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Comment by edrxty | Hacker News Reader

Getting rid of tenure is fine but they'll need to pay much more to stay competitive.

The calculous is fairly simple. Tenure track and then have an easy work life but less money, or go to industry and make lots of money but work more. Nothing wrong with either but if you get rid of the upsides to academia expect to replace them with something. That's just how market economies work.

The issue isn't stem so much as the stuff where there isn't a highly paying industry sector. Those PhDs will have to go out of state for the same QOL as there will be no other competition to increase pay.

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> Tenure track and then have an easy work life

That doesn't match the experience of anyone I know in academia , when you want an easy work life you quit and move to the private sector

This.

A friend remarked one benefit of moving to industry (aside higher pay and more job security(1)) was the reduced hours - no longer always continuing to work after leaving the office.

(1) job security after tenure isn't magical compared to industry around here; before tenure, job security is more or less a guaranteed "haha nope."

So on average, industry has far better job security.

I find the likelihood of paying professors appropriately to be very unlikely; it's not like non-tenure-track professorships are making bank.

I mean, it's not apples to apples, but I do part-time adjunct stuff in NYC, and the extra income is nice enough but even if I extrapolated it to full time, I'd barely have enough to pay my mortgage.

Adjuncts get treated like dirt everywhere, afaik

I mean, they treat me fine I think; everyone has been polite to me, I'm just a lecturer.

It just doesn't pay well enough to survive. I mostly enjoy teaching, but honestly I don't think that I will be doing it again next semester.

It's tough to say if I'm a "good" lecturer obviously, especially I think it's borderline impossible to fail a teaching evaluation here, but I do know that it's trivial for me to find work that pays more than twice as much in the private sector, without a ton of extra work.

I think @kevinmchugh meant that the adjuncts are exploited everywhere.

The adjuncts in my department are all there willingly and they seem pretty happy if you listen to them tell it.

They are all retired engineers and project managers from a local technology firm. They got bored with retirement and like to come around and supervise projects in the capstone. We pay them a couple grand a semester for it, it's not a lot of work. They like it, our students like it, the faculty like it. Everyone wins, what's the problem? How are they being "exploited"?

Yeah, I largely agree; I’m not retired (only in my 30s), but I think for the part time work that I am doing (6 teaching hours a week), I am actually paid reasonably enough. It does bother me that full time professors (tenured or not) are getting paid less than half of what they could easily get in industry though.

I made more two years into my industry job than any of the tenured professors at my Tier 2 mathematics department (comparable to A&M).

There’s no way Texas state govt can stomach paying competitive salaries for non-tenured professors. They can’t even stomach investing in critical infrastructure.

>The calculous[sic] is fairly simple. Tenure track and then have an easy work life but less money, or go to industry and make lots of money but work more.

You have no clue what you are talking about.

Going from academia into industry, the work is much less stressful, and the pay is much higher.

"Easy work life" and being a research professor are mutually exclusive. Your work never ends.

>The issue isn't stem so much as the stuff where there isn't a highly paying industry sector. Those PhDs will have to go out of state f

Again, you have no idea how this market works. The absolute, vast majority of PhD holders and grad students come out of state to begin with.

They will simply avoid Texas, which is simpler than going out of state.

> Tenure track and then have an easy work life

Most faculty works much longer hours than the private sector. It's not easy by any means.

People become professors for exactly the same reason why some people become doctors and others real estate agents - they enjoy it or their personality matches the profession.

Money is not everything.

One of my colleagues, Randy Pausch, used to quip that "academia is the best. You can work any 70 hours per week you want!"

There's truth in that, for better or worse.

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