Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.

I only do this because I like teaching, so this is not my main source of income. I am not in the verge of homelessness because I do programming for a living. But the problem is still the same: Universities are charging astronomical tuitions and then paying a laughable part of them to teachers.

It does not make any sense, and IMO that explains in part why University education is losing its value: you get overworked and unmotivated teachers as a student, so you may better learn your stuff online.

In the last decade, universities have shifted teaching responsibilities from full-time, tenure track positions to part-time adjunct positions. Today, half of all teaching positions are part-time and include no benefits. Adjuncts are paid an average of $2,987 per semester-long course[3]. That's less than $1000 a month. If you've ever taught a college class before and realize how much preparation it actually takes, an ostensibly "part-time" position easily demands 40-60 hours of work a week.

In some fields, over-supply is helping drive this trend[4]. We produce more History PhDs than there are jobs to fill. This weakens the bargaining power that academics have on the market. But this does not absolve universities from their role in the immiseration of academics – after all, they continue to accept more PhD candidates with full knowledge that most of them will never find gainful employment in their field. This is not surprising given the fact that departments now rely on _graduate students_ to teach one-fifth of their course loads[5].

The "casualization" of post-secondary teaching is also a disservice to students, many of whom don't realize that the bulk of their instruction is now done by overworked, underpaid adjuncts who don't have the time or incentive to do their best work.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/posts... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_101.20.a... [3] http://www.chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Project-Shows-Wide/... [4] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/11/grad [5] https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts

I think that some fault lies with unrealistic expectations. Every liberal arts graduate student knows that there are only enough positions for 1 in 10 of their cohort, but each firmly believes that they will be in that 10%. Worse, many who are talented enough to actually be in that 10% self-sabotage by being unwilling to move to locations they perceive as less than desirable.

Same for other "liberal-arts" degrees.

Because that would be like saying "hey, there is a big white elephant in the room!" to the room's occupants, when there is indeed precisely such a beast in that room.

Such as proclamation is rather more befitting of, say, the Economics faculty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

Humanities students do indeed go on to earn less, but the differences are much more slight than stereotypes would have you think. They also narrow as people progress in their careers:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/05/new-data-what...

There are indeed too many PhDs minted in the humanities, but I'd say this also applies to pretty much every field other than, perhaps, CS. Times are pretty tight for bench and social sciences as well.

It's a demand-side problem. Most higher education is funded by state and federal government, and they have been cutting funding dramatically, reducing demand for skilled academics.

It doesn't have to be that way. The U.S. could fund higher education at the levels it used to, and fund reasonable incomes for the higher ed workforce. To create a less educated population than the prior generation is to go backward.

Lately, I've been finding myself frequently thinking: "That's Texas."

Let me get this straight. Take a course load of 4 double semester courses per year with 200 hours of class time total in the given year. Let's double it to 400 hours just to be safe to include exam marking and office hours. A single student paying $30k per year is paying $75 / hour / student, or an annualized salary of $150k / year.

True, you can't work all year round, but the average adjunct earns less than a single average student's tuition?! Where does all the money go? How is the market so broken?

I've got friends who are working on their PhDs while teaching 4-5 classes (at other locations). I considered being a TA a few years ago, but you couldn't have a second job. The stipend as a TA was $1300 a month + tuition for 40 hour weeks (may have actually been "20" hour weeks, not certain). Yeah, right.

It's pretty screwed up. It's a privilege to be in higher education but it is also pretty crushing and you've got to be a soldier to deal with it. The worst part is I've almost never met anything but great people who willingly put themselves through it.

It's why as an overeducated graduate student, I'm against expanding education more and more (like free community college for all). The incentives are way off currently, not sure what the solution is, but it has to change.

The truth is, the brilliant professors are surrounded by mediocre professors, who in turn are dwarfed by the numbers of administrators and staff. At the vast majority of universities you are unlikely to get taught by anyone especially brilliant.

A university education was a bit of an expensive luxury in the past, now with the internet it's far more true.

No they're not. STEM professors get paid quite well.

In a time of bullshit thought leaders and companies like Equifax who will tell you obvious lies, the academic discipline with its rigor, criticalness, and policing against self-promotion is a kind of last-bastion for intellect in the West. And even that is sort of cracking.

BTW one country has already tried the “you can only get useful degrees that have immediately available needs route”. It was the Soviet Union, in which everyone was an engineer, to such absurd levels Gorbachev got his degree in “Steel Metallurgy of Ball Bearings”.

- There are far more qualified people than could ever be eaten up by the demand for them.

- In practice, most workers of this type can't make it their only job.

- Though a small fraction at the top are extremely well compensated.

- Unionization can allow workers to capture more of the surplus (and has, for actors), but the oversupply is so extreme that it still wouldn't make the job a viable career path for the typical qualified applicant.

