My experience as a Unit-18 Berkeley Lecturer
blog.pamelafox.org
blog.pamelafox.org
It's eye-opening that the salary of an adjunct faculty member at Cal with 100% appointment with classes taught to 1.5K+ students (CS61A) is less than the tuition fees of 8 students.
At least that’s what I got from the article. Weird for a university professor to blame a union.
[0]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/20/new-report-sa...
Research output determines rankings. Teaching quality doesn't.
Now, at least some of this is academia having too strong of a filter, but the year I joined Berkeley - I was 1 of 4 to accept the offer.
It should be an INVESTMENT into the educational institution on the MERIT and VALUE of the degree taught and received.
Thus: If I am lured into an educational track which promises a market level pay/industry-pertinent-education which makes one employable in said field, but results in NOT... the institution should be liable for such and the investment/"tuition" should be negated and a "write-off" to the school.
That's the same as saying:
"Pay me $100 to teach you how to fight!" Gets ass kicked. "You still owe me $100 for TEACHING you how to fight."
I doubt you'll find many people that have side jobs during college to defray costs are partying their way through.
(Trump.edu anyone?)
Saying things like this is a real disservice to the kinds of people who waste years and decades of their lives trying to return to academia after being rejected. Deliberate gestures of inclusiveness encourage people to keep hoping long past all reason.
I cannot muster a lot of sympathy for people choosing between 6 figure careers.
It's not reasonable to expect a university to be able to match rates of one of the highest paying careers in industry. If universities try to match industry costs for all of their employees, those costs will just be passed on to graduates in the form of more student debt, which is already enough of a crisis.
She should take the higher paying opportunities available to her, and the university should find someone who is happy with what they can afford for the position.
This may be true for lesser colleges, but Berkeley has a 4.8 billion dollar endowment and is teaching some of our brightest minds. They can eat the cost.
It's also worth noting that 6 figure salaries don't go nearly so far in the Bay Area. Food, rent, and services are more expensive here than in most of the state, and taxes are higher than in most of the country. A rough estimate, I'd put this salary as equivalent to 65-70k somewhere like Boise, Idaho.
Endowments are not simply a pool of money sitting around spendable on anything. They are generally composed of thousands and thousands of donations, each with specific requirements for that donation. Some may be scholarships, some to fund specific research projects, some to specific departments or groups (and again with strings attached).
A better indicator of is the salary reasonable, is are there ample job applicants for the positions? If people choose this position over all their other options than this pay is market clearing, paying more is simply taking money from other productive uses.
In particular, the author mentions important issues like cheating, "grade grubbing" (and its primary cause), managing the 100 employees, associated with the course, and revising materials (which I was very suprised to find out that an adjunct would be in charge of!).
(In contrast to the discussion here, which when I read it focused solely on the compensation aspect. Look for something else in the piece! There's more there than money.)
Revising materials is more of a milestone. As technology advances, we should be teaching more up-to-date stuff, so we typically revise what we teach and then share that with other instructors. Sometimes that takes considerable work. In some positions, the program strictly restricts what is allowed to be taught. I typically stick to the core content for about 65% of the course, and then add in my own topics for the other 35%.
I'd consider 60k solid middle class (not lower end of the spectrum).
That being said, I quickly googled the average rent in Berkley and it's around 4k$.
The salary difference (ignoring 9 vs 12 month) seems to be around 50k which is over 4k/month...which should be enough to cover average housing all else being equal. And that assumes no rent for the German counterpart :P
Also depends a bit where you are in Germany. I think in Munich (most expensive) the buying price is around 10k€/square meter and Berkley city from quick googling seems to be around 12,5k$. Not sure around rent prices but I'm assuming they scale to buying prices.
I found the part about health insurance interesting as well. I would probably never willingly under-insure if I had that option (I do not).
She should have married her partner to be on their insurance, that’s what I did.
You can't just change words like that. It's dishonest. Poverty != "low income".
