Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
nature.com
nature.com
That's why I'm quite confident in saying generally "universities are in trouble". I've seen it over time and geography. Not all places of higher learning are. Some private and state entities are thriving. What is killing the universities, in my opinion, is they're caught in a no-mans-land, as neither fully state entities, nor private concerns.
Colleagues in other countries have suggested that "each unhappy university system is unhappy in its own way". Hugely constrained funding in some countries, direct government interference in others, rampant casualisation in a third, a collapse in scholarship in a fourth...
I also knew plenty of more senior professors that left the field, which didn't encourage me to backfill it. Strangely enough, whatever difficulty there may be in the more senior ranks, entry sure seems like a grind.
Our middle and senior management are increasingly a separate class. It used to be that management was done by established academics on a temporary basis: the department's full professors take their turn as head of department, for example, and the Pro-Vice-Chancellors (deputy Presidents) would have recently been senior profs. Nowadays, heads of department tend to be externally recruited as such, there's an increasing group of senior management that have never been academics, and those that have been are essentially part of a separate management track that doesn't really interact with the career paths of the rest of us.
The traditional governance measures have also broken down: it used to be that the faculty Senate was (probably over-)powerful; now management is corporate-style in the hands of Vice Chancellors-as-CEOs with their senior management colleagues and carefully selected 'independent' non-execs serving as oversight.
As I've said in other comments, this is correct - I can confirm this is the case at several top tier UK universities.
As usual with these claims, chances are it's due to the fact that these positions don't pay enough to be competitive.
Some of them can try to squeeze their student base a bit more (increase accommodation prices, reduce subsidies in the food halls, etc) but the students don't have access to private loans so they can't afford much.
I’m back in school and my programming professors have been awful. Really high failure rates even in intro to programming. I already have the knowledge but not the degree and I felt bad for the students so I was wondering if I could teach COP1000 part time. They had a similar opening for an intro to IT class and I started laughing as soon as I saw the requirements and the pay.
They were asking for a PhD and they were paying 40k a year. I’m pretty sure you can make more than that working at Costco, Apple retail, administrative paper pusher or as a server, which require no degree at all.
It’s ridiculous.
I got an offers to work on several really cool projects, but the pay is at poverty level basically.
But the post doc stuff feels like ritual hazing. Poverty wages for highly educated, highly skilled individuals for even more years. It seems like medical residencies, but you’re never going to see the type of money the physician will after paying dues.
The decade of the big scam was terrible for doing science also. The trust between politicians and scientists was destroyed deliberately by the first. Covid was just the last nail in the coffin.
This hits the nail on the head. Everyone I know in academia is there despite their management. One had to leave the UK for the US in order to progress her career. The ongoing pensions fiasco has produced some extraordinary responses. Some universities are threatening to withdraw a whole month's pay for any strike action, not just for the period of the strike. Strike action is likely to hit exams: https://twitter.com/ucu/status/1531245496190128131 , with the result that universities are trying to outsource and automate marking (a lower quality product for which students will be charged the same amount).
Inflation over the course of this year is likely to be 10%. Pay offers are in the region of 2%, with pension cuts of up to 40%. Staff are going on strike simply to maintain their pay levels.
Marketisation has ruined the concept of the university. It's now seen as a place for manufacturing Education Units (to be sold to students) and Research Units. The staff on the Unit production line are therefore as metric-driven as Uber drivers. And there are attempts to casualise them similarly. Nobody senior or in government really cares about the content of the Units, only how they're ranked by the Unit Assessment System (RAE).
The culture war is also squarely pointed at universities, which are in and of themselves a threat to the right-wing, apart from the top two or three which are required for elite reproduction.
It's somewhat validating to see this phenomenon get attention in an outlet like Nature, but likely too little too late.
I did interview at a university in the UK before I left -- one well known to HN is my guess. My impression from discussions there is that the UK and EU has been insulated from many of the trends in the US, but at least in the UK, there has been a shift to adopting some US practices. There are rational reasons for this but my impression was that it was already creating some of the same problems as in the US. In general, my impression is that the US and UK academic sectors are starting to resemble one another much more than was the case historically.
I've gone back and forth about whether or not leaving was the right decision. For a long time I didn't regret it at all, but now I often wonder if staying was the right choice despite all the problems. It's become distant enough in time I now have difficulty remembering everything though, so it's easy to remember certain feelings and thoughts more than others.
The US university system is often held up as one of civilization's great achievements. However, to me the system is fundamentally broken. I often can't discern if that's just my sour grapes opinion, or if the US university system is somehow riding the coattails of previous decades. I'm partially saying this cathartically, but partly because I worry about the rest of the world seeing the current US academic system as something to emulate, as opposed to what it was 50 years ago.