My previous HN exchange on this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964421

Here we go again. Please show evidence that it works. Oh right, there isn't any. Please point to a reasonably complete economic model that shows it will work.

Online courses are great, but they don't replace everything. I don't think the future of universities is bleak. The explanations above considering that we have a surplus of Ph.D.'s seems to be a lot more likely of a cause to this. Simple supply and demand.

That effect only seems to be growing. That said, certainly do agree with you in principle.

The whole prestige of academia isn't access to information: internet has more academic content than any university(e.g. Sci-hub, Arxiv, book sites, online courses). Universities own vast collections of lab equipment/tools/devices which universities can afford due economy of scale(serving groups), this "lab-grade" stuff is out of budget for most people. Of course there are areas where research can be done with older, cheaper and simpler equipment, but cutting edge science is confined to top-hardware owners: An example is amateur astronomers having much less capable telescopes and recording equipment, but still capable of advancing science with affordable devices.

Weird, my professors answered questions that I and my coursemates had.

I thought in The Netherlands that higher education was effectively free.

Teaching salaries are low relative to education level because lots of people are socially pushed toward teaching (obvious example: many people's mentors are teachers). Programming doesn't have this dynamic.

I'm not opposed to unionization - I joined the new grad student union when I was getting my PhD. But I think you should focus on programmers' specific problems, like long hours and low vacation time, not on problems from other jobs which have low relevance.

If you need to qualify to join a union, or to do a specific job in a union, the qualifications will be owned by the companies which are politically powerful.

Imagine being unable to qualify as a C++ programmer unless and until you've qualified on Microsoft Windows and Visual C++.

Imagine being unable to qualify as a Perl programmer at all, because Perl isn't one of the technologies owned by a major corporation.

And, of course, doing freelance work, or contributing to Open Source, makes you a scab, stealing work from Poor, Honest Union Workers.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/30/academic-b...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argu...

https://www.agb.org/trusteeship/2013/5/changing-academic-wor...

I learned that for the budget of most research projects, 50% was administration. That is 50% wasn't for researchers, the lab, labor, or equipment. Part of the 50% administration budget was paying for the oversight of said budget.

I am no longer amazed when government projects go severely overbudget anymore. Its designed to do that. Not just the contractor but the government itself. Budget a project, get the vendor, project goes over, create a department to track costs, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, budget goes over, create another department to track budget, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, ad nauseum.

And then they come to us for tax dollars, while also slashing their involvement with local communities. Why should education tax money go to universities that are so woefully inefficient and bloated with money when it could be spent on primary and secondary education, or better access to preschooling?

This problem is further aggravated by the fact that students often choose Universities based upon reputation and are therefore rather insensitive to price increases, so extra spend on administrative staff is easy to find. In addition to this the government gives away student loans that matches rising tuition costs and because you can't get rid of student loans in bankruptcy it is an attractive asset class even for private lenders.

Other situations are complex - grants/external funding impose substantial administration requirements (while being larger and larger shares of revenue) or require substantial administrative expertise, often require things like outreach programs which PIs don't want to deal with, etc.

But at the same time, I think administrative salaries are frequently unconscionable.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

"...some of this probably relates to a difference between personal versus institutional risk tolerance."

> Critical Thinking

> English composition

> poem

> history

The good things in life are unpaid

This is a socially productive vocation that we should capitalise on as a society, to exploit it is demeaning for all of us and eventually destructive of our social fabric.

Some of them believe that the only way to avoid being a failure is to work at a university.

Some of them believe non-academic work is worse than what they are doing already.

Some of them only want to live in their current town and this lets them do it.

Some of them have difficulty changing fields. Having a graduate degree, especially a PhD, in a humanities field can make it hard to get a job in another field.

A few of them are just not suited to doing other work. Most employers simply wouldn't want to hire them.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4484...

I was once an underemployed English major seriously considering applying for grad programs in literature[1]. Instead, I went back to school to build up the necessary math and CS and ended up getting an MS in engineering. Many years later, I was startled with how accurately this article explained what was going on in my head when I was trying to figure out what to do.

This article really does an amazing job explaining why people do go into these fields when the market is practically screaming that they shouldn't.

[1] this was in the recession of the early-mid 90s, and I was in SoCal which had been very hard hit by government cutbacks. I noticed that humanities majors who graduated just five years later, at the start of the first dot-com boom, did far better.

To expand on this a bit - it really showed me how much the conditions you graduate into make a difference! As a new grad, in a recession, you're competing with people with much more experience for entry level jobs. In a boom, those more experienced people are moving into higher level positions, and are often looking to hire new people themselves. If you get one of these jobs, you can build a critical few years of experience. Eventually, a recession will come along, but you're in a far better position to weather it if you graduated into a better economy and got some more experience under your belt. Had I graduated into a better economy, and found better work as a lit major, who knows? My career path might have been dramatically different.