Lower down it discusses the nationally averaged poverty line. At no point does it make any claims to a number for a SF specific localized poverty line. As you say, local values are going to be different, but the national number is far below the "low income" threshold set earlier in the article.
You know something has gone haywire when "low income" and "median" incomes are basically the same amount.
Except that everything else is more expensive here because of these costs. Any service you can imagine, jack the prices up 50%+.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/berkeley-ca/home-values/ [2] https://www.immowelt.de/liste/muenchen/haeuser/kaufen?sort=r...
Actually building the apartments in question took three weeks.
There aren't very many other places in the world where this problem is so acute.
Maybe it’s more appropriate to compare Munich, London, Paris, Amsterdam with Berkeley and see how lecturer salaries there compare with each other. hint: Berkeley adjunct has higher salary even compared to some tenured professors in comparable cities in Europe.
In the UK an experienced postdoc, or one with a competing offer, can make around 40k before having to push for lectureships. Professorial salaries start at 60k and maybe hit six figures for senior staff. Munich is fairly high, I think between 50-70k depending on who you ask (TV-L E13). Scandinavia is not great compared to the high cost of living, last time I checked.
A better comparison is somewhere like Oxford/Cambridge which both have extremely high rent/income ratios - some of the worst in the country - many postdocs, and almost all PhDs, can't afford to live alone. A room is close to 1k a month which is absurd in the UK.
And yes by all means compare Berkeley to Munich or Berlin or any of those cities other than London, where despite being expensive for Europe they don’t come close to Berkeley in terms of cost
I have done training (usually one-off seminars) for years. The prep takes forever. I have known a lot of teachers, and have heard stories about lesson plans. I suspect college profs have that, X20.
And academia (like nonprofits) doesn't have money, so ego can be the currency. Can make for a rather unpleasant working environment.
https://www.dailycal.org/2017/08/18/here-are-the-five-highes...
> "Former chancellor Nicholas Dirks’ gross pay was $562,243. Dirks is set to go on paid leave for the next academic year, during which he will receive $434,000."
This is well over the pay for say, the governor of California.
These thoughts are incredibly valid -- I also wrote something similar after two years, though didn't share it. Salary is a tough sticking point in the Bay, but it's far from the only thing there. At the same time, it'd be one that the University could relatively easily fix if they tried...
The point about inflexibility is really worth underscoring. My calendar is WAY more full during the semester than it ever was as a SWE. While my summers are quite a bit more flexible in terms of a calendar, they are completely filled with prep and research projects - some to fill in a pay gap, some that are fun... I also find the 15 week (really more like 18 week) semester in the Fall quite a slog. In industry it's often possible to take a couple days vacation when you need it without issue, but it's incredibly difficult to recharge during the semester.
- Low pay? check
- Not being able to change or at least select the schedule? check
While I'm curious about giving back in form of some CS/programming classes, it probably won't be instructing at college.
There are however some advantages to an academic job: somewhat more flexible schedule (not when you're teaching), relative freedom to engage in whatever research you wish, no need to sit in front of a computer screen all day, job security.
On the other hand, there's a lot that's more inflexible than in a SWE job: lecture times, university-dictated exam times (at night! I had to sleeptrain my toddler to make them), staff meeting times (hard to find a time that works for a staff of 50-100).
So yeah- more flexible in some ways, less flexible in others, it depends what sort of flexibility you're looking for.
Congratulations for trying out lecturing and for the eloquent writeup.
P.S. Btw, I've stumbled upon your website https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/, which even works with memoized functions (in what seems to be a left-to-right call-by-value order), so I will be using this the next time I'm teaching dynamic programming or backtracking, in order to save time on drawing calls by hand on the board.
Pamela already addressed the inflexibility part. And I'll just echo that I find it worse than how she described. But I've probably over-committed myself, too. Engaging in research-like stuff is very fun, but it is often unpaid for someone who is a lecturer.