Everything you're saying is exactly right on the money in my opinion, though. Especially about marketisation. The problem with marketisation as applied to academics, I think, is that it mistakes short-term market metrics with long-term real value.
My sense in discussing things with colleagues is that a lot of this is location-specific. That is, there are enormous pressures in academics right now, and a lot of someone's experience depends on having an environment that is supportive and constructive. If you end up someplace fundamentally dysfunctional or abusive, it's decimating to your ability to function. Conversely, if you end up someplace where there are at least some reasonable individuals at the helm, with checks and balances, and an environment of looking to help each other succeed, a lot of the problems can be mitigated. I think that could be said of almost any vocation, but in academics it's especially important because there's so few degrees of freedom.
On the other hand, observant or not, it's still (nearly ) the only game in town for some sorts of things that people want to do. Some people pursue that for a long time hoping things will shake out ok for them... as it does very much for some.
Most people who publish in journals are affiliated with academia simply because that’s where the vast majority of basic research happens.
Edit: One of the most important papers in fracture mechanics was published in a campus newsletter. The publication venue doesn't matter that much.
the publication venue matters very much in most fields. it is rare exception when something is published elsewhere. the bulk of papers need to make it to goodish journals to be ever seen and considered when deciding about funding. Open access misses the target because it only replaces the publishing part, not the prestige part.
I’d be very interested in a link, that sounds cool!
One of the more important contributions in grain growth theory (crystalline materials, not food) is a short comment by John von Neumann, where I guess he attended a conference talk and just came up with this elegant topological theory right there.
Paris' Law, which predicts fatigue crack growth rate, was published in "The Trend in Engineering", which is the University of Washington College of Engineering alumni newsletter.
“Though Paris’s ideas presented a way to quantify and predict structural integrity, his approach was considered unconventional, and none of the leading journals published it. So, in January 1961, after leaving the UW to return to Lehigh for his Ph.D., Paris published his paper, ‘A Rational Analytic Theory of Fatigue,’ in The Trend.”
https://www.engr.washington.edu/news/article/2021-05-24/pari...
this is not true.
I have a wide range for friends all from top tier universities, none of them had the experience you're describing. Today coming from a top tier program at a place like Harvard, MIT, Cornell or Yale means you have a shot at landing a tenure gig at a mid to top tier university, but it sill requires a long run of post-doc wandering. The environments are still toxic, and the majority still end up fleeing to other careers to make a living.
The politics were petty and vicious, and the number one rule there was to maintain the "face" of the people above you.
I understand that "mooshot" research exists, and why it sometimes has to be that way. It's just that the entire process of academia seems to be almost designed to crush any curiosity and redirect mankind's brainpower to validating particular ideas that incumbent scientists base their ego on.
Don't forget about those sweet, sweet tax-free endowment investment gains.
Well the same can said of many devs who orgasmate on the next JS tool/framework.
Oh well, the whole premise of life seems to be built on some giant false promises. After life (truth=death is a dead end) , god ( truth=nobody around), meaning of life (truth=42), career( truth= sorry job), democracy( truth=refined oligarchy) lol, got to stop somewhere.
1. Covid was hard on education from kindergarten through college. Systems and processes that were already stressed to the max became overloaded and everyone was asked to do more and sometimes take a pay cut or have reduced benefits while doing so.
2. Society stopped valuing education as much. While once educators traded lower pay for the prestige of being a professor they can’t really say it is a worthy trade anymore as a vocal minority do not value education at all.
3. Faculty no longer run colleges/ universities. Once faculty ran everything, but as regulations have tightened and colleges started getting sued for any number of things professional administrators started being required because the jobs got bigger. In theory this has created less work for faculty, but they now feel disconnected and impotent.
I can totally see why that is the case. Raised in a classical worker family and observing how my peers from childhood are doing, I can imagine where this is coming from.
Most of them were also raised as workers kids (i.e. both parents working in mindless jobs in a factory and earning barely enough to raise the kids), but some had the chance to go earn a BS or MS. Yet, they are financially struggling for severals reasons. Also, they have a hard time explaining to their parents why they can't afford a house, vacation, a new car and all the things their parents never had, but wanted their kids to have. So all the reasons their parents fought to get them a good education are nullified.
I know getting a good education is of value in and of itself, but the reality is, that most parents want a good education for their kids because they want them to be financially successful, not for humanistic reasons (remember who attended universities in their beginning and why, it was aristocrats with a lot of time and money).
So to play the devil's advocate, what value has this education, if my kids still struggle in life, just they way I am? And why should I have "high esteem" for the people teaching, if what they offer has so little practical value?
I also see this now with the new Bachelor students in my department, professors are really confused by complaints like "this was only said during lecture, how should I know".
My econ prof was from Canada and told us all the time what a better racket the US is to make money. All while making us buy a $90 book that he wrote and changed editions yearly.
