UCLA professor says he's homeless due to low pay
kron4.com
kron4.com
What people are typically not told is that financially stable academic positions are either political or hard to come by. It’s like professional sports: you can be a pro and just short of top notch and you’ll be playing in the minors for your career, making pennies. This could take the form of endless low-paying postdoctoral gigs, or the crown prize, an associate professorship with little or no benefits and a salary that just lets you scrape by.
In the meantime you are expected to pour your heart and soul into the endeavor. There is some reward in that but it is fleeting, and once you have committed to a career path the momentum to change tracks can be a real obstacle. Academia will suck you dry and demand more. Unless you end up with a tenured position at the end of that, it’s not sustainable unless you have another source of financial backing, like a spouse with a “real job.”
The US doesn’t really value education. Those who do are idealistic or exploitative, sometimes both. You’re buying into a deeply dysfunctional system and should at least go into it with eyes open.
As another commenter noted, this person could likely easily go into the private sector and earn multiples of their salary. Also $70k is smack on for median salaries in LA. This person chooses to work in academia. He is not being exploited. Presumably he finds it more fulfilling to do what he does currently. And good for him. But that’s a luxury. Nothing in life guarantees your dream job and your dream salary.
I admire the guy for choosing to do more important work and making sacrifices to do it. But I'm not owed a decent salary in return for following my own dreams rather than my employer's dreams. Nobody is.
Ok, but he is owed a decent salary for performing an important job. Without guys like this, we don't have a next generation of physicists (most of whom will move into the private sector).
the incentives, the logistics and finances of how we get to a point like that -- well that's where it gets muddier.
Academia is, in essence, a multi-level marketing scheme that produces more of itself, and will (if given unlimited resources from other areas of society) expand until it takes all resources simply replicating more of itself.
Many poor countries have enormously bloated education sectors.
One man can make a video lesson and teach millions, so more educators doesn’t mean more educated.
You can change the teacher:student ratio and still improve the number of educated. If you think this is false, then anything beyond 1:1 tutors is bad. Yet UCLA doesn’t operate on 1:1 ratios.
Finally, what makes you think there will be less educators? Very likely UCLA can rely on the rich and nerdy people who are willing to subsidize their own careers. This already happens in many fields.
Really finally, this is a shit practice. I’d like to see an audit of where the money goes such that the most student focused educators become last in line to get paid.
Anything beyond it isn't bad, per se, but it is less optional.
A here does not imply B. If it did then the natural conclusion is that the world only needs one singular educator.
In reality there's a sliding scale where more students to a given educator results in lower quality education, but a greater number of educated. The art is balancing these concerns.
'How the world works' is not set in stone. The current dysfunction of the academic system in the US (the world?) wasn't always this bad. We can educate the next generation, make scientific advancements, and not have professors starve on the street to make that happen.
There are plenty of people who would be totally happy to step into this professor's shoes at his current rate of pay just to have a position in academia. We have too many PhDs—there are more people who want a position in academia than academia can support.
We're not faced with the prospect of not being able to train a next generation of physicists, but there's a real possibility that the next generation doesn't view academia as the ideal place to be—the physics equivalent of Broadway. If that happens, fewer people will put up with low-valued positions and a dangled tenure carrot, and the college job market will adapt.
In the meantime we're not going to solve the problem of academic jobs being overvalued by the workforce by artificially inflating pay for the lucky few who landed an academic job at all.
It seems to me that they think it's easier than being homeless.
Not to “kids these days” it or anything, but the entitlement over not being able to afford a private, one-bedroom apartment in a fantastically-popular city center is just absolutely mind-blowing.
Any job, no matter how meager, should be able to sustain you, the individual, by yourself, should you choose to leave your situation.
Any other structure is a failure somewhere (policy, incentives, housing, structurally).
Fantastically popular city centers still require a huge number of people; what’s implied by having them waste their time on a commute and being unable to live near their job is that they’re “not worth” their presence - which, again, is required in the city center.
I used to think this way—that is, just like you—in my 20s. From my experience growing up, I was used to not having nice or even merely adequate things, and it was the norm to go without. I'm less cavalier about declaring it entitlement now. Why shouldn't an adult, even a brand new (i.e. young) one, not have their own place? I realized that I didn't have a good reason to justify the status quo (where a home of your own is out of reach), only that it was the status quo, and the thrust of my old position really just came down to something akin to the old saw that Hardship-<X> is good for you because "it builds character"—even though I'd never really found that argument persuasive when I'd encounter it elsewhere. (Just like the old retort "life's not fair", it seemed I'd only ever encounter it from someone in the process of actively trying to screw you over while trying to paint your indignance about it as unreasonable.)
