a successful assessment by the institution] and "Assistant Professor" [recently hired tenure-track faculty]. Also not uncommon is "Visiting Assistant Professor" [usually short-term non-tenure track faculty hired for 1-3 years as sabbatical replacements or to fill a (supposedly) short-term need]. Informally, all of these are referred to as, e.g., "Professor Smith" (much as a Lieutenant General might be called "General Smith" in conversation).

Adjuncts (whose contracts are course-by-course rather than for any fixed length) are commonly given a title like "Instructor" or "Visiting Instructor", though there may be places that would assign a "Visiting Assistant Professor" title to an adjunct with a Ph.D. ("Lecturer" is less common in the US, in my experience, and often implies a longer-term non-tenure-track faculty position.) As often as not, students don't pay that much attention to whether a given instructor is an adjunct, so it's pretty common for them to be called "Professor Smith", too.

So in the broadest usage in the US (which I think is pretty typical among people who don't work in academia), "Professor" winds up meaning "any college/university level instructor", while "Teacher" means "any elementary/middle/high school instructor".

twblalock2• 11 years ago

Despite the assertions made in the article, the adjunct system is sustainable, because there is no shortage of naive, delusional people who will complete graduate degrees despite knowing full well the state of the academic job market.

I know people stuck on the treadmill of adjuncting, and their resistance to the idea of working outside of academia is amazing. They are still holding out for the impossible.

jldugger3• 11 years ago

Protip: Adjunct faculty is not a job. It is a side-gig that you take while working a day job in industry. It is not something you settle for instead of a tenure track position. And if adjunct positions are all you're landing, this is academia's hint to go find a job in industry.

You were planning that as a fallback, right?

ZanyProgrammer4• 11 years ago

What industry are history and political science adjuncts supposed to work in? Government?

tikhonj• 11 years ago

Finance, compliance, HR, marketing, advertising, business development... there are lots of jobs that require some degree, but don't really care what it was in.

none_for_me_thx• 11 years ago

Government is not "industry". That word usually means "private sector".

If you receive low wages in the private sector, it might be an indication that you're not providing much value, and that your time and effort are probably better spent in some other endeavour. It could also be an indication of some artificial or temporary misallocation of resources. The same goes for high wages. You could be providing genuine value, or your profit could be due to some intervention or other.

In the meantime, people who can't make a living doing teaching shouldn't teach. Or they shouldn't do it as their day job. At the very least, they shouldn't demand other people subsidize their choices.

Perceval• 11 years ago

Yes, if you're located in DC.

jldugger3• 11 years ago

What industry are history and political science adjuncts supposed to work in? Government?

This is something you should have figured out before borrowing money for grad school. If there's truly no outlets commensurate with the debt, that's a powerful signal you should pay attention to.

Which brings up rule #2: if you can't convince someone to pay your way through grad school, don't borrow for one.

tsotha2• 11 years ago

Instead of unions or new laws or strong-arming from DoE, what really needs to happen is people need to realize there are far too many people trying to teach at the college level. Stories like this in WaPo are a good start.

There's no reason anyone should feel they're entitled to a career in academia anymore than we can all make a living as park rangers or porn stars.

swatow• 11 years ago

Yes. This is just the sound of the free market telling you to get a different job.

dataminded4• 11 years ago

"I never knew what my employment would look like the following term and constantly applied for part- and full-time teaching positions in case I didn’t get rehired."

Why is the right answer to invest more money in adjuncts and not to encourage adjuncts to find other jobs? If he loves to teach, why not become a public school teacher? Many districts are experiencing critical shortages.

Nobody is entitled to a job in academia and if you are educated enough to do that, you are almost certainly educated enough to do many other more lucrative things. To the extent that an adjunct is a PhD that did not succeed in the academic job market, the right answer is not to force universities to make room for them anyway.

Universities have a perverse incentive to saturate the market with graduates that they can hire back for little to no money. That needs to change also.

dogma1138• 11 years ago

So basically a substitute teacher for the Academia complaining she can't get enough hours? Jeesh.

Too many professors, not enough classes, and most likely many of the adjuncts do not teach classes that could justify any type of full time position at the institute to begin with.

I would be much more concerned at the fact that many full time K-12 teachers do not make ends meet.

My GF worked as a PE teacher for 2-3 years and was in the same boat, many schools do not hire full time PE teachers, or just hire one and use 2-3 more part time each week. Since you are not full time you get much less benefits (e.g. no summer pay, no additional "non-teaching" work hours etc.) you also tend to be paid at the lowest band of salaries regardless of you experience. But she wasn't complaining that the system was broken, she understood very well how the system works for many subjects. When you only teach 10 or so hours a week it's kinda hard to justify a full time position.

And while the 13 hours work days might seem back breaking (and they are) these are because you work at 3 schools, and have to travel in between, if 5-6 hours of your day is travel it might suck but you can't really claim you are forced to work 13 hours either.

I was a professor at four universities. I still couldn’t make ends meet

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