At least he was honest that he was robbing us blind.
Also 40 years of experience doesn’t pay much in general. I was paid more as a new associate developer than I would have with 40 years of experience and a masters degree as a teacher.
Pensions don’t have compounding interest, they are defined benefits. And often they are in place of social security (though the amount you pay in as a teacher is basically equivalent to social security taxes). They can be good, but it’s risky and depends on the state. Lots of states like to raid the pension fund and then promise to make it up later (but rarely do). Cutting pensions is also a popular move to score political points, so it’s possible that you could always end up with little to nothing by the time you retire.
This is not true in any state I am aware of. Salaries are very rigid and all teachers and staff with the same years of creditable experience and educational status make the same amount regardless of new hire status. Some counties may offer extra pay for performance or extra duties like coaching or summer school, but it is usually not a significant amount.
She finally moved out of state and retired for a couple of years to get away from the principal.
I've heard and seen many variations of this.
Covid didn't break their back--shitty parents did. Covid just ran the parental shittiness meter up to max.
And, to put a cherry on top, practically all teachers now have multiple students who actually had a parent die. In a normal year, that would be rare and that child would get lots of counseling. With Covid--it's too common and the teachers have to deal with it. Just like everything else.
And people wonder why teachers are quitting ...
This can't possibly be the case. 67,366 adults between the ages of 18 and 49 have died (of COVID) in the US during the entire pandemic. There are 25 million children of primary school age in the US.
Why explains this discrepancy? Social media. Every teacher has seen other teachers mourning the death of parents on social media, and that feels like something that actually happens to you.
But no. It is absolutely not the case that practically all teachers have multiple students who lost parents to COVID. The math is completely off.
This is extremely unlikely and if you know multiple teachers with this condition you just have really bad luck.
Only about 60k COVID deaths are 30-49 [0] with another 200k for 50-64. This is about 25% of COVID deaths in the US.
There’s 50M school kids between k-12 [1] so the odds of a kid having a parent who died is really low: 1:50M/60k2 for typical age range of school age kids or 1:50M/260k2 if you lump in the older age group, but I think that age group is less likely.
So if you’re a teacher and teach 7 classes of 30 students your odds of having a single kid with a parent who died is 50% so certainly not “practically all teachers.”
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372#PK12-enroll...
We'll roll with 20-59 which totals to: 20,765 confirmed deaths https://dshs.texas.gov/coronavirus/TexasCOVID19Demographics_...
Texas has 1,247 school districts: https://tea.texas.gov/texas-schools/general-information/over...
That's roughly 16 parent Covid fatalities per school. This, of course, ignores population clustering which is going to mean more deaths in larger school districts. And there's some fuzziness because not everybody in the demographic has children (although Texas is probably higher in that regard).
Granted this probably overcounts a bit because 55-59 may not have children in school anymore. However, this also doesn't count people who survived but are in bad shape (who probably outnumber deaths by quite a bit) which may be worse from a student mental health point of view.
I see no contradiction to what I have said and I stand by it.
Your statement about most teachers is blatantly wrong.
There are more survivors, but still not the vast majority of teachers.
The decision is easy when you have mouths to feed, wages don’t keep up, and I can earn double my salary doing the fun part of my work (ML+optimization+data/energy modelling in civil engineering space) literally the next day. I was working with all kinds of companies to help them get started with this kind of work. Instead of sending my students I just leapt and it’s been a tremendous experience. If I return I will be a better professor, however not publishing for a couple of years may kill that dream. Right now, it’s a great feeling not to have to worry about food and I can actually focus more on doing my job better. I feel bad about leaving my group, but they can find someone more hungry than me that wants it more.
The biggest problem was that the higher ups in the organisation still had a very fuzzy idea on how/when/why to actually deploy ML/data science etc. in projects, but at least they where aware of this shortcoming and working to address it.
You are going to have to 'sell' yourself and your skills and spend time convincing people that you bring real bottom line value to projects, and there is still scepticism among the old guard that data science can bring anything of value that you will have to overcome.
On the plus side I found lots of opportunities to get involved in all kinds of varying projects from crowd simulation to using ML to create predictive geotechnical models. Since no one really knows the best way to use these new tools within civil engineering I found a lot of room for doing essentially R&D.
I also found that civil engineers seem to have a much more sane view on work-life balance compared to software engineers and so the work hours and levels of work where much more reasonable than I've seen in many software companies. The flip side to this is that the pay is on the whole lower compared to software companies.
I would love to do research and science, but I just hate the current status of that "industry".
And this is considering that I traded a "comfortable" life in Germany, with all the great social safeties in there (I didn't have a problem with the language) for a Mexican based startup with very high risk. And the pay was even not that different. After 10 years of my decision, I can say I took the best path, given that it took me to work in other startups that have been doing amazingly well and for which I've got some good amount of stocks.