Not saying everyone should expect the works, but I can't exactly fault anyone who would be content with a 12x10 kitchen attached to an 8x10 office that doubles as a bedroom but isn't able to have it. And that's without even addressing the fact that we're likely talking about a situation where you're losing all this money on something you didn't even get equity for!
And it’s not like it was a barely tolerable existence — I wouldn’t trade my five years living in a glorified flophouse for anything, even after that time my housemate attempted to clean their vomit off the bathroom floor at 3 in the morning with the communal Roomba. I guess that was hardship of a sort, but hardship creates friends and memories — I don’t think I built an ounce of “character”, but I had a hell of a time.
k. So you're not against strawmanning.
> And it’s not like it was a barely tolerable existence — I wouldn’t trade my five years living in a glorified flophouse for anything
That's good for you, I guess. Are you acquainted with Rob K. Henderson and what he calls "luxury beliefs"? Or abfan1127[1]? It's easy to discount having "a quiet place to study"[2] if you've never been harmed by not having it and your response to your roommates' youthfully stupid hijinx involves grins and not grief.
I'm disgusted at the implication that 70k isn't enough to live in LA. Yes, it may not be enough to meet some arbitrary standard, but it's insane to say that the alternative is being homeless. This is just a spoiled rich kid who isn't making enough to keep their previous standard of living. There's tons of working class people in that same community getting by on way less than 70k who aren't getting articles written about them.
I think you'll find that there's a lot of overlap in the group of people who think this guy should be paid more and those who want more pay for the people you named.
> I think they are lot more deserving and necessary than people working in universities.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to cosign on the idea that the guy saving me a trip to pick up my own dinner is producing the same value as the guy educating the next generation of physicts.
Of course. On the other hand, one has to wonder which of this two occupations helps humanity more, and it's this the one that's paid better. And if not, should we rethink the way we reward work to prioritize things that help society instead.
The problem is that everyone has different ideas about what helps society.
At least the current system, where people are compensated based on supply and demand, people actually want what's being produced. In contrast to the old soviet system where top down production decisions mean that what's "best for society" is of no use to pretty much anyone except those people who needed to fill their quota.
The problem is not that those people are underpaid.
The problem is the morass of regulation that prevents people building enough housing where they want to live, which keeps the cost of housing high.
And look - I get it - most of that regulation is there for a reason: it's popular. People like it. People like having rent control, or limited increases in property taxes. People in single family houses like not having apartment buildings go up next door to them. People like seeing green space on office campuses. People like mandatory parking requirements for homes and businesses.
But ultimately, a high cost of living is deeply corrosive to society, and all the little perks that come from these regulations just aren't worth it.
If you're going to count the emergent structure that forms from voluntary cooperation as "regulation", the word loses its meaning.
> Capitalism doesn't exist without private property law.
Sure it does.
Laws aren't self-enforcing: the the thing that makes laws "real" is violence (or the threat of violence) backing them up.
For those who are unable to avail themselves of remedies under the law - typically because they're engaging in illegal behavior - they can skip the law bit and move straight to violence.
Basically every criminal organization or individual operates in this manner.
I'm not saying it's nice to live this way - I very much like living in a place with a (mostly) functioning legal system. But Capitalism very much does exist without private property law.
Your dismissal of "excess supply" based on "margins" eliminates breakthrough contributions by profs that work for 20-30 years producing marginal research until one day they make the connection that transforms the world.
It's true that most professors never come up with breakthroughs. You cannot predict in advance which ones will. The best we can do is put many of them to work on research, connect them with their peers, and wait.
This is all besides the point because lecturers aren't even a research position.
In America we are doing the opposite, and then wondering why the results are sub optimal.
Students at public universities deserve good instructors. Stop applying a capitalist market rationale to public services.
Are you one of those people who thinks that whatever price the market offers for labor is axiomatically fair?
We're discussing wages. Wages are all about that rationale. If you make a choice you should abide by it.
This is nothing to do with what students "deserve", whatever that means.
Just imagine if he worked somewhere private.
Deserve is an interesting phrase, who really does deserve more? The more you go down that rabbit hole the less you'll think people deserve in general.
That said. I only have an associate degree and even I made $70k at a regular tech job working with someone with a PhD. I got lucky though before, too bad he didn't.
Why should that employer's dreams take primacy over anyone elses?
The answer: there isn't a reason why. All semblance of economic activity is based on a fiction. That fiction has been guided to structurally elevate a subset of people's wishes and motivations over everyone else's, including yours. And you're totally okay with that state of affairs. Useful idiot much?
Can at least applaud the guy for sticking to his principles. Sometimes society needs a good nut kick to realize it's destroying itself. That it collectively takes so many ruined lives to do so is the true tragedy of our times.
This is due to the hierarchical ranking system of academic institutions. McKeown's qualifications may be the same as his more highly ranked colleagues, but the tiered system which rewards research does not pay as much for lecturers whose primary assignment is to teach.