As for job security: Non-Tenured folks (like the OP) get relatively short term contracts. And it's easy for the University to not renew them, especially when there are budget constraints. Sure, I never had a contract like this as SWE and I could have been fired before my 1-2 years were up, but my job there felt much more secure. I knew my manager and how the company was doing. In contrast, while I'm friends with everyone - I don't yet have security that I'll be returning in the Fall, even though my name is on the schedule.
Still, the pay is better than I thought and MUCH better than most adjunct situations. Even with all the caveats, I would 100% take this over an industry job that paid 2-3x. Sounds really fulfilling and fun as fuck
https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF03311 -- this is the CS job posting https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/apply -- this has all the lecturer postings, including related fields.
It's really hard to find folks who are going to enjoy the tradeoffs. (Also feel free to contact me directly. Append gmail.com to my username.)
At my UC, there is a separate ladder called Lecturer Full-Time PSOE/SOE. It's not clear why she wasn't on that ladder. Perhaps Cal doesn't have one.
I can't quite wrap my head around this. Is there an expectation in the US that all meals must be eaten out or something?
I would be still hungry after just a starter.
For the company restaurants, from what I've seen, it depends on the company and how much they are paying, so it goes from pretty terrible to actually decent.
Note that I meant for lunch, not dinner. I meant the equivalent of “Mittagsmenu” we have in Germany. The price is generally lower.
Edit: just to be sure my tone isn’t off here, I don’t expect to know what things cost in France and not trying to say that you’re incorrect. I’m just wondering if prices I’ve seen are more or less the norm or the exception.
I don't think it's that high (yet?), though you can find restaurants like that. (See [1].)
Funny, just by coincidence I was reading notes I kept when I visited Germany from the U.S. by myself several decades ago. I commented back then, more than once, about how annoyingly long I had to wait to simply get the tab at the end of the meal so I could pay. I thought it was just me.
Well, Switzerland is expensive in general, you will reply. True. Berkeley is expensive as well.
Certainly with better planning, I could have reduced those costs slightly.
I think I don't mind spending the money, but it is a significant change compared to working from home, or working in an office with food, or just making so much more money that you don't care. (Which is how it was when I was a SWE that worked in an office without free food.)
There is some cost of living adjustments but it is pretty minimal. The discipline adjustments are more significant. English department adjuncts are probably paid a lot less.
My biggest surprise was that adjuncts are paid so well. It rivals my salary when I got tenure especially with only teaching two classes per semester and them being co-taught. I've done the visiting/adjunct thing in NYC, and the Berkeley salary is over 2x higher. But I was doing that for the joy of teaching and I had a day job.
There are some professors who earn much more than average, mainly in medicine, economics and engineering from what I’ve read.
Startup idea didn’t work out (and it’s stressful), so I’m back to being a working stiff.
I do have to warn you, if you're not already aware... all those articles about lack of student engagement due to pandemic are horrifyingly correct. I started adjuncting as the pandemic hit and it seemed like each semester was worse than the previous one. I just finished up my last course and it was such a slog. People barely show up, are completely silent when they do. A root canal was more fun.
That said, it's a great feeling when you really make a connection and I hope to return to teaching sometime in the future.
I will put my psu address in my profile, if you want to connect.
Ah yes, I remember this feeling well, the voluntary impoverishment of academia.
So this might add up to 300K. Which is a number that is unprecedented in history. Throughout most of history and to this day in pretty much every place in the world, such a salary would be reserved for the executive branch. It's an insanely high compensation largely made possible by a local tech boom, excessive venture capital, very high local living expenses, and the nature of startups, where maximum spending is considered good: 300K can be afforded because of the potential exit.
That's not how 99.99999% of the jobs work, so the comparison is odd. Not at a personal level, but definitely at a societal level.
I'd slow down on the hyperbole. That number is specifically for the US so let's look at other white collar professions in the US that fall in similar ranges:
- Finance
- Consultants
- Lawyers
- Doctors
- Accountants
- Dentists
...