I know you pointed out salaries, but the vast majority of junior academics are not interested in chasing higher salaries. They are there for their research and the opportunities to pursue that research.
(Somehow this is both sarcasm and the literal situation of people I know.)
I mean: a lot of universities provide dorms for their students, why not for parts of their staff, too?
Hilariously, it turns out that was always the case. The profs with the fancy houses were never doing it on their university salaries; they were doing it on family money. Meanwhile, one of my colleagues resigned and left because he couldn't afford to pay rent for him and his partner in Oxford on a postdoc salary. Plus ça change...
I get this, but these are almost all ponzi schemes when "guaranteed" by the government or some form of bureaucracy. We deal with it in the US. Chicago and Philadelphia public pensions are underwater with no way to solve the problem, so elected officials kick the can down the road until it blows up.
>> universities are no longer capped in terms of the number of students they can take
>> Some form of bureaucracy
1. To take my research group to dinner, e.g., if a visitor comes to town, requires that I submit a form with about ten fields. We have to name all attendees, date and time of dinner. When the form is submitted, some admin will call the restaurant to organize that the bill is sent to the university. But before all this, I have to call the restaurant to make a reservation. (One time I forgot this and it caused a lot of confusion… I thought the whole idea was to get approval before booking.) Then if the admin approve, it goes to my department head who also has to approve. Actually, before the whole process I have to get an informal approval from my HoD. All this requires a lot of careful planning with all attendees and so forth… it may not sound so bad, but I didn’t mention that the admins require that we submit the form at least five work days in advance to be guaranteed processing in time for the dinner… that’s a lot of hassle pre-dinner… compared to the previous approach; ask HoD if ok, go to dinner, pay with CC, submit receipt and get reimbursed.
(Sorry the explanation became more complicated than necessary because I couldn’t remember the ordering of the steps off the top of my head… goes without saying — we spend a lot less funds on dinners after this system was introduced, which is why I keep forgetting the steps…)
2. Our travel reimbursement system is based on the infamous SAP platform… last time I traveled I spent four hours filling the form. We need to provide loads of unnecessary details. And every minor change to a form field requires a save to the database, which typically takes about a second or two in the best case. The system is broken.
They keep hiring more admins that are supposed to help. The result is more admin tasks being pushed down to the faculty…
How are you defining "Work enterprise"?
Note: Work should be Woke. Error on my part.
Subroutine: auto-detect use of 'Woke'; start flush opinion routine.
Set recurring reminder note to user - don't ever get this intellectually cringe.
/End
1. Benjamin Ginsberg: The Fall of the Faculty. The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters.
2. Harry R. Lewis: Excellence without Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.
Regulation and accreditation has become more stringent because some for-profit schools have scammed people out of money. Regulation has caused a bunch of positions to be created to make sure that the University is in compliance at all times. Falling out of compliance can cause the university to be sued or lose accreditation. The risk of either is so massive it could close a small college or university so it makes sense to spend as much money as required to mitigate the risk.
Cheap loans have changed consumer behavior in the same way low interest rate loans increase the cost of housing. Consumers are willing to spend more to go to the best. But how is a student to determine which school is best? It is impossible to really compare education beyond the general prestige of the university, so how do schools differentiate themselves among similarly ranked schools? New buildings; more and better services; better dorms; better website / marketing materials; better events and activities for students. A good example of this is the student fitness center. Almost every school now has a massive world-class fitness center, not for student athletes, just for students to workout and play rec sports. These are buildings that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Great, don't build one you say. Pass that savings on to the students. That is fine, but students will, without fail, choose the school with the giant fitness center. And it can't just be a nice fitness center, it has to be on-par or better than what other schools have.
Schools that are closing their doors are the ones that have left themselves open to risk (compliance, cybersecurity, accessibility, etc) or have not kept up with the arms race for amenities.
I’m leaving my academic position for industry this year. (Technically I’m “on leave” for a year but I am not going to come back barring something insane happening.)
For anyone else in my shoes considering the move, I will say that while money isn’t everything I am going to very nearly quadruple my salary by going into industry.
I know I’ll have a boss and more boring meetings than I have now, but I am not convinced that I’m going to work more hours.
I do not fully understand the economics of higher education—they're complex and often opaque—but a few things to keep in mind:
1. Tuition seems absurd, but very few students pay the sticker price. At my institution, average cost after aid is 39% of average cost before aid, and less than some of the private K-12 schools in this city. 2. "These institutions" are not a monolith. See above—especially when it comes to prestigious schools, many students aren't paying close to sticker price. 3. Families and students expect much more from colleges than they did a few decades ago, both in terms of facilities and staffing. I don't know if anyone's done a study of student wellness center staff sizes, but I wouldn't be surprised if they doubled over the past two years. 4. The sciences (and things like conservatories) are particularly expensive because of equipment/lab costs. Someone has to pay for all this. I think more should come from the corporate America (not sure how), which benefits greatly from these programs, but I'd venture to guess most comes from tuition and government grants.