This leads to another thing I've noticed - think of your career path as a vector field. What happens with the first couple of arrow can make a massive difference in where you are a decade or more later. Some degrees and majors are more resilient than others. For instance, I've read that graduates of Harvard are less affected by the economy the graduate into than people from less prestigious universities. This may be because the reputation and network provides you with multiple re-entry paths - in short, you can always find an up arrow in that vector field, even if you have to wait a few years to get it. Other graduates who start on a down arrow may get caught in a downward current. Five years later, when things improve, they're competing with recent grads for entry level jobs, and employers prefer to go straight to the schools than hire someone who seems to have floundered for the last half decade.

I think engineering and other in demand majors are also a way to get on to an up arrow on the vector field. Even in a recession, the engineering students still seem to get decent jobs - they may not rocket upward right away, but they get into an updraft to the point where they're positioned to advance once the conditions emerge. They don't get stuck in the underemployment rut that can afflict people with less desirable majors from lower ranked schools.

There really is quite a bit of randomness and luck to career paths. You can do great with a lit degree from a relatively unknown college, but some degrees are much more resilient than others.

I know several adjuncts that teach law/business and they are largely indifferent to their adjunct pay - a drop in the bucket. The title 'adjunct lecturer' confers high-valued benefits of prestige, networking, and depending on the course, specialization signaling that helps fuel their practices.

edit- spelling load -> loan.

I'm a programmer, and a PhD student's time is worth a certain amount to me -- at least, as a tutor on subjects I never got to learn but have an interest in. After all, most of the graduate students, adjuncts, etc have worked as tutors and instructors. Presumably, this is true of some fraction of other programmers. So you can support a community of some size by selling lessons -- it just requires substantially adjusting the business arrangement, eg, teaching evening advanced math classes that I can easily take 1 at a time of.

It's actually near that point -- for what I would pay for lessons, you'd only really need 10-15 students to have an okay job (def: median household income where I live). So there my be some sort of actual logistics problem we can solve with technology here. (As an off-the-cuff idea: Kickstarter an evening class; prepay with limited refunds, etc. It wouldn't cost much for adjuncts to try.)

For me the value of lecturers is that they respond to the needs of the group they are teaching and to the individuals on the outliers of the group. That interaction is what changes the educational trajectory of students from fail->pass and from pass->excel.

I find it hard to harden my heart to the idea that people who work to do that should be ill rewarded for the effort.

Not so much lecturers but curriculum. I can't tell you how many developers I've met that don't know much about designing relational database models, which is arguably the most important, if not the longest lasting part of business application development.

When you are self taught, the stuff you decide to learn, you can really master. It's the stuff that you decide to put off that is actually important that hurts you.

Obviously if you engage in class you often get immediate clarity on issues that you may have had to research for hours in a different source than your online material.

If you're not taking advantage of the lecturer, then it is on you, and obviously you won't get much more out of it than an online course with little to no feed back

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

Second, shared resources like laboratory equipment or an auditorium can be of value. A university could develop unique offerings there, that other entities wouldn't willing to provide.

1-reason.com/reasontv/2017/09/26/stossel-entrepreneur-saves-free-college

If you think about it, humans are unique among all other species in that we do have a dedicated category of productive workers whose only task is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Few other species have any concept of teaching, and without permanent records, no mass culture or collective wisdom that can extend beyond a particular group or tribe.

There are several schools of teaching. One, that I don't subscribe to, is that of the student as a vessel to be filled. This strikes me as all sorts of wrong.

Another takes its lead from the root of the word information itself: to inform. That is, to leave an imprint that recalls the original. This view also recognises the difference between explicit knowledge, that which can be transferred by words or writing, and tacit knowledge, which ultimately has to be experienced. Even much of the information we tend to think of as explicit has a very large element of tacit-nature to it. There are concepts I've been using, working with, and being exposed to (through writing, reading, lectures, video, and even experienc) for decades that I have only recently come up with far better understandings of.

(Example from the past week: maser and laser technology are the molecular equivalents of electronic oscillators used in radio, and achieve much the same ends: a highly uniform, high-capacity information channel. This a realisation despite having first learned of lasers and masers in the 1970s. And yes, this was an insight I'd arrived at myself, but it's taken me three decades on from Uni to reach that stage -- rather inefficient.)

What a good teacher understands is not merely the subject but the transmission of understanding of the subject -- where students get stuck, how to progress through intermediate understandings, exercises which truly cement critical concepts, or operations, or techniques, in the neural wiring of the student's brain. Teaching is itself a skill deeply founded in tacit knowledge, difficult to express in verbal form. As with a coach, or music teacher, or dance instructor, often the trick comes from hints and prompts which nudge the student in the right direction.