This person is probably in the top percentile of their field if they're teaching at a top CS school so let's use the high end of those fields and not the average.
Regardless, 300K is not a salary one should expect in pretty much any public function. By comparison, the PM of my country makes 150K.
Qualified candidates to people who teach CS to Berkeley students are likely to be in a similar situation too. Until the tech boom subsides a bit at least. I'd say the comparison is fair, even if a bit removed from most people's realities.
If you don't have a background in programming/computer science and come in fresh with starry eyes, you better be a prodigy in learning, because it's a lot of material in a very short amount of time.
Shouldn't the introductory course sequence be designed to help all students master the material?
What's the point of teaching a class poorly or not giving students enough time?
Does Cal not have enough faculty to teach the follow-on courses if too many students are successful, so they have to prevent students from being successful?
Berkeley doesn’t have enough faculty for all the students who join. So part of it is just pragmatism.
It also wants to maintain a certain level of prestige. The degree is fairly difficult to get.
When you have more people entering a major than you can handle, you end up having to weed some of them out.
If that seems nonsensical, well, maybe it is, but (I think?) it's not like the same person is deciding to do both of these at once. One entity decides to overenroll, another one needs to find a way to compensate.
Simple: the idea is that if you will likely fail the degree course, you should better fail fast to decrease your opportunity cost.
Berkeley is a generally place where all the resources are available to you, but you need to do your research and make wise choices.
The problem is that because CS 10 is not a required course, most freshmen that come into Berkeley, many who were top of their class in high school, think “hm I can just take 61A since it’s mandatory.” It’s not entirely their fault, since Berkeley doesn’t do a very good job of advertising the CS 10 course. It’s fairly new, and there’s still a stigma around it — that you’re “not as smart” if you need to take it. The result is you have almost 2000 students every semester, and many of them are inevitably going to struggle.
I’ve sat in some CS 10 lectures (albeit while I was graduating with a CS degree and TAing CS 61B) and watched my friends do the homework. I didn’t have the luxury of taking CS 10. It’s a great way to learn how to think like a programmer. My personal recommendation is that every incoming Berkeley freshman going into CS should take CS 10, and it should be made mandatory. The CS degree only takes 3 years to complete all the required courses at a fairly leisurely pace, so there’s definitely room to add an extra requirement. Especially since now, the incredibly stupid EE16B has been dropped from the curriculum.
Why was EE16B bad? It looks like it covers some good material in terms of signals, systems, interfacing, and robotics? The labs look like fun also.
Was it too EE or controls focused - maybe a CS-focused hardware interfacing and intro robotics class would be better?
For pure CS majors, it should be an elective. But it was made mandatory until recently. The main complaint is that it’s intense and difficult - regular reports of spending an extraordinary time on the course per week. You can see how a lot of resentment builds up quickly.
This is ridiculous, how do you raise a child in US? Under the table, in your office or what. (in my country, mat. leave is by law and till your child is 3yrs old, employer is prohibited to fire you during this period, again by law. But of course, you'll not get full salary during leave, only some percents)
But also, being at home for 3 years (or 5 if there are two kids) hurts your work super lot even if you formally stay employed. And while they cant fire you while you are away, they can fire you shortly after returning back or you get position designed to make you leave voluntary. Women after that long stay away are penalized a lot. (And also, both leaving work and going back to it are pretty large adaptations.)
It works for food, why not?
A little more seriously, raising kids properly is the most important thing there is for society, that should be explicitly recognised by a society.
Which country?
Do you also get maternity leave for adoption?
Furthermore, fathers can also ask for paternal leave in the same conditions, also for up to 2 years. Only one of the parents may take this longer leave, but the parent that doesn't still has the right to 1 month of leave.
Even if the 1 month is not taken, fathers can still request 5 days of special leave for this (or 10 if they attend a child care course).
