The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
Given a massive oversupply of replacement workers ready to go at a moment's notice, unionization seems unlikely to change anything.
Probably Ph.D. graduates should consider teaching at a university as a sort of popular avocation like music, art, sports, or video games. Maybe you can make some money at it if you are particularly skilled and lucky, but you will almost certainly need a real day job in order to pay the bills.
The adjunct model is basically scamming everyone at an information disadvantage: for students, it inflates the perceived faculty-to-student ratio, even though many of those faculty are part time. For grad students, it inflates perceived demand for teachers because the total faculty market is growing, even though many positions are underpaid. And this is perpetuated for adjunct faculty, who are often told the position is a step towards tenure track, while universities move the ratios towards fewer permanent positions.
The article's suggestion, to rebalance towards permanent positions, would make true supply and demand clearer so the market can rationalize.
It's a bit like the people who get scammed on Amazon by highly rated products that don't exist, but fail to rate/return or buy again anyway. There's more suckers born every minute.
The recent explosion is numbers of students attending university requires them to expand the pool of teachers without a corresponding ability to expand their demand for grant winning researchers. Hence the lower average pay.
I would love to hear an expert in the field chime in on this, because I’m as armchair as it gets when discussing this ecosystem. Are there any high paying professors whose primary responsibility is teaching students only?
If the product is actually education, there exists an opportunity to take all of these underpaid but overtrained adjuncts and all of these overcharged but undertrained students, match them up together, and put all existing universities out of business.
If the product is actually research, there exists an opportunity to take all of these underpaid adjuncts, hire them in a private research lab, and profit from their discoveries.
The fact that neither of these business models appears to be viable indicates that the true product is something adjuncts can't provide by themselves: social signaling.
The choice to isolate these functions without clarifying the education proposition isn't a market equilibrium, it's a choice by universities to optimize their information advantage.
I was fortunate as although I didn't have the "communication skills" to land such jobs (my hoop jumping skills were terrible), I did had tech skills so plenty of smaller companies and government jobs were possible for me to get.
Anyway if this situation has changed, doing arty degrees should come with a disclaimer that no job might be found as a result, and as such they are hobbies. Doing a full time hobby for a few years at a cost to yourself should be considered a luxury of the rich.
https://gizmodo.com/there-are-5-000-janitors-in-the-u-s-with...
I spent the first 11 years of my professional career in the Navy flying airplanes. It was a niche skill set. When I left, I had the airlines available, by I would’ve been bored to tears in the job.
So at 35 I started over in a new career. It’s been challenging - but there is a future. I’m 6-8 years (at least) “behind” my colleagues.
The choices we make have consequences. And if you have your health, you can always choose to change your course.
1. service to antarctic bases
2. water bombing forest fires
3. test pilot for a Navy contractor
4. dirt airstrips in Alaska, with animals on the runway and weather
5. dirt airstrips in Lesoto, short and high altitude
6. Zero Gravity Corporation (commercial "vomit comet")
Also, if you move from professor to administrator you can make $300K+ with arguably fewer work hours and responsibility.
Yes! I look at research as a boring, stressful pain-in-the-butt, and I love teaching my students. I am contingent annually, but full-time with benefits, and I would not want to be on the publish-or-perish track. Teaching smart kids hard stuff is what I am passionate about.
There is no shortage of people entering PhD programs knowing full well how bad the job market is, yet somehow still convinced they will get a tenure-track job after they finish.
I spent some time in a history PhD program almost a decade ago. We all knew how bad the academic job market was. Yet all of the students were committed to spending the next ~7 years working toward a PhD so they would get a chance to compete in what they knew to be of the world's worst job markets.
At that point they had been in the academic bubble for so long that it didn't really make sense to consider life outside it, and they viewed academic work as part of their personal identity and could not imagine themselves doing anything else.
Why, after all, would I pay workers to improve the lot of the poor? And how, after all, can the poor pay workers at all?
And so we see all talent funneled into a few employers' projects; often wholly detrimental ones, such as peddling fructose, and nearly always tangential to the talent's personal goals, priorities, and passions.
> Given a massive oversupply of replacement workers ready to go at a moment's notice, unionization seems unlikely to change anything.