I disagree with most financial aid and admissions offices, who seem to regard loans as "aid"
Please dig deeper if you care about this issue. My wife works at a state school and by far the overwhelming factor on rising tuition has been the systematic defunding of state schools since the 1980's. Our state university currently receives about 20% of what it once did from the state 40 years ago.
Imagine if the school was just a building with rooms for teachers to meet with students and labs to do research in. Maybe it wouldn’t be fun for the sporty people and their name wouldn’t be in a cheerleader chant but it would be very focused and efficient
Studying at an American campus is like buying an expensive timeshare.
I’ve been getting a lot more recruitment outreach this spring, some good some bad. The biggest thing is that they’re offering sometimes up to 2x my salary. My institution already compensates much higher than most schools (I make 70k, most research techs make like 30k-40k) so this was quite striking. Also hours are better, etc.
A better barometer perhaps would be the postdocs I know, the majority of which are not bothering to pursue academia. Only 2 that I’m aware of landed tenure track faculty jobs. I personally have no plans to stay in academia unless I somehow land a tenure track faculty position at a R1 university which might as well be like winning the lottery. I’ll stick to industry or leverage my training to go into patent law/science policy/biotech investing.
A postdoc/research associate would be early career researcher, where you still are a member of a research group, but might have bachelor's and master's students under your supervision.
Something is broken in Academia.
So I said "nope".
I worked as an Econ professor and visiting academic in top Business Schools in Latin America and the East Coast (USA), and I can tell you that Business Schools make A LOT of money. They charge whatever they want and people (in most cases, their employers) pay them. In many cases Business Schools can amount up to 40/50% of the universities' revenue. That is also why business professors are paid a lot more. I personally know people at London Business School making more than £ 200,000 a year. Salaries at INSEAD are very similar as well. Of course, salaries at top US Business Schools are even higher.
My point is that you cannot run a business where one or two products make money and the remaining 90% bleed it. That is, if you want to run it as a business and attract talent and pay nice wages. If you want to run universities as some type of public good, then good luck. Pay everybody the same and offer as many degrees as you'd like. Good luck hiring competent people...
University outputs seem to be comparable in this sense.
The patent for Gatorade alone has brought in probably 100 million to U of Florida.
In one of the universities I worked at they had a four-year long History undergraduate degree. Between 5 and 10 students chose it each year (the entire university has around 5,000 students, give or take). That means that there are around 30 students combined. For these 30 students, there were more than 40 full time academics! There are more professors than students. All this is possible because they had 2,000 undergraduate business students, and 1,000 business postgraduate students paying 3x or 4x what a History student paid in tuition fees. I know this might be an extreme case, but it is not that rare. You cannot run a sustainable business like that. Of course History professors made a lot less than their business counterparts, and they complained a lot.
The success of this basic research feeds back into society with substantially increased tax revenue and reputation to attract the best minds in the world.
I would love to see a source on that, particularly the tax revenue increase and return on investment.
I think it is wrong to fund so many researchers that contribute almost nothing to society with tax payers money. Why force minimum wage workers to give part of their income for academics to sit around and think about something that will probably have zero to no impact, while risking nothing. Let's face it, most academics accomplish nothing and have no impact whatsoever with their research. And I am saying this as an Econ researcher. I believe I contributed nothing to research in Economics while working in academia for 30 years. If I had any contribution whatsoever, it was either by teaching or by my consulting jobs.
This is quite a bizarre statement, since universities have been run as a public good for centuries. The idea that they should be profitable businesses is relatively recent. I doubt that the classicists at Magdalen college have ever turned a profit over the centuries, but that doesn't mean that they had trouble recruiting competent people.
That things worked in a certain way for centuries means nothing. Humanities academics are easy to hire, they are many, many PhD graduates, and very few open positions. Also, they make more money in academia than they make in industry. With not money outside options, it is easy to fill those roles.
I'm not suggesting cutting all funding, I think they do provide value in society. However, they shouldn't be demanding salaries that they cannot produce themselves. The fact that Business School professors (as an example, the same could be said by CS professors) make a lot more, doesn't mean that Humanities professor should make the same.
Also, having governments fund most of their budget has many risks. It is very hard for it not to become political and a tool for those in power.
Lots of people demand 'salaries that they cannot produce themselves'. For example, soldiers, nurses, firefighters, etc. etc. I'm not sure why you have it in for academics specifically.
