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Comment by abenga | Hacker News Reader

Essays are async and easier to delegate.

If I'm paying 30k$/yr the professor is damn well reading my essay. If they don't want to teach & grade, they can get a pure research position. Fun fact: pure research positions don't pay as well.

Roughly 50% of higher education occurs at community colleges. We don’t do research. What you pay for the class does not correspond to what I make. I’m not paid enough to do all the stuff that is suggested in the comments.

The top earning professors in the nation in mathematics are all very good research mathematicians

Fun fact: pure research positions don't pay as well.

Where do you get this from? The people I know with pure research positions get paid basically the same (after correcting for 'rank' and seniority) as those who split their time between research and teaching.

At least in the sciences, and in the US, there is also the issue that research professors tend to be on "soft money" -- that is they get a minimal salary from their institution but can increase it (up to a point) by getting grants that they can charge their time to. And they also tend not to be in the tenure track system. That being said, if they get large enough grants, they can make as much if not more than traditional tenure-track professors with defined salaries. But in years where they don't get much grant funding they don't make much at all (I used to be an non-tenure track research professor myself).

Pure taching positions pay barely minimum wage. Look up "adjunct".

If their situation is that bad they can walk into a local staffing agency and get a factory job that pays 3x the federal minimum wage. Poor pay as a adjunct is a situation they choose for themselves for some reason.

I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, many years ago. Like you say, there's usually a reason, such as collecting benefits while running some kind of side hustle. A teaching gig lends itself to this because the hours are flexible (outside of your scheduled class time), there is utterly no supervision, and no questions asked about what your other income sources are.

My office mate in engineering was trying to get funding for a start-up. I was trying to get a consulting business off the ground. Neither of us achieved those things, but whatever. He got a teaching gig at the community college, which is unionized and actually a pretty good situation. I found a regular day job through his network.

A friend of mine had an adjunct gig in the humanities, and used his off-time to learn how to code.

A lot of academic spouses get adjunct gigs, especially if they want to balance part time work with child care.

This is spot on! And that reason is peer pressure.

A lot of adjuncts sit around in precarious financial situations, developing serious mental health issues, and drinking problems because the system taught them that this is a form of success.

Going to industry and making money? That's failure. That's an "alternate career". Not scraping by in a system that couldn't care less about you. That's success.

It's pretty vile. I've never had a student become an adjunct. It would be a personal failure that I haven't given them the tools to thrive.

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