Perhaps, then, a union of the unemployed.
I think this plays right into other employment issues. There is a feeling that employers will not train you. Many STEM based employers that need highly trained individuals (DoD, Pharma, data-science, etc) are outsourcing some of that training to PhD programs. Thus far, the situation has been acceptable in STEMy fields. But the PhD program is not structured to train the high skills workforce (it just happens to be okayish at doing so) and that mis-match is coming to a head.
TL;DR: Until commercial employers start to rely on grants, a PhD isn't job training.
That's simply wrong.
>A doctorate (from Latin docere, "to teach") or doctor's degree (from Latin doctor, "teacher") or doctoral degree, is an academic degree awarded by universities, derived from the ancient formalism licentia docendi ("licence to teach") In most countries, it is a research degree that qualifies the holder to teach at university level in the degree's field, or to work in a specific profession.
We've recently formalized it to "doing research", but for most of history it has not been limited to, or even primarily for, research.
DoD is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.
Some Silicon Valley companies will pay for your master's degree, but usually you still have to work full time for the company in addition to your course work.
I've heard of some companies like Pixar actively training their employees for several months and paying them to learn (rather than expecting them to keep working full time in addition to training) but that seems unusual.
Why is this a bad thing - I'm genuinely curious? I completed a masters and a PhD the same way. Of course, the downside is that since I already had a job I wasn't going to deal with the funding rat-race that comes with academia and stayed in industry.
Edit: The biggest upside - career growth, no student loans, regular paycheck, health insurance, etc, etc.
First of all I admire you for finishing a Master's and PhD while working.
I personally think about going back to school all the time (I didn't finish undergrad) but am pretty confident that if I do I would want to go full time.
My reason is just that working full time is exhausting and I can't imagine being able to give 100% to my studies if I'm also constantly fatigued from work.
I certainly still am able to learn new things after working, but compared to when I was focused on school completely I learn at a much slower pace. There's a lot of cognitive overhead in having to context switch, at least for me personally.
You: Wrong! The DoD actually outsources training to PhD programs.
And this is why you are so confident in your claim that you made a new account a few minutes ago to argue with people?
How long have you been on HN using your real account, if I may ask?
Or perhaps you'd like to claim that you randomly stumbled into this board a few minutes ago and happened to see this thread and decided to post with your relevant expertise.
First you have to overcome the moral barrier problem to get people to work there these days (resulting in higher conditions for those who do)
Then you have the fact that its products are not easily measurable in terms of consumer utility or organisational profit/ utility, and its own budget/demand side is not based directly on consumer choice, competition or revenue.
DoD has a specific unique position in most of our cultures and market, and its conditions cannot and should not be extrapolated to other parts of economic life/debate unless you can also bring those other aspects of defense which make its particular environment possible (Which is generally neither possible nor desirable).
In short, being able to sleep at night is a form of non-cash benefit, and the fact that everyone wants to do it increases the supply of labor for those jobs.
contentious or morally repugnant jobs are just the opposite, shrinking the available labor pool and inducing an intangible cost on normal people who take them on. Of course, if you're a psychopath or morally blind, you as an individual do not pay this psychological cost, and benefit from the increased wages and conditions deriving from the relative shortage of labor.
There's a reason they call it the dismal science... :p
This is probably easier said than done and only accomplishable in the Humanities, as they don't really need multi-billion dolar equipment to do research. This would also be a very elitist form of organization, since ... yes professors, researchers and assistents must eat, have health/social insurance and have time to conduct independent research. And the students must have enough free time to actually study.
But how much worse can working conditions get? We as a society can value knowledge for the sake of knowledge (and not to have "Prof. Dr. phil. habil." attached to a name).
That being said, I worry about the people who go to PhD programs just because that's what they are "supposed to do" or because they just don't know what else to do. Especially the ones who lack social skills or lack "connections". Many of my friends from college fall in to this category.
I don't even want to think about the people in the above category who get a PhD at a "non-target" school.
And if you're going to be that constrained may as well get a job and make some money while you're doing this.
Your salary as a PhD student is a joke but you're still an expensive asset as far as your advisor is concerned because of your tuition which pays for stuff like maintaining the campus, allowing you to take classes, your office etc..