Universities in the UK and many other countries have been heavily subsidised by governments for a long time. In general this does not seem to result in universities becoming a tool for those in power. Quite the opposite in many cases.
Soldiers, and defense in general, are part of the main things a government should provide (we can discuss how much, but that is another discussion).
I am not sure why you say nurses cannot produce salaries. Nurses work in the private sector and provide substantial value.
I do not have it in for academics specifically. In fact, I used to be one. What I am saying is that they are mostly disposable and think of themselves as some superior value.
In the UK in particular, education used to be tuition-free. Now they are running more as a business. I do not see the point of forcing subsidies on people who produce something that not even other academics are interested in. You are basically paying people to sit in a room and discuss something by themselves. Why does a minimum wage worker have to subsidies that? We are all getting hit by inflation, some more than others. Academia is a job with zero risk involved. I don't think it is fair to keep subsidising the dream of a few while having so many better uses for the money, or even reducing the tax burden on society.
[0] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/ac...
>Soldiers, and defense in general, are part of the main things a government should provide
So is education. All developed countries spend public money on education.
>In the UK in particular, education used to be tuition-free.
That is my point. There are abundant historical examples of how a thriving university sector can be maintained without each department needing to be run as its own business.
>You are basically paying people to sit in a room and discuss something by themselves. Why does a minimum wage worker have to subsidies that?
In the UK? In the UK a minimum wage worker pays hardly any tax, so they don't subsidise much of anything. If the question is why society should subsidise that, my answer would be that it should do so if it values historical knowledge (assuming that we're still talking about history PhDs). If you are just saying "history sucks, so let's not spend money training people to be historians", then sure, that is a coherent position.
It is the universal measure of how useful your research is. How do you measure it otherwise? Research is useful if somebody else uses it. Most research in humanities has no use. I'm not against humanities per se, the same could be said about biology, for example. I'm against forcing people to pay very high wages for doing nothing of value. Because, let's face it, academics actually make very decent wages for the zero-risk job they have.
> So is education. All developed countries spend public money on education.
I don't see university-level education as a fundamental aspect of government spending, at least not in its current form. Also, the fact that everybody does it means nothing.
> In the UK? In the UK a minimum wage worker pays hardly any tax, so they don't subsidise much of anything. If the question is why society should subsidise that, my answer would be that it should do so if it values historical knowledge (assuming that we're still talking about history PhDs). If you are just saying "history sucks, so let's not spend money training people to be historians", then sure, that is a coherent position.
'Hardly any tax' is quite a bold statement. You are clearly not on minimum wage. Try living in London on £1,300 a month. Even if they 'only' pay 20%, there is also a 20% VAT on everything they spend.
The fact that almost all governments of developed countries subsidize their university sectors means that the burden of argument lies squarely on those who think that they should not. I understand that you’re one of those people. However, I disagree, and you’ve given no argument in support of that aspect of your position.
Take the example of historical research. Either you want a society which knows its own history of you don’t. You can’t put a price on that. To try to reduce the value of such research to citation numbers or some kind of financial measure is just nonsense.
You keep talking about how things have been historically. Things can change, and historically not everything was done correctly.
> Either you want a society which knows its own history of you don’t.
You don't need hundreds or thousand of History PhDs for that.
There is no point on people studying things nobody cares and nobody will ever care about. If your work never gets used, why force a subsidy on it? Do it with your own means if you like. Or accept the fact that you will have to do it for a very low wage no matter how many PhDs you have.
You seem unable to defend your position other that 'historically it's been this way' and 'unmeasurable value'. There is no point in keeping going with this discussion.
In fact, any college will be thrilled that you're interested. Owing to several factors it's very, very difficult to find people who have a software engineering background and are looking to teach.
Please do look at part-time ("adjunct") positions at any universities, colleges, and community colleges near you!
all in all I am not fond of the academia industry and the hierarchy.
Surely doesn't help people who want to make actual money doing the job, but it doesn't seem like that's realistic for 90% of people anyway.
1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna cripple the economy and are vastly unsustainable. Especially given the ridiculous payback terms that change on a whim every year, and vastly unsustainable interest rates. People aren't earning enough to pay them back either.
2) Grants are being used as a negotiation tactic, with EU horizon funding being held hostage by the NI protocol negotiations.
3) There looks to be a sharp drop off of Chinese student inflows post-covid.
4) We are hitting a bump where we will soon see the population curve drop, and a dramatically reduced number of people attending Uni.
5) As much as people decry the pension changes, I have seen the values given to senior professors and academics. They are vastly unsustainable.
6) University appears to be hitting a weird point of serving too many functions. It props up real-estate, loads millennials/gen-X with debt, acts as a adult school, and provides critical research. A lot of these functions should frankly be split up for different purposes.