Another element is simply enthusiasm for the subject. I've taken classes I really had no particular interest in only to discover that the instructor was deeply immersed in, and truly loved. (I'll occasionally experience this listening to lectures or interviews on topics I'm not particularly interested in, but where the speaker has an absolutely infectious attachment.) Contrast with multiple topics I'd launched into with gusto myself only to find that a teacher, or author, or lecturer was unable to communicate, not only the material itself, but any interest whatsoever in it.

That's the inherent value of lecturers.

You can get away with paying those adjuncts a pretty low wage. But then it drives the cost of adjuncts down across the board.

The problem really comes in when you are in a field that doesn't afford you full-time non-academic employment, such as the arts or sciences such as archaeology etc. and are teaching full time to pay the bills (or not, as the case may be).

Adjuncts are a cost for the university, their salary is a liability on the budget line. Professors are a net positive. They have high salaries but they bring in millions of dollars in grants and attract talented students who can be paid worse than adjuncts (and teach classes).

Adjuncts are space fillers. When a university can't goad a professor, post-doc, or grad student to teach the 101 class they farm it out to a Adjunct.

The skills needed to teach the entry level courses are basic, so there is a wide field of individuals who can fill that role. As a result the pay is not great.

Just so you have an idea, 4 courses per semester amount to what would be a full time job (if done right). In my experience most adjuncts / instructors have to teach up to 6 courses per semester, which results in them either being overworked, or doing a shitty job at teaching.

Not that this invalidates your conclusion, I find the difference between what the school charges versus what goes into the teachers' salary mind boggling.

The same can be asked about sugary drinks, and cable news television. Fortunately, since all of those things make a lot of money, nobody ever questions whether or not those things should still be sold.

The problem, at least in my diagnosis, is that there is a huge disconnect between the "ideal education" and education in practice. Even at elite institutions known for the quality of their teaching, half or more of the work is done by screening their applicants and admitting only those who are equipped to succeed. In other words, the summa cum laude graduate from a state's flagship school would probably be a summa cum laude graduate anywhere. The same phenomenon is seen in charter schools, who pad their statistics by choosing only excellent students, and then claim that their better outcomes demonstrate the superiority of their management.

A useful concrete example is my academic department. We are well known for the quality of our teaching, and even provide graduate students with specific and well tested training in pedagogy, which is extremely rare in a STEM field. (This isn't to say we slack in research; this is a top school in the field. In other words, our graduates go to prestigious postdocs almost without exception, though in recent years its been getting harder and harder.) Nevertheless, we are ultimately limited by what we have to work with. If you have motivated students, you can teach excellent classes covering difficult material. If your students are unmotivated and without preparation, there is simply a limit to what you can teach them.

People who work in higher ed in less than prestigious institutions do not have the advantages we do. Their students are often (but not universally) less motivated and prepared than ours, so they have to work much harder to teach the same material. The problem is that everyone is already working as hard as they can, so in the end they are probably doomed to fail. They will retreat onto statements like "teaching how to learn." Yes, in theory, that is what the value of a liberal arts education is - you learn not only the curriculum but also acquire the attributes of an educated mind: how to think and reason; how to acquire more knowledge when needed; how to communicate both verbally and in writing. This is the "ideal education." Nevertheless you will simply never acquire this if you lack the tools necessary to do so - and if you have these tools, you will acquire them regardless of where you go.

The answer is that, frankly, college is pretty useless for most students. If you can make education work for you, you are very likely to succeed anyway. Personally, I cherish my education. I benefit tremendously from it, and at this point, my education colors my entire existence. Nevertheless, most of my high school classmates - even those who did relatively well in class - were woefully unprepared to take advantage of a college education. A corollary to this is that, no matter how much you value the academic lifestyle, it is extremely irrational to continue working in it unless you are a "winner."

I don't think that skipping college and putting the funds you have into bitcoin is anywhere as risk-free as going to college in the scenario I outlined.

>Was there a US president coming at your graduation and promising you a bright future if you pursued your academical ambitions?

Yes, it's pretty typical for a prestigious public official to speak at graduations and say basically that.

So long as diploma issuance is still tightly controlled by the educational cartels, MOOCs will make next to zero difference.

You're right that each actor is making (more or less) rational decisions, but federal subsidies for student loans are what throws a wrench into the mix. Previously, the decisions were all the same, but consumers had much more limited capital and were far more price sensitive.

Now they can get bigger loans much more easily, and sure enough, they're willing to pay higher prices. The less the consumer knows / cares about the price of something, the faster that price will increase. See also: health care in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginity_auction

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html