However, I feel that most of those resources are useless as far as a student is concerned. You just need to pay for rent and maintain a relatively comfortable lifestyle. So something like $2,000 a month would be more than sufficient for a student and is a tiny cost for an investor looking to have interesting research published either as a paper or open source project.
The only real working relationship in a graduate program is the relationship between faculty and student so maybe it's worth it for some of the wealthier faculty to cut out the middlemen.
You're right about the constraints. Even when the constraints aren't there, many academics are used to thinking that they are, so they seem blind to possibilities outside of the constraints.
As an example of the latter, consider Scott Aaronson's discussion of a quantum-inspired recommendation algorithm: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3880
On that page he wrote "On the Hacker News thread, some commenters are lamenting that such a brilliant mind as Ewin’s would spend its time figuring out how to entice consumers to buy even more products that they don’t need. I confess that that’s an angle that hadn’t even occurred to me".
The endless supply of money combined with the demand for students to try to secure their future careers leads to constant price increases with no impact on demand.
The number of full time, tenure track faculty positions has not. However, there are plenty of adjunct professors that have low wages, poor benefits, and no job security.
Government-insured student loans mean that the university has an incentive to take as much from that as possible. But the job market now often requires some kind of degree, and new students don't really know what they're signing up for by taking on $25k, $50k loans and beyond.
Everything else is secondary. It would be fine to save space in weird ways, like the shower doubling as the entryway or the sink above the toilet or the bed bunked over the desk. Even the best roommates are disruptive, and most are far worse. Shared bathrooms are a horror show.
The current university model, the subsidies, the regulatory capture, the administrarive state, etc, are all just part of the idea that everything can be regulated and socially engineered by people who are smarter than others. It's just modern day fiefdoms of lords and peons.
It's all a train wreck. Science has stagnated and everyone knows it despite all the mental gymnastics we use to try and deny it. For many Americans, they are the first generation to live with worse job, housing, work/life balance, income security than their parents. We have escalating rates of suicide and depression. We are the first generation of Americans to live under a surveillance state.
To be honest, San Francisco and Seattle both look and feel far, far more dystopian to me than Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei. Even more than Hanoi or Kuala Lumpur, despite the fact they still struggle with deeply entrenched corruption, infrastructure and human rights. And yet this problem in America will be met with yet another round of bureaucrats and technocrats coming up with a solution that is more and more of taxing and regulating our lives.
I'd rather they just give everyone basic income/healthcare and let them sort it out on their own.
I'm also willing to consider something slightly short of basic income: a new "new deal". Anyone that wants to work should be able to work. A job provider of baseline resort. That would also be how minimum wages are set (the market price is set by this job provision via some other process).
However consumer buying power should be part of active market control in the form of regulations that discourage inflation by encouraging the market towards positive equilibrium rather than cyclic loops of inflation and crashes (which arguably we're still suffering from the lack of; there was no actual correction in many areas during the last/current recession).
Amusingly, recently corrupt bureaucrats have attempted to re-instantiate Nalanda. Despite gathering a huge amount of dirty money and land they've only put through a handful of postgrad students, and already have weathered multiple substantive allegations of corruption, sexual harassment, etc.
Perhaps people are the problem.
Far from letting anyone lecture, an important office in those places was the dvarapala (“gatekeeper”) This was a senior scholar whose job was to examine applicants and only those who passed his tests were allowed inside.
This sums up the core of the problem. Some here will argue it is a labor oversupply issue, but I would argue it is a problem inherent to American capitalism itself. Our universities have transitioned into a mindset of "running like a business" and thus have adopted the common enterprise mentality of constantly seeking cost reductions. These cost reductions come at the expense of quality. I say this having spent many years working in University administration. It is exactly as the author notes, the cost savings merely get spent elsewhere in nonproductive ways, usually on more expensive administration. You see this in for-profit enterprises as well as they mature the pay inequality skews as executives take more of the profits.
"What’s the way forward? Treating nearly 75 percent of the professoriate as disposable, ancillary to the mission of higher education, has become the norm."
