A successful academic faces lifelong debt
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
My teaching job pays about $30.00/Hr. However I only get to work about 25 hours a week or so. It's not much money to live on.
Also realize the pressures of college teaching:
Society needs you to teach skills to the students that they will need to excel. The students have been given a free ride all the way though High School.
How do you teach C programming to students that cannot do any algebra and have no understanding of logic?
If you make the class hard enough for them to excel in the global marketplace, all of the students drop out.
It you make it easy enough for everyone to pass, you have scarcely covered the first one or two chapters of the book.
It's a political problem because a working democracy requires smart people that are able to understand complex issues and cast their vote accordingly. As an outsider it's probably easier to see, but American politics has turned into a farce where political issues matter much less than appearances on the right talkshows and hitting the lowest common denominator. The press has to play along with this, if they don't nobody will read their newspapers or see their newscasts. Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country.
It's an economic problem because in the future (and now) we have to be pretty darn smart to compete in the international arena, and India, China, etc. are basically eating Americas lunch.
Education is one of the best and most important investments a country can make, and to be frank I think it's despicable that a college professor doesn't make more than you do.
This is part of the problem. Instead of people reading in depth newspapers they want to be entertained. They then switch to comedy shows which take sound bites out of context for the laught of the minute and call it politics.
That said, the author did manage to be hired in multiple tenure-track positions, and made it to an Ivy League school. One would hope - expect, really - that with that level of career success she should be able to at least pay off their college debts, especially if she was as frugal as she claimed to be in her essay.
It disgusts me that we live in one of the most wealthy societies in the world and arbitrary criteria, such as the class or gender you were born with, still determine much about your ability to succeed in and enjoy life.
Rhetorical question of self-examination: how would you feel if she were a math professor instead? Being an academic mathematician is just as self-indulgent as anything in the humanities.
Star physics researchers can get away with this-- just as, to use a fictional example, Dr. House can slough off his clinic duty-- because they are retained for their brilliant ideas. Most academics can't.
This attitude fails the humanities especially, because the entire point of these departments' existence is to transmit culture from one generation to the next (e.g. teaching). Most humanities research (unlike in the sciences) is not very useful, especially if only academics can understand it.
Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.
You know nothing about poverty.
Unfortunately most people chose not to take these opportunities and then demand equality of outcome.
Almost no one expects or even wants "equality of outcome", but we do want a world where people are free from worries about health care (due to our third-world health care system) and meeting basic needs. You simply have a better society (more innovation, more creativity, happier and healthier people) if peoples' lives aren't clogged up by maintenance.
I grew up in a relatively poor family in a third world country (in a rural area). So, don't make baseless assumptions.
> but we do want a world where people are free from worries about health care (due to our third-world health care system) and meeting basic needs.
These (healthcare, education, etc...) are privileges. You are lucky to have it – but it is still a privilege and not something that you can demand. Btw, Europeans go to the USA for advanced health care (such as Cancer treatment). Ever heard of the MD Anderson cancer centre? It is the best in the world.
Guess what, hospitals and doctors do not just pop into existence. They have to be paid and everything costs money. You want all this to be free (at least for you). I am quite sceptical of this – someone has to pay for it. It looks like everyone wants free healthcare and no-one wants to pay for it.
> You simply have a better society (more innovation, more creativity, happier and healthier people) if peoples' lives aren't clogged up by maintenance.
It seems that the list of entitlements only gets longer and the list of responsibilities gets shorter.
Wasn’t the USA founded on the principle that everyone can pursue their happiness? It seems more like you want government to guarantee it. I think that this says more about the current generation of young Americans than of the American system.
Correction: You know nothing about poverty in the United States.
These (healthcare, education, etc...) are privileges. You are lucky to have it – but it is still a privilege and not something that you can demand.
The discrete right/privilege distinction is a meaningless distraction from the more subjective issue of social justice. If the resources exist to give everyone healthcare, then everyone should have healthcare. If the resources don't exist, well... there's no such thing as a right to something that doesn't exist. Obviously, no one has the right to live to be 200. On the other hand, we shouldn't have people dying of third-world diseases in the U.S. just to keep insurance bureaucrats rich; that's not a reasonable trade-off.
Guess what, hospitals and doctors do not just pop into existence. They have to be paid and everything costs money. You want all this to be free (at least for you).
Wrong. I want to pay for it through the tax system. We're spending trillions on "defense"; why not spend money to be defended against things like cancer, which are far more likely to kill most of us than any terrorist?
It looks like everyone wants free healthcare and no-one wants to pay for it.
Ridiculous assertion. No one with half a brain considers that possible. Someone has to pay.
It seems that the list of entitlements only gets longer and the list of responsibilities gets shorter.
That's what happens as society improves. On the list of responsibilities shrinking: are you arguing that we should go back to an era when people spent a substantial fraction of their time making their own clothes, instead of buying cheap factory-made clothing at the store?
Wasn’t the USA founded on the principle that everyone can pursue their happiness? It seems more like you want government to guarantee it.
The idea that the government could guarantee anything about a person's emotional state is patently ridiculous, and you know this.
Also, how can someone pursue happiness if he can't afford treatment for basic medical conditions, and can't work because, untreated, that condition is too painful? People wouldn't get into messes like this in a more reasonable society.
I guess America is special then.
> The discrete right/privilege distinction is a meaningless distraction from the more subjective issue of social justice.
