How did we discard the idea of college faculty?
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
This only means that technology changes and many industries are maturing. This is a good thing.
"We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded bookkeepers: by finally letting women do it after decades of declaring that impossible, and then immediately reducing the status of the work once it became evident that women could, in fact, do it well."
I never saw any supporting evidence that we are suddenly paying professors less because we know more women are getting positions.
Once a professor is tenured, they can pretty much do anything they want and have a job for life. I can't really say that about any job I've ever had.
I also don't think being a professor was ever a path to riches and wealth. It was a way to do what you love and still make a living.
This is hardly an apt comparison. The skills required to drive a cab were never worthy of credentials beyond a driver's license and and a background check. The ride sharing companies didn't lower the bar for this job at all. They just rightly opened it up to a lot more people.
In some cities, taxi drivers were expected to know the vast majority of the streets, such that a passenger could get in, say where they wanted to go, and the driver would know where to go and how to to get there. No looking up in maps, or using an A-Z, just go. They would be tested and certified in this too.
Ride sharing companies + navigation/route planning apps have reduced the barrier to entry tremendously, but they have also reduced the quality of the drive, as drivers no longer actually know where they're going. They have also reduced the ability for abuse, thanks to being permanently tracked.
That was a nod to the fact that "Women are not tenured at the same rate they are receiving PhDs, and less likely to be tenured when compared to their male counterparts." [1]
Also the commoditization of education has made full "professors" less necessary from the perspective of the college/university. For the vast majority of students at the vast majority of colleges who just need to take the required classes to get their chosen major so they can get a certain type of job, they don't need research professors, they need someone who knows the material and can teach a class. I don't think adjunct teaching positions should pay as little as they do but since so many people want to be adjunct professors as opposed to pursuing careers in other fields, it drives down the cost of hiring adjuncts.
What can we do to fix the problem? The federal government can require a certain ratio of PhD student:professor positions to receive federal research funding, so the ratio balances out across all the school. Decouple being a research professor with being a teacher of tertiary education (adjunct professors aren't really professors in the same sense as a full professor anyway). Get rid of tenure so universities don't perceive giving out full professorship positions as risky.
The real problem is that the people who should know better, the people who run Ph.D programs for disciplines whose only career prospects are in academia, decided to graduate more Ph.D's that they were willing to hire. Those guys control both supply and demand, and are perfectly capable of balancing them.
I didn't mean the department should hire its own students, just that it shouldn't graduate a higher number than it's willing to hire. So if they have 5 open positions, they should hire 5 from the market, but then only train and graduate 5 or so students (who can find jobs elsewhere) to maintain balance.
A system with only "blind market forces" would not have subsidies, and many prospective PhD students would look at the job prospects, the tuition bill, the living expenses, and the opportunity cost of working for 5-8 years, and decide to do something else. The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them. This is a market distortion, not unfettered market forces.
Yet it doesn't explain why they don't leave once they're done. Even the author points out how irrational he is. When I was in grad school a little over a decade ago, the realities of academic life were clear for anyone who cared to look. In his day, things were likely different - such information was hard to obtain.
I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia.
If someone gets a BS in CS with the aim to get into FAANG, and never does, and has a nervous breakdown because of it - I wouldn't blame FAANG or the software industry.
Totally agree. For some folks, it's just an easy way to defer making other tough decisions, plus it's prestigious, plus there's optimism bias.
And I think students naively believe that since universities create PhDs and hire them, they would not purposely create an oversupply of PhD grads. This feeling that universities are acting responsibly is probably bolstered by the fact that universities are nonprofits.
These systems aren't "blind market forces." A purely academic discipline controls both the supply of tenure-candidates (Ph.D's) and the demand for them. It's just like if you decided to bake some weird cookies that only you yourself like, and you baked more than you could possibly eat. You'll have to throw the extras in the trash, but then imagine those extras were people.
to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
> to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
Yes and no. The people did decide to pursue a Ph.D, but also they have to get accepted into a program to get one. It's like a job: I can choose to work at Google, but I can't unless they hire me.