Note that while the pay you get for this period is based on your regular salary, it is typically capped at a fairly low level, so for high-paying positions it still represents a significant income loss.
Most young people are migrating outside the country for any skilled jobs, huge deficit & debt, and cutting back on the promised welfare doesn't sound good to me.
You have to consider long term sustainability and practical implication.
Nordic countries, switzerland, etc which are famous for welfare systems are funded by financial systems and oil. Other countries are not. Can they afford all these generous benefits?
Still, given that the welfare system is mostly financed out of current taxes, if the population can be stabilized (or even increased), it can be self-sustaining. We are not in a good place right now, but we were in a much worse place 10 or 20 years ago, so there are reasons to be hopeful things can be turned around.
Also, lots of people are leaving exactly because welfare is not good enough in the country (while the legal benefits are nice, often times the quality of the actual services is well below par). So again, I don't think reducing welfare will have a positive impact, in the longer term.
That is true for every welfare system based on social responsibility structure. Society pools money to pay for retirement of everyone at a fixed rate. Young people are entered into the system to fund old people's retirement today and promised that they would get funded by young people tomorrow.
This works as long as enough young people enter the system at intervals to continue the payouts except when that doesn't happen due to demographic collapse or some other reason. Think of a legal pyramid scheme.
> if the population can be stabilized (or even increased), it can be self-sustaining
Not necessarily. Many countries underestimated the life expectancy of people retired and had to run on a deficit as a result so they are taking money from pensioners of future today. They had to fix this by increasing the retirement age, cutting down benefits, removing benefits for people with private savings, etc.
They will only keep cutting. If not, it will fall.
> lots of people are leaving exactly because welfare is not good enough in the country
I see unemployment among youth as the major reason. Welfare won't be funded by unemployed.
> So again, I don't think reducing welfare will have a positive impact, in the longer term.
Reducing unsustainable welfare will because money can be used elsewhere to create jobs, attract businesses, increase employment, etc.
Comparisons of totally alien industries (non-profit academia to for-profit tech startups) don’t make any sense because everything about them is overwhelmingly different.
However, since the supply of PhD students grossly outnumbers the number of tenure-track positions, people do end up in some kind of limbo (post-docs, non-track lecturer or adjunct positions) for a long time.
The tenured positions also don't pay as well as industry but they come with much greater freedom, more flexible balance of research vs. teaching vs. service and incredibly robust job security.
Why is it logical? I'm not saying teaching should match private sector. But if the pay is too low, how are we going to get passionate and talented people who actually want to teach?
My take is that Pamela is championing for higher pay for Unit-18 faculty. $107k sounds like a lot of money until they break it down. And these are the folks prepping the future generation of our field. Pay them more.
The salaries shouldn’t be compared with private, but should be compared with other non faculty salaries within the UC system, or across universities in the world.
A faculty in London, Paris, or other high CoL city would love a pay boost to 107k.
If you’re looking for that, I hear there’s a school down on the Peninsula.
The size of the classes at Berkeley has always had me scratching my head for decades now.
"I found it really difficult to balance CS61A (a massive class of 2000) with CS169A (still a fairly large class of 350), since 169A required a fair bit of work in writing quizzes/exams (5 quizzes, 1 exam), grading open-ended homework assignments, and staff management."
I knew people who went to Berkeley years ago, and was shocked at the class sizes.
I've worked with Berkeley grads, and besides constantly signaling they went to Berkeley; I wasen't impressed with their abilities. (That goes for all the fancy schools though? All the ones we are suspose to be wowed by.)
Then again some of the guys I worked with whom really impressed me were college dropouts, or mainly self taught.
If I started a new business, excuse me Start-up, which college applicants hide in for 4 years would have no bearing on my new hires.
And yes--I'm the guy who spent way to much time hiding in college. It was cheaper in the 90's though, and I lived with my dad way too long.
