As I've said in other comments, this is correct - I can confirm this is the case at several top tier UK universities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.