When the Ph.D programs themselves are the only groups that consume their graduates with their credential, they can perfectly balance supply and demand (and pretty simple at that).
The example of Data Science is telling: from too many to not nearly enough graduates within a few years. In Australia we had the opposite with geoscience graduates. The mining industry was starved of them, they were earning a fortune the minute they graduated, then suddenly the exploration boom stopped and the place is full of unemployed geologists. How is a university supposed to predict this?
And I don't get what the alternative is...?
Only having the same number of PhD students as there are tenure places?
Refusing to let people start a PhD unless they can prove they have a viable career plan that uses it?
No, sorry. That's wrong, and quite an impoverished way to look at institutions of learning (and many other institutions besides).
The "universities" that think as you describe, the for profit colleges, are an unmitigated shit show. Almost all American universities that are worth the name are either explicitly non-profit or literally part of the government. They're not businesses, and for them to act like businesses is a mistake on many different levels.
> The example of Data Science is telling
Data science is not a purely academic discipline, which was such an important qualifier in my original comment that I italicized it. There's plenty of industry jobs for those skills, so those programs can follow a different path.
I'll admit that, say, theology or philosophy are probably only ever going to provide a career path in academia. But even then, you never know.
And are you really going to say to someone who has a burning ambition to study philosophy "no sorry, we're full, go study something else"?
What I think you mean is, the amount of money feeding demand for professors is not high enough so that salaries are at a dignified level throughout academia for for everyone capable of and willing to do the job, and so the market salaries (and fraction of the labor force in academia) don't make us feel that this valuable labor is being compensated correctly.
But what would it look like for that to be corrected, and would that actually look like an optimum?
Remember, a lot of people already avoid the professor track in awareness of the poor prospects. As you pump up demand for professor labor with nice, market-correcting grants, you draw them back in. If it took 25% of GDP to sop up all that latent demand to be a professor, and pump it up to a reasonable salary, would that look any more sane?
In my experience, it's generally the budget-strapped universities that choose to replace tenure-track professors with adjuncts.
On the other hand, private universities with very large endowments tend to be prestigious and part of maintaining this prestige means hiring tenure-track professors to teach undergraduates, mentor graduate students, and to do research.
> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.
> The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and now disgraced demographic shortfall studies.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
Personally, I have no problem with professors getting paid less. My only objection is that these savings don’t appear to be passed on to students. When we get much more efficient at manufacturing computer hardware, one of the benefits is that anyone can buy a capable device for $300 or less. But when we get more efficient at generating phds, and therefore have a much greater supply of teachers, the savings are not apparent in tuition prices.
Higher tuition wouldn’t really be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that many people who take on these massive debts are later unable to secure high paying jobs that let them pay it off in a timely fashion, turning them into debt slaves for the better part of their life (or maybe all of it). That’s the risk you take though.
Regarding tuition costs, there are a lot of reasons why it has grown so quickly. One is the growth in administration. When my old university announced they wouldn't be doing any more one year contracts and would instead be going with exclusively part-time faculty, I suggested they look into part-time administrators but they didn't seem to think that was a good idea...
Another is the escalating "arms race" of campus amenities. Four year universities feel like they need to add more and more and fancier and fancier amenities to attract students because they feel like if they don't have a new multi-million dollar rec center and the nearby college does that students will be more likely to go to the other college.
A third reason is that the funds colleges get from states is a smaller percentage of their budget now than it was in the past. One of my friends is an advisor at a Big Ten college and she recently posted on facebook that she was going through some old paperwork that had been left in her office and found the university's budget for 1997. Comparing it to 2019, the university's budget had doubled but the amount of money that it received from the state had only increased by about 25%. That money has to come from somewhere (which is one reason why that university has made a big push to attract international students in recent years since they pay a lot more in tuition than in-state students)
You'd think we'd want more and more researchers in general, even if their research doesn't immediately turn into a marketable product.