This is the way though of our current system, we treat employees as disposable cogs in the machine. We outsource to companies who pay bargain basement wages and produce low quality work destroying small businesses. We do this in the name of efficiency, but we neglect quality.
I propose no solutions of my own, but agree with the author that some healthy debate is needed on this issue.
So long as the brick and mortar university remains a sacred cow I cannot see the needle moving more than slightly. The current education system is so batshit yet so entrenched into society it will take decades to resolve the issues. You can't just moralize about how adjunct professors DESERVE more and expect the situation to resolve itself when universities deliver less value every year. Its literally not possible to take the status quo, replace the adjunct professors with full paid ones and have the system be fiscally viable. University provides too little value for the students or greater society to tolerate such costs.
Adjunct professors are a symptom of a greater sickness.
In that past age of the world long gone... I could have advanced the state of a science in dire need of advancement, I could have done really interesting cool stuff, I could have landed a lectureship and maybe a professorship. I could have written a book or two. I could have even received industry funding to do all this.
These days? Do a Phd in Comp Sc? You're joking.
I'd be in debt up to my ears, no guarantee of a better job at the end, endless academic horseshit in between, and your expected gain from the book is less than from cleaning toilets.
Then we wonder why the state of Computer Science as a Science is what it is.
Admittedly I'm not exactly in the center of the known world.
Consider the amount of money locked up in the major American institutions [0]. It just seems improbable that the money is going to be well managed in a system where literally sitting around all day talking about philosophy is an accepted, hopefully encouraged, activity. In that environment the words 'well managed' lose all meaning, the only metric is results a generation or two after the fact.
Then there are the people who go into the system; people who reasonably were born into a wealthy family, went through a good educational institute, learned at a good university then spent a great deal of effort pushing thorough to a professorship. There are going to be many individuals who are completely buffered from having real-world experience in an environment where safety is not guaranteed. Furthermore, the population of a university campus is going to have a large portion of clever but underdeveloped and inexperienced students floating around in it.
So there is an environment where the administration has every incentive to become corrupted by money and the faculty have no guide-rails to prevent the formation of really disconnected world views. It is a testimony to the raw drive and intelligence of the people involved that it all hangs together at all.
There are more Americans being processed through environment [1]. Talking about the conditions of the professorship is an important facet, but it is not wise to isolate that from its place in the greater system - the direction is that most people are going to be university educated and the overall system probably doesn't have the sort of governance structure that can cope with this slow influx.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
That to me would put a crunch on middle or lower tier institutions, which rely heavily on teaching and which don't offer a degree worth much more than an online credential. In that scenario, you would expect these schools to go for the short term "survival" scenario vs. the long term "thrive" scenario, and in fact, that is what we see - lower tier schools with big sports budgets, fancy gyms, nice cafeterias, etc., staffed entirely by adjunct faculty.
Overall, the selective pressure against these lower tier universities might not be a bad thing. As those die out (which I believe they will), it could result in a good set of schools all which provide a strong, general education, and an equal, respected set of online institutions which can provide credentials for those who do not want the more traditional path.
not true. from music, to plumbing, to software, to fiction writing...
meanwhile the training MOOCs provide is hardly equivalent to a bachelor's degree in CV-terms let alone curriculum.
Meanwhile, for example, a Data Science in Python nanodegree may very well be better prep for an industry job than a statistics bachelor's, but the two were never going to be equivalent.
That is the root of the problem isn't it? IMO No institution should train you for a job in the industry except the industry. Also, higher education (post-college) should not discredit themself to be an apprentices-program for any industry -- it is not what they can accomplish anyhow since the requirements change faster than the institutions can adapt. A university has lost all of its meaning if they do not work to further the field itself, but for the ever-changing demands of the economy.
If I want to hire someone, how can I tell the good schools / MOOCs from the bad? Will I be able to continue doing that reliably over time? Will it be any better a signal as to who is a good candidate than the current system?
As they are, most for-profit MOOCs seem to have pivoted to being corporate training / collaboration platforms...
You probably shouldn't. If you want to hire someone, test their skillset on a small-ish 1-week Project with realistic goals and expectations. Optionally with integration in a team, since soft-skills are not really teachable but usually very important to solve problems on a certain level.
Strange