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Comment by bjd2385 | Hacker News Reader

My mother is an adjunct math professor at three universities in the Western NY area. She teaches 7 classes to support the family while she's also going for her PhD (she's got like a 3.98 GPA or something btw).

The thing that gets me is that we look around and the campuses have millions to put up for new buildings and infrastructure and sports, etc. But here they can't give my mother a full time job with benefits.

Education is nothing more than an industry. They don't care if I pass or succeed, as long as they've got a job at the end of the day. I'm convinced of that.

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Three things colleges care about:

1. Enrollment 2. Retention 3. Graduation with a job.

Enrollment is priority one, so they need nice campuses to get you in the door, good facilities to entice you to come. They'll advertise small class sizes with individualized attention because the current generation loves to hear that. (Of course this means they need more faculty to be there in the room.)

Graduation with a job is second because they need to show that people come out of the school. This of course becomes marketing material for #1.

Retention is the one they leave up to the departments and faculty.

You're not entirely wrong, but due to funding models of state colleges, these priorities may be a bit different.

In Ohio, for quite some time, state funding was based on enrollment, so that's what state universities did: enroll as many students as they could.

Then, it was decided that enrollment was a terrible thing to incentivize because the incremental enrollees were far more likely to drop out. So the state switched to funding based on graduation numbers, so retention and graduation are far more important and universities have tightened their enrollment standards and started building stronger relationships with community colleges.

That's what the state prioritizes.

But at the college level, enrollment is always prioritized because people who come in don't always complete. Attrition, transfers, etc.

So enrollment must be way over 100% each year to have a shot at getting graduation and retention numbers that don't look terrible.

So the state sets priorities, but the college has to meet them however they can.

At least with enrollment incentives, the deleterious effects on education itself are only indirect. Incentives for graduation rate directly promote grade inflation.

My wife works in primary-age education, and is fiendishly smart and academic, with a degree from arguably the best university in the world, again with a tilt towards maths.

She could have easily gone and become an actuary, an i-banker, or a management consultant, but she didn't, because she wanted to be a teacher. This decision costs us ~$100k a year as a household.

Schools are able to hire people like my wife at below her "market" value because you don't need to be anywhere near as smart as my wife to be a teacher, and because there are couples like us who can walk away from more money for the improved lifestyle.

Why would a responsible organisation pay more?

> She could have easily gone and become an actuary, an i-banker, or a management consultant, but she didn't, because she wanted to be a teacher. This decision costs us ~$100k a year as a household.

Probably more like $400-450k per year. And if you're fiendishly good as an investment banker, a lot more than that.

I agree with your main point, but mentioning new construction is something of a non-sequitur because that funding usually comes from donors.

We might be able to make the case that the donations don't cover the ongoing cost of operating the new buildings, but at least at my institution, the new buildings are usually energy-efficient replacements for old ones.

But yeah, the whole thing is nutty: a few years ago at a Chamber of Commerce function, one of our extremely wealthy doners (you probably know of them) told the audience members that they should be providing a certain minimal level of funding to athletics, even if it meant reducing their normal contribution to the academic side.

Where I'm from an adjunct is an assistant professor. That is somebody who already has a PhD. Does adjunct mean something different in the US?

I teach in a college math department in the US. A typical adjunct for us would have a Masters degree and teach one or two sections of Elementary Stats. So, no PhD.

An assistant professor is a full time position. An adjunct is like the contractor/part time version of an assistant professor. The result is that adjuncts typically teach at multiple institutions, for example an R1 research university, plus a couple of local community colleges because 1 or 2 classes at one school is not enough to pay a livable wage.

In regards to credentials, in the US they can either have a PhD, be pursuing a PhD or have completed their Masters, but it depends on the institution's requirements to teach (and the classes they are teaching). You wouldn't have a Masters grad teaching graduate classes or an ABD teaching PhDs. Most well respected higher education institutions require a PhD to be an assistant professor (full time) but only be pursuing a PhD to be an adjunct/part time assistant professor teaching undergraduates.

>Education is nothing more than an industry. They don't care if I pass or succeed, as long as they've got a job at the end of the day. I'm convinced of that.

Oh definitely. Admittedly, if you're an undergrad right now, a certain percentage of you are expected to fail, each and every year, because (it's assumed) you're just stupid or lazy.

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