Don't even get me started in regards to the current ridiculous scheme used to train junior doctors and nurses.
7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point does the value of this come into question? Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university degree.
8) At some point someone is gonna realize that the paper generated by some of these institutions is not gonna help in a rapidly shrinking junior job market. The nature of which appears to be rapidly changing.
9) Current Universities work on vastly exploiting their phd students, supervisors, postgrads and teaching assistants at close to minimum wage. People are gonna realize this isn't worth it, especially with rapid CoL rises.
Two years of home lecturing that by all accounts has resulted in close to two years of lost progress if my observation of teachers complaining about ill-prepared students is anything to go by.
In particular -- it was a real struggle to get my first year college students to do any group work (an opportunity they'd usually jump at, because 50% responsibility, right?).
If this actually is the case, it is a really unfortunate outcome. I'm opposed to getting kids sick/exposing them to "mystery long-term health consequences." But setting them up for academic regression is also no good.
All in all, 0/10 pandemic, would not pandemic again. Not sure there could have been a positive outcome. Not sure what the least-bad option could have been. I wish we'd done more, though. I think we may have failed.
I wish we'd tried some really out there strategies. A pet idea I wanted to suggest was having the students on campus and organizing them by major into units -- so, your dorm/floor (depending on the size of the building) is all your-major students and it forms a unit. Call it the Harry Potter strategy. You can socialize normally with each other, maybe classrooms are assigned to a given unit. Maybe a grad student is assigned to (live with?) the unit (hard, though, grad students have their own lives going on and I guess they wouldn't want to restrict themselves enough to safely interact in person with the students -- I don't think I could). Lectures could be broadcast to the unit, with some local representative for the instructor. No interactions between units, but at least the students would have some peers to interact with. But I don't anyone would have been brave enough take responsibility for this sort of thing safety-wise (I certainly wouldn't), and I don't know that I'd trust the average school to work out all the details. But if it worked out, it could have been really something!
Actually, I guess we're far along enough to see if anywhere tried that out, and if so, if it worked out.
Maybe facebooks next pivot will be in education.
Sounds dumb when written out, but the alternative is to keep asking "do you understand?" And then getting back "yes" or "(lying) yes," because nobody ever says they don't understand if the question is asked at them directly.
Maybe the fastest way to get to this is a “Star Wars” esque hologram approach. Why else have we been training our youth to see themselves and the world through Snapchat filters.
Why do you say that about the UK? I’m not from there and this is the first I’m hearing about problems with UK student debt.
If you take a 6 year medical course, you are on your own for the 2 extra years at least from a maintenance grant AFAIK. Hence a lot of students, especially those in London struggling for their 5th and 6th year of study. Don't even get my started in regards to the junior doctor salary.
The payback terms of this is 9% of everything you gain beyond a specific threshold i.e. anywhere from 20-25k.
After 30 years, theoretically the loan gets wiped off (unlikely). Already there are talks of extending it for the next gen plans by another 10 years.
The interest rate for this student loan is RPI + 3.5, and adjusts higher the more you earn. Effectively becoming almost impossible to pay back apart from those who are the absolute highest earners.
So far, we have seen the government repeatedly change both the repayment threshold, and the time before it gets wiped.
Given NI rises, I have seen effective marginal tax rates up to 60%.
At the end of the day, the rich are gonna pay it off immediately and avoid the problem, the middle get loaded and pay back far more than necessary during the loan lifetime, and the bottom may get it wiped off but forget the idea of having savings or disposable cash.
https://www.student-loan-calculator.co.uk/
The current system basically reduces massively disposable spending for middle and low earners, doesn't affect the top earners. It also is an effective black hole given most people aren't expected to be able to fully pay back the loan. This will have a massive impact on the economy and government finances. Especially given this is an open blackhole.
If you want an illustration of the magnitude of the problem the might resonate with HNers: the USS Trustee is aiming to achieve CPI+0% investment returns for the next 40 years. With long-run equity returns being what they are, that's borderline criminal. (It's certainly not the investment strategy that universities will be adopting for their own endowments).
The honest truth is that the USS was highly solvent on a going concern basis before the recent changes (which already involved prospective cuts of 30% to accruals only a few years ago). It only generates a deficit if you model closing the scheme tomorrow and shunting the entire fund into gilts in order to eliminate all investment risk. But even if you do that, the scheme can still pay: it's explicitly backed by the combined assets of every scheme member, which includes all the richest universities and (hilariously) the government.
Oh, and the present cuts will take it down to less than half the pension of our colleagues in the newer post-92 universities who are in the Teachers' Pension Scheme. What price a formal government guarantee?
This a problem with many public sector pension plans. Many cities across this country have pension plans that guarantee pensioners income that cannot be paid from the plan without screwing over future retirees.
Clearly this issue has to be evaluated system by system.
