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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

Or permanent positions that are reasonably paid and not professors. Like teachers, researchers, ...

I don't get the impression that everyone becomes a manager in software, not everyone becomes a line manager in a factory. Not every wants to become CEO eventually. Why should academia be any different?

In Germany for one we used to have positions at universities that focused exclusively on teaching. That was, like, their specialty. And frankly a lot of researchers shouldn't be teaching, they only do it because there's nobody else left to do it.

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In the US, less than half of all college teaching is done by professors. The remainder are "adjunct" teachers, whose job focus is on teaching. An adjunct job tends to have low pay, is short term, and you sign away some of your rights under the labor laws. You have to re-apply for your job every semester.

Perhaps the real difference is how Germany treats workers.

The US has community colleges, that focus on teaching. In my state, the community college teachers are unionized, and teaching is treated more like a career.

Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, more than 25 years ago. My spouse has worked there as a non-faculty researcher since that time.

There is also a USA non-adjunct job called "lecturer" that is meant to focus on teaching rather than research. But while better pay and job security than adjunct, it's still usually pretty bad. (Also not tenured).

German higher education is based in large classes with only an exam at the end of a class and no TAs, except at maybe the top institutions. They don’t need so many teachers, so they can treat them better.

It’s a system that we might want to try here in the USA, but it doesn’t coddle students.

This doesn't solve the problem. If schools have a ratio N students per teacher, then at most 1/N students can expect to become a teacher. This works fine for things like B-school of CS where there is heavy industry demand for the credentials and less than 1/N students are trying to be teachers. But for other departments, especially humanities, there is essentially no private sector demand for that credential at the graduate level. This means that almost all grad students are aiming to teach, and since one teacher can teach many students, the majority of them are destined to fail.

This is a thing at US universities. There are pure teaching professors, pure research professors (who might teach one class a year), and others who do both.

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