[0] https://www.pa.ucla.edu/lecturers.html#:~:text=physics.ucla....
Academics are also typically paid a 10-month salary (the "academic year" he mentions), if they teach summer classes that is separate "summer pay." At research universities, part of a professor's salary is also funded by research grant awards they win.
UCLA is on a quarter system, so maybe 2/2/2.
That is not 'technically' homeless, or any other kind of homeless. If it was, millions of adults who move back home with their parents would be 'homeless.' Millions of spouses who aren't on the lease or deed would be 'homeless.' Millions of roommates, too -- which is, in fact, what this guy actually is.
I sympathize that the guy is in a tough spot, $70k a year is not a lot to live on in LA. But this kind of self-victimization is not helpful, Professor.
hmm...
> ac·a·dem·ic year
> the period of the year during which students attend an educational institution, usually from September to June.
That's around 100k annualized. Something is rotten in Denmark.
They have around 5500 faculty members and 31000 staff members (although both of these numbers vary quite a bit from source to source), but many of the faculty are in research positions not teaching positions.
UCLA is usually reports to have a student to teacher ration of around 19:1 and around 45000 students, which would suggest about 2400 teachers, so my proposed 5% housing expansion would let them offer housing to about 1/4 of the teachers.
It would probably have be high density housing, much like typical undergraduate housing, but that should be fine. All the people in it would be doing very similar jobs, likely on very similar schedules, and with similar requirements for their home environment. The more similar you are to your neighbors the higher density can go before people want to start killing each other.
Any sympathy I had for him disappeared when he started attacking folks making good points.
70K salary in Los Angeles - Gross $5,833/mo, filing single, including federal, state, fica, state disability gives a monthly take home of $4,447
So find it hard to believe he is "homeless", seems to be more by choice. And if the take home after paying rent is still too high, do like most others do - get a roommate to share expenses.
Furthermore, he could live 20 minutes away in another neighborhood instead of Westwood - which is LA's version of Lower East Side in NYC - and get a 1bdrm for $1800-2400.
This is truly out of touch, because so many Los Angelenos have a combined household income at or below $70,000 yet are able to raise families and live a middle class life in LA.
This does not mean that lecturer pay shouldn't be increased - lecturers in humanities fields at UCLA get paid WAAAAY worse than $70k, and would fight to get that kind of a salary alone.
I don’t understand how he couldn’t afford $2,500 per month on $70,000 per year. Wouldn’t his take home per month be around $4,000-4,500?
Not that it would be easy to live on the remainder necessarily …. But I know I have at one point lived on $2,800 per month while paying $1,200. (In a lower cost of living area ).
People are just terrible at personal finance. I have friends that earn $300K that have no savings.
I suggest watching the YouTube channel Caleb Hammer if you want to truly understand how easy it is for some people to overspend and go into debt.
I checked out the site referenced, and there's suburbs reasonably close with average rents 30-40% lower than that suburb. That's within a ~45 min. bus ride, according to Google.
Also damn, there's even free wifi on some of those buses.
It doesn't look like low pay is the dispositive cause. This looks like it's cost of housing.
I have a simple solution to address housing costs: tax the hell out of rentseeking. We should be shooting for a scenario where, five years out starting from right now, a Schedule E filer who owns additional residential properties where they are not an occupant should only be able to net 10% in 2028 for the same gross in 2023.
You can afford to rent a 1 bedroom on a $70k salary in Los Angeles - not in Westwood (the bougie neighborhood that UCLA is located in), but take the 405 and commute from the Valley.
It’s now outdated, and the numbers are worse
As an anecdote, let me explain how the game is played. I had two different postdoc advisors at Berkeley. Both were tenure-track professors with good publication records. The first one negotiated her own startup package (starting professors get lab money and lab space to get started) and ended up with a small collection of rooms (3) on a crowded floor, with terrible IT infra. She eventually convinced the facilities manager to give her an IT room (nothing quite like watching your advisor waggle her body to get space) and eventually got tenure- 12 years after starting. The second advisor brought a lawyer to his negotiation and secured a full lab space with promises of more, a $1+M startup fund, and a number of other key concessions; he got tenure in 5 more years. The first professor said it was "unseemly" that the second professor had brought a negotiator- but the reality is that the Deans who act as the university representative are quite knowledgeable and seek to bring on faculty for the lowest prices, while paying themselves the excess.
“Hi everyone, my name is Daniel, and I’m an astrophysics professor at UCLA. I’m only being paid $70,000 for this academic year,” McKeown says in the video.
McKeown, listed as a lecturer on UCLA’s website, says he had to move out of his apartment because he could no longer afford the rent.
McKeown says his rent was $2,500 a month. According to RentCafe, the average rent is $3,700 in Westwood.