If you want far more detail than is sane, there was a 'Joint Expert Panel' set up by the employers organisation and the union to provide a way forward after the industrial action caused by the last attempt to abolish the scheme. Their report analyses USS in detail (rather than pension schemes in general) and is at https://web.archive.org/web/20220506092908/https://ussjep.or...
Largely talking about my experience seeing my parents'(30 year professors) pension who are in the Teacher's pension scheme along with other pension schemes.
From my perspective, I was blown away by the figures they were being given. With my points in regards to a potential drop in grants, and funding from students. I fail to see how the figures I saw will be sustainable going forward.
My own projected pension is £13,180 a year, based on about 30 years' worth of (mostly future) combined employer/employee contributions of 30% of a salary of a little less than £40k/yr. Big bucks it is not.
I have a lot of friends and acquaintances that are university professors and it was frankly embarrassing how many of them could not be bothered to learn to adapt to online teaching. There was endless complaining about basic things that anyone who works in an office doing meeting with remote teams has to learn.
There are entire industries based around providing educational content online, and even more based around creating engaging content online. It's more or less a solved problem and someone with a Phd should certainly be capable of learning a few new tricks. You're not tasked with some impossible challenge, you're just being asked to rethink how you teach for the benefit of hundreds of students paying collectively millions of dollar to learn from you.
Not only any class but I can probably find multiple different professors teaching the class and take my pick of who I like the best.
To me, it can only be explained by our cultural obsession with education as credentials and the total disregard that classes have actual valuable information. We have had an absolute revolution in education that we are not taking any advantage of. Instead the classes mostly rot on youtube and the education racket collects rents no differently than in 1980 other than charging way more.
As nice as open access sounds in theory, in practice this new "Plan S" policy will mean that bullshitters who game the system and shouldn't even be in academia will win big time and can spit out one crappy publication after another. I've met people in my profession who literally said "Who cares if its false? It's another publication in your CV!" The difference between fringe journals and the top journals is unbelievably high in my discipline, people used to even count bad publications negatively, and a few publications in top journals used to give you a tenure-track position. To give you an idea of the difference, the former have acceptance rates of about 100%, the latter have acceptance rates of less than 5%. Now the top journals won't even count any longer at all in evaluations by our funding authority. There is so much crap published nowadays, they should limit the allowed number of publications/year; instead they are going for the opposite, a large number of publications in fringe and even self-published open access journals. Some of my colleagues are already literally starting their own journals.
I admit that there are many disciplines where open access works better, but not in mine. Maybe "Plan S" will have great and noble effects in 20-30 years from now, but for the generation in-between it's a complete disaster for anyone interested in quality. For me that's the decisive reason to leave.
Also there was a Trump executive order that threatened ALL govt funding to any org that commits a thought crime and that will return as soon as Republicans win the WH
I'm not gonna claim anything here but do agree what firms / business are mostly complaining about is key employees changing jobs more so than leaving the workforce entirely.
What anecdotally is the case is that there are a lot of staffing issues for service sector jobs.
Mother was working as a teacher for over 40 years. A real teacher by calling. Kids loved her, always got the most flowers and chocolades etc.
Unfortunately she had to retire prematurely because the work conditions became terrible.
Goverment wants you to do more and more for the same pay. On top of that ppl quit and you have to fill in for them too. Slowly the situation will resemble retail sector.
Healthcare and Education are the two sections we should NEVER be cheap on.
Unfortunately our rulers dont see that.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/236541/per-capita-health...
2000-2016: -4.3% LFPR
2016-2020: +1% LFPR
Current: 0.2% below what we were in September 2015 (while currently in a sharply increasing trend)
The graph is eye popping, but the numbers themselves don't seem particularly exceptional.
Really, where this chart is misleading is that there are likely different cohorts. If stratified by decade of birth I would expect boomers to be most of the difference, and maybe even millenials offsetting it. And if so, there are at least two great resignation stories to tell:
1. Boomers resigning, as long predicted. in the 2008 crisis everyone expected them to retire but that didn't really happen. maybe happened this time
2. The rest of us resigning one job to start another, filling the vacancies created by story #1, and creating its own cycle of job hopping for salary bumps.
Changes are probably at the margins but those can still be significant in the aggregate. There are obviously many people (of all generations) that can't afford to just pack it. But there are also a lot of Boomers, among others, who--thanks in part to a long bull market--don't have to keep working and there are a lot of reasons to imagine why now might be as good a time as any to wind down full-time employment.
Back in 2000 the Department of Labor started tracking the number of people quitting their job. The number has bounced between 1.5 and 2.5 percent during that time. The number recently went up to 3 percent, and is staying high.
From that it appears "something" is happening. Given the lack of historical data it is impossible to tell if it is normal variability or something interesting.