One if the best at your school doesn’t mean one of the best at uni though! And I realised while I like maths, it is the maths you can visualize. My favourite was calculus and learning about limits! Just imagine it getting smaller right. But then it got more and more abstract. I lost the love of studying it and the intuition.
So in a nutshell I am saying Dunning-Kruger. But I could have been just a good coder if I got a job with other coders to learn the craft and nothing beyond 0-16 yo learning. I would have self taught stuff to the same difficulty as the 16-21 yo learning but on applied topics. Learning Windows internals for example or Linux - depending on where the job took me.
Is it the belief that someone who's entire job is teaching at a research oriented university should be paid similarly to those with greater academic credentialing (PhD) and who balance both teaching and research? That seems to be the implication here. And I don't disagree that teaching is undervalued, but Pamela Fox seems to want the higher status without the 5-6 year academic journey and brutal selection process to get tenure track positions. And academia doesn't reward great performance like the private sector so doing a great job as a lecturer would never elevate her to that upper track.
It is sad to lose great teachers but a part of me finds it hard to sympathize. This reads like a very smart person not doing their homework on the way a system works though ample public resources are available to find out.
I also feel like there will be some tension between increasing wages to be competitive with SWE salaries and the staggering tuition fees that students pay in America (orders of magnitude more than their EU counterparts in comparison).
Out of curiosity, how much do you believe it would be in Europe post-tax? In California this would be around $76k.
- Are costs of living (including housing prices) comparable?
- Is retirement comparable?
In the US you need to try to save some of your money for retirement too; not sure if most European countries have a pension-based system or not, but that's another thing to account for.
Even if they do have generous plan on paper, can they actually pay that 50 years in future?
Most won't. I know people from southern EU who haven't received what they were promised for pension and live in poverty today. It's only worse for future pensioners while they tax 25-30% in social security with no cap from your salary for pension and healthcare (You still need private coverage on top).
They also cut pension for people who saved money on side and accrued a livable amount ignoring their past contribution.
No. The US is far and away the richest polity on Earth. Nowhere pays comparably.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_househo...
She wanted to try academic teaching, took a pay cut for it, tried for a couple of years, and is factually describing that it's undervalued and exhausting work, even though she has a passion for teaching. Useful info for people thinking about it. Maybe also useful info for people who want to improve academia.
No grand systemic changes are suggested or requested in this post, nor is she asking for sympathy as such.
As a European the salary levels seem very high (top level professor in Germany starts lower than that), but the conditions (maternity leave, health care) are unbelievably atrocious.
I'm Googling and here are a couple of numbers I find:
- Median rent in Berkeley seems to be around >= $3k/mo for a ~700 sq. ft. (2-bedroom?) apartment. [1]
- Family of four estimated monthly costs are ~$4.5k without rent. [2]
I don't know how accurate that estimate is, but it's around $90k/year in expenses, which is $14k more than the post-tax salary.
Curious what your numbers are that suggest this is pretty doable. Of course I'm sure there are people scraping by with much less, but it seems like doing so would need a fair bit of creativity and not be something that would seem "very doable".
[1] https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/be...
We recently bought a house, so we've had some home maintenance costs, which was the big issue that popped up this year - I didn't have the money to split roof-fixing costs, and a big rainstorm caused a leak which caused us to have to tear the drywall out of our bathroom wall. I look forward to having a bathroom wall again in the near future! :)
To the original comment: I agree that my salary was doable (and higher than many Unit-18 lecturers! and than many in the bay area! I am quite fortunate indeed). However, given that I am able to earn much more as someone with a CS background in other roles that I also enjoy, I made the decision to leave the lower paying role.
I did do research this year, by the way, as I managed to get a grant even as an adjunct lecturer. That was one of the things that added to the courseload. The other Unit-18 lecturers in EECS are also involved in research.
Hopefully my reflections make it easier for others to do their homework. :D
In reality, there's spots where it very well could be a career path but it's incredibly difficult to make it work in CS. (And in many many other fields too!)