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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

It would seem like there would be some kind of middle ground where adjuncts should be paid a little more and get health care, and students pay less in tuition. $3,500 to teach 50 students? Where does all the tuition go? That's enormous overhead for buildings and administration, especially in a low cost area. Even you turn the $3,500 to $10,000 with a raise and health care baked in, it's only $200 per student. (I'm making assumptions on class size)

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Deanlet and deanlings making six figures to oversee "student life" and "strategic planning". Tenured professors who have 2/1 teaching schedules and haven't published since the 80s, but can't be forced to retire and keep on picking up inflated COLAs. Ever multiplying new unnecessary buildings (usually paid for by donors, but maintenance comes out of the budget). Special signing bonuses, research stipends, forgivable loans, and extraordinary salaries for "star professors" who are considered stars not because of their teaching prowess -- which is never, ever considered by hiring committees -- but because of their fame in a particular field. Lacrosse, volleyball, and crew coaches and facilities (only football and basketball pay their own way).

And so on and so forth. The people that actually do the bulk of the teaching in many schools -- adjuncts and grad students -- get paid very very poorly. Even in schools that claim to have a high ratio of tenured faculty teaching classes, if you dig into it you will often find teaching assistants doing a lot of the direct student interaction and almost all of the feedback.

I am actually ok with high pay for star professors. If you're a Nobel and bring international esteem to the school, you deserve to get paid. If your lectures are beamed around the world in MOOCs, you deserve to get paid.

I think many tenured professors don't deserve it, and schools have very bloated administrations. They also have mispriced priorities. (Subsidizing luxury dorms, athletic facilities, etc)

I agree that top researchers should be paid well by someone, I just don't think we've got the right someones.

No man, or organization, can serve two masters. Either these schools are about undergraduate education or they aren't. The counterargument about presige isn't completly wrong. Prestige of the school is valuable to a degree holder. But all the universities chasing after the same limited pool of prestige is socially wasteful, and these heavily tax subsidized institutions are supposed to be advancing the social interest.

We should have separate institutions that do research and perhaps train grad students.

Either these schools are about undergraduate education or they aren't.

They aren't. When has this ever been a question? That doesn't change the fact that starry-eyed undegrads want to bask in the light of famous members of their field.

Imagine Feynman was still teaching, but was terrible at it. Would that stop countless people scrambling to get into the university he teaches at, simply to get exposure to his prowess and dream of working in his lab?

Research universities are a natural place for undergraduates. It's a symbiotic relationship. The University has use for willing young minds and hands, and willing young minds flock to the places where the knowledge is.

P.S. Don't forget star professors are often stars because of how much funding they bring to the university. It's not like undergrads are bearing the brunt of funding their laboratories.

I hear you. In a sense you could argue the liberal arts and community colleges do focus on undergrads, and the research schools take undergrads and professional programs along for the ride to pay the bills. In that case undergrads who subsidize faculty who are only concerned about producing Phds are knowing participants. But even still, the liberal arts schools (say Amherst) shouldn't be 20x the cost of the community colleges.

I've worked as an adjunct professor at a community college. Class sizes appeared to average around 20 students there, rarely above 30 and sometimes around 5. In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable.

A tenured professor though can get $20k per class or more, assuming that he/she is only teaching and not involved in any research (most start with 3 courses per year). Of course many tenured professors also bring money to the university through grants and whatnot, but that is not always the case. I know of some that get more than $250k a year just to provide prestige to the department and maybe teach a course now and then.

In any case, it doesn't matter if the class size is 10 or 50. You still need to prepare the same material, you still need to be there for the same amount of time. $3500/class sounds like a bargain to me. A TA earns more.

I buy the argument for community colleges. $3500/20 = $175 per student per class. The courses are cheap, so it's a wash. I disagree with this for private colleges where the cost per course can be $3,000 per student.

In that environment, $3500/class seemed pretty reasonable.

OK, but how are the professors expected to live on that ? Independently rich or retired cannot account for any size-able number. CC are subsidized by the state and county, or at least should be.

Many adjunct professors are people who have full-time jobs doing something else. A friend of mine did this one semester to make some extra money. He worked full-time as a structural engineer, but took a long lunch three days a week to teach Introduction to Statics at the university we both attended. He said it was fun to do for one semester, but he computed that he was only making about $10/hour when you included the time to prepare for lectures and grade papers.

In my experience, teaching has a way of ballooning to fill whatever time you have. Teaching one class feels like just as much work as teaching three, partly because either way you have to be available to students outside of class - office hours, answering email, and so on. I can't imagine teaching a single university class "for fun" while holding down a full-time job. Certainly it's not something I've seen very often.

Some people Adjunct to improve their resume too. NYU's school of continuing education has a lot of underpaid adjuncts who get residual benefits for the prestige of being NYU faculty. But nobody lives in Manhattan on NYU adjunct salary alone.

Adjuncts are especially cool for this reason in fields with a significant professional application.

Oh no! I didn't mean to imply a good living, just that those numbers make sense. But as has been pointed out, the school she was at was likely charging a lot more than $200/student.

IIRC colleges also often milk the fee income from talk-and-chalk courses to support science, engineering and medical courses with expensive lab requirements. As well as collegiate athletics, climbing walls, landmark building projects and so on, of course.

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