We’re talking bout PhDs in fields like “environmental psychology” as mentioned in the article.
Such invented pursuits have minimal societal benefit. It’s unsurprising that society is unwilling to subsidize many tenured positions in the study of bullshit.
From the internet: "Environmental psychologists often study how the built or physical environment affects human behavior. They may conduct research on this topic, or apply their knowledge to designing safe and ergonomic spaces that are conducive to emotional well-being, such as colorful, open floor plans."
Building appealing work and home-spaces may not save the world, but why isn't it a worthy area of research?
People studying mediaeval literature can also be researchers.
> Such invented pursuits have minimal societal benefit.
I'm sure this is true of some fields, but even fields which produce obvious societal benefits, and even fields which actually do produce PhD candidates who go on to have well-paying jobs in industry often have difficulty growing their departments.
I'm a CS professor.
[1] Yes, tenure has been horribly abused by some professors over the years that had nothing to do with this. There are also those who, while not blatantly abusing it in ways that made headlines, never contributed much back to society in return for the privilege. All systems can be gamed.
There is really next to no value in taking on PhD work at an institution below a certain threshold. Nearly all tenure-track positions go to candidates with a very select background. They must have graduated from the top 30 (or so) institutions in their field. They usually have done a postdoc at another peer institution in that class. They need to have produced a large number of publications, which usually means having well connected collaborators, especially your PI/advisor. If you do not have this background, you stand little chance of even being considered for the tenure track.
That being said, the lower tier institutions are less capable of supporting their faculty, so they pad this with cheap labor in the form of PhD students. The selection hierarchy begins even before graduate school - whether you attend an elite institution in your field is a major academic accomplishment in itself. Many are tempted to take the consolation prize when they don't make it, and the faculty at the lower tier schools are all too happy to accommodate them.
The tenured faculty will never change this on their own. They are the winners, whose continuing success depends on a ready supply of people who are deceived into thinking that they actually have a shot. For some, this deceit is only a moderate one - if you are at an elite school you have maybe a 1 in 10 chance. For most, the rate is approximately zero. Very few people are willing to really give their students a realistic assessment, but in the end it doesn't matter whether they do anyway. Graduate school is like trying to get published as a novelist, or becoming a professional athlete. Everyone wants that kind of status. Heck, you can definitely support yourself, depending on what level of asceticism you can tolerate and how lucky, well connected, or (rarely) brilliant you are. It is just that the vast majority makes very little money/status, and a privileged few make a large amount. There will never be a shortage of people who try to make it anyway. Some would say the entire enterprise depends on it.
(edit - clarification)
Of course, it ascribes malicious intent for all of them, too.
I think the paragraph about journalism was probably the most pertinent. No-one decided to relabel journalism as "content" to be produced by designated "content providers". Pre-internet only journalists had a way of publishing their opinions. Post-internet everyone does. The simple law of supply and demand means that opinions are less valuable now.
Seriously, good riddance to the ivory towers. College is a racket-- you have to pay big bucks, tenured profs can behave pretty much as they want to, and the books game is legalized thievery. As recent news articles have shown, the rich are shown the short line through.
I can't wait for MOOC 2.0 to bring quality, affordable education to anyone who wants it.
I just don't get why this is a problem. You chose to study mideval literature. Chose to get a PhD in it. Chose to be an adjunct professor. Kept choosing to keep doing it, etc. If it's a bad job, stop doing it.
The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure).
Then they finished school, tried to actually become a tenured professor, and found out being awesome isn't good enough. You actually have to be spectacular. So they failed, unlike their old professors who encouraged them the whole way.