(70000-(70000*0.36))/12.0=3733.33
Ok he is left with 3733.33-2500=1233.33 a month, that is BRUTAL, but I know people that live on less than that after a home mortgage and car note.
Again, I have no idea of his situation. Maybe student loans, maybe a car note, medical expenses, etc, but to state out loud that you have probably 1.2k a month after rent and can not possibly live without _a hundred grand_ extra (what he is trying to raise... which is EIGHT THOUSAND A MONTH EXTRA) seems a bit, I am not sure, overreacting? I am just conflicted about this story. I have really good friends that would do a hulluva lot for a 70k job with a 2.5k rent, but at the same time, it is true we are paying professors (and educators in general) far too little.
Is this just to make a statement maybe?
I take that to mean $100k total, which is $2500 pre-tax.
I suspect his effective tax rate is significantly below your numbers. 22% may be the marginal federal tax rate on $70k (I didn’t check), but that would probably put his effective federal rate in the low teens.
EDIT: just checked, just below 11% according to this SmartAsset calculator which puts take-home just shy of $54k or $4500 a month. Only if he has ZERO other obligations like child support or student loans.
Factor in state and local taxes, utilities, necessary expenses, transportation, etc. it seems fully believable that he is paycheck to paycheck which gradually boils down to debt when life rolls a 1 and you have to pay $500 to fix something.
If he is married, has obligations to support parents, you are out of luck.
If he is married, then his spouse (especially given the marital demographics of people holding advanced degrees) is quite likely also contributing income, and decently likely to be contributing income at least as much as he is. Now married with kids is a different ballgame, but married per se isn't going to be a financial burden.
Total effective tax burden (federal, fica, plus CA) on this pay amount for a single person with no other circumstances is just shy of 23%.
However, I feel that the lecturer, who started his position at UCLA last year, didn’t do enough homework regarding academic salaries. $70,000 for a non-tenured lecturer is normal, maybe above average, and in fact there are many tenure-track assistant professors who make about the same. To add, UCLA is in a very expensive area. He will have to compete against well-heeled people who want to live within close proximity to some of the nation’s wealthiest areas, such as Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. A physics lecturer simply can’t compete against Hollywood.
In addition, a $70,000 annual salary means that he could qualify for a rental no more than $1944 per month due to the standard 3x the rent requirement a lot of California landlords have. A cursory search on Craigslist shows plenty of one-bedroom apartments in Los Angeles County that are within this budget. Granted, they may not be the nicest complexes in the nicest neighborhoods, and they may require a commute, but the Los Angeles metro area does have extensive public transportation, and nobody goes into academia expecting a luxurious lifestyle on an academic salary. An academic who wants to make serious money needs to take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities outside the institution.
In addition, there are plenty of grad students and postdocs making less than $70,000 who attend schools like UCLA that are in very expensive areas. Once again, I don’t want to dismiss the challenges they have. I myself lived in Santa Cruz County for over a decade and I know firsthand the challenge of being a grad student at UC Santa Cruz dealing with the area’s notoriously difficult housing market.
But I have a feeling we’re being withheld useful information about his finances. Does he have massive student loans impacting his budget? Does he have other obligations such as taking care of family members? Why wasn’t he able to take advantage of UCLA’s faculty housing?
I just feel that this guy didn’t do enough homework about the realities of being an academic, especially one living in a very expensive area. I’m an academic in Silicon Valley and I’m fully aware of the tradeoffs of choosing this lifestyle over industry. Yes, I’d like a bigger home closer to work, and I have no idea how I’d raise a family (though I’m single now so I don’t need to worry). But at the same time I enjoy the freedom I have in academia; I have far more research freedom as a community college instructor than I did as an industry researcher. I also love teaching and guiding students.
> Why wasn’t he able to take advantage of UCLA’s faculty housing
Lecturers are at the lowest priority for UCLA Faculty Housing.
That said, you can afford a 1bdrm on $70k in LA, just not in Westwood. He'd have to commute from the Valley if he wants to pay less than $2500/mo.
Slow news day.
this basic economic situation has gotten so fucked up that even a traditionally solid middle-class gig like "professor at moderately prestigious university" can't pay his bills
(and yes, i do understand the difference between a lecturer and a professor, and i do understand about roommates, and i do understand about living in a cheaper cost-of-living area. i think these are all reasonable points. but i still think that it would be nice if someone could live a good life a distance from work that doesn't make their commute an absolute dread and still be able to afford basic things. yes, i believe everyone deserves this, no matter what type of work that they do. no, i don't think that's the direction we are currently headed.)
It’s not a fair situation from any perspective. NIMBYs are slowly destroying California’s heart, and turning it into a place where only people with a 100k+ (and soon 200k+) income can afford a home.