So there they are. Ph.D in hand after a decade of hard work, but no tenure in sight. What would you do in their position? Find and adjunct job that's at least someone related to what you've spent your life doing? Or roll the dice again and spend thousands of dollars you don't have to go to some javascript bootcamp or something (that you'll probably fail, since you're no technical whiz kid, because you spent the last decade focusing on medieval literature)?
Adjuncting is not on the academic track. If you are adjuncting you have already lost. If you choose to keep making the same mistake over and over again you don’t generally get much sympathy if it’s gambling or sticking with a partner who beats you. Why does chasing a dream you’ve failed at get so much more sympathy?
Teaching high school is very much not what most people want to do but it’s at least better than adjuncting. Lots of people do things they don’t want do for money, if adjuncts would prefer to do something they want to fit very little money, great. Their choice, the consequences are theirs too.
Lambda School is free until you get paid so if they want to do a boot camp that’s the way to go, not borrowing money.
But while second place for failing to start a startup is you go make high six figures at a FAANG, second place in academia is you're fucked.
IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.
This is that corrosive individualist idea that the community has zero responsibility for its members, so we get to wash our hands of each individual's failure. It's wrong. Often the individual can't "do the research" to accurately estimate their outcome, such as when they're so disadvantaged they don't know where to start, or when they've been lied to.
I think the issue that the author is raising is that in the not-so-distant past, these jobs did pay well. They weren't wildly lucrative, but one could live comfortably as an academic. At some point though things started to change. College costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last two decades [0] and yet with all this extra money sloshing around in the system, salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]. In fact most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts [3].
There are a lot of people in this thread saying "it's just supply and demand!" and that's part of the story, but it's not the whole story. Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities. I think it's fair for us to question the morality of this and to question whether the result of all this has been a net gain or loss for the cause of higher education.
> You chose to study medieval [sic] literature.
That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days. I think it's also a bit shortsighted as what's happening to academics is part of a larger hollowing-out of the middle class in this country; hardly something to be celebrated. Today it's college professors, but it's not at all unlikely that in a decade or two people will be saying similar things about people who "chose" to study software engineering.
[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tu...
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.as...
[2] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.as...
This was the worst part about paying for college. So much of what I was buying had little direct impact on my education.
>That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days.
I don't have a hostile disposition towards the humanities. I just don't have a special reverence for it either. I don't see the point of hand wringing regarding intelligent well educated people choosing to go into poorly compensated careers. I'm not saying that the humanities are without merit, just that there is a low expected value for pursuing some degrees and we can reasonably expect that the individuals pursuing those degrees know or should know that. We don't have to act like it's a huge problem when the people pursuing financially non-rewarding careers wind up not making a lot of money.
As a final point regarding your highlighting of my spelling mistake, the term "[sic]" is a Latin phrase meaning that the thing you're quoting is exactly as you've written it. It helps the reader understand that you're reproducing an error rather than making one yourself. You seem to have used this incorrectly as you both corrected my spelling mistake and still marked it so.
Wasteful sure. But immoral to hire an administrator over a tenured professor?
Applying symbolic logic, hermeneutics, retroduction, and criticism are higher abstract levels of creative problem solving, via inference to the likely explanation with respect to priors, a.k.a. the scientific method. These kinds of reasoning simply aren't practically doable by math alone yet, not to mention deep learning tools in the field.
The next wave of AI methods will need to go beyond statistics to come full circle, because classification is not reasoning. What else is there? All the GOFAI stuff, prolog, expert systems, knowledge graphs, fuzzy/modal logics. These things were always great at reasoning but the last winter happened because they were bad at dealing with uncertainty. Now the stats methods have solved that problem but they suck at reasoning. It is time for a synthesis.
As a startup I don't want a data science PhD to tinker with an optimal CNN design for a year to eke out that extra 1 or 2 percent of precision and recall. I want an ensemble of specialized models, ideally pre-trained, grafted together in a logically consistent way that is configurable and introspect-able via text/data at runtime.
The economy is misconfigured! That said, humanities people should probably learn how to code as a research skill.