The word “social justice” is a misnomer for a list of entitlements and an enforcement of equality of outcome.
> If the resources exist to give everyone healthcare, then everyone should have healthcare.
The only problem you face is that these “resources” belong to private individuals. So you only have to coerce these “resources” away from them and somehow force them to keep working and creating these resources.
One guy once said what you are trying to implement: “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need”. Was it Marx?
> spending trillions on "defense"; why not spend money to be defended against things like cancer, which are far more likely to kill most of us than any terrorist?
You are justifying one bad idea with another bad idea. This is a stupid line of reasoning. For a government with an incredibly large amount of debt, it is not a good idea to spend trillions on anything.
> > It looks like everyone wants free healthcare and no-one wants to pay for it. > Ridiculous assertion. No one with half a brain considers that possible. Someone has to pay.
Yes. And the answer is always, “not us”. The argument is usually that “rich people” will pay for it.
> > It seems that the list of entitlements only gets longer and the list of responsibilities gets shorter. > That's what happens as society improves.
Now, that is when society declines and decays.
> On the list of responsibilities shrinking: are you arguing that we should go back to an era when people spent a substantial fraction of their time making their own clothes, instead of buying cheap factory-made clothing at the store?
This has nothing to do with government entitlements or personal responsibilities and duties. Here are some example responsibilities and duties:
- Save for your retirement (don’t push this duty on the government).
- Save to send your children to school and hopefully university.
- Raise your children well.
- Volunteer to become an army reservist, police reservist or any other civic duty.
- Take care of your parents when they are old. Etc…
Here are some entitlements: - Free healthcare
- Free welfare payments
- Cash payments for each child born.
- Free education and university
- Gauranteed salary throughout your life (whether employed or not). Some countries call this a "basic income grant".
My point is that you have no idea what it's like for those who are poor in the US. To claim that they have abundant opportunity is ludicrous. I know this society inside and out, I've got friends at all social levels-- from dirt-poor to three-digit millionaires-- and I know that you're impossibly naive.
The word “social justice” is a misnomer for a list of entitlements and an enforcement of equality of outcome.
Wrong. Equality of outcome is an impossible goal, and would be undesirable even if it could be achieved. More desirable is a world in which people have the ability to maximize their contributions to society, because they're given the resources necessary to realize their potential.
I don't think everyone deserves to have a big screen TV or a new car, but I do think everyone should have a chance to make something of him- or herself.
Yes. And the answer is always, “not us”. The argument is usually that “rich people” will pay for it.
Everyone pays taxes. Rich people pay more. I have no problem with this. They get more out of society; why shouldn't they put more back into it?
Here are some entitlements: - Free healthcare
- Free welfare payments
- Cash payments for each child born.
- Free education and university
- Gauranteed salary throughout your life (whether employed or not). Some countries call this a "basic income grant".
The only one of those that's been demonstrated to be a bad idea is the cash payment for having children (which encourages people to have kids they can't support).
Nice flame-bait, but weak on the logical argument.
I think you are being deliberately deceptive. I have friends that went to work in the USA. One worked for a harvesting company and received a good salary. Another did long distance trucking. All of these are “low paying” jobs, yet in the USA they receive excellent salaries.
Many people in low paying jobs (such as plumbers) can own their own home – which is unheard of in many countries. The salary for manual labour is incredibly high.
> More desirable is a world in which people have the ability to maximize their contributions to society, because they're given the resources necessary to realize their potential.
You view someone earning money as a “gift from society”. If someone works or has a business, he owns his own money with no obligation to any other party. A lot of people on the left wants to view individuals as servants of society (as you do).
> Everyone pays taxes. Rich people pay more. I have no problem with this.
You do not have a problem with this, because you do not fall in the top tax bracket. That is the “not me” phenomenon in action.
> They get more out of society;
Again, you view any money an individual makes as a gift from society. This is not so. For a voluntary transaction (where there is no coercion) no one owes a third party anything.
> The only one of those that's been demonstrated to be a bad idea is the cash payment for having children (which encourages people to have kids they can't support).
Free universities tend to be of much worse quality. Two good examples are Germany and Greece. The qualities of Universities in these countries are much lower than countries such as the United States. Greece has the highest number of foreign students studying abroad for its population size.
The Basic Income Grant causes a lot of people to work and places an incredibly high burden on tax payers. In my country they want to introduce the basic income grant. Currently there are 13 million people on welfare (child grants which stretches until a child is 16, unemployment,) while there are only 3 million tax payers (i.e. four people getting grants for every one person on tax). BIG will push it to ten people receiving grants for every one person paying tax.
That's not poverty. Not even close.
You do not have a problem with this, because you do not fall in the top tax bracket. That is the “not me” phenomenon in action.
I probably will.
Again, you view any money an individual makes as a gift from society. This is not so. For a voluntary transaction (where there is no coercion) no one owes a third party anything.
Society enables that transaction to happen. What happens if people stop doing their jobs? Shops close down, infrastructure fails, and no one can get any work done. Those transactions can't happen, because people can't get in to work.
The qualities of Universities in these countries are much lower than countries such as the United States.
That's because the US put a lot of money into universities/research in the 1940s-60s, which attracted a lot of talent. It's self-perpetuating, for now.
In the USA even an unskilled person can get a fairly good job (as the above example shows). How exactly do you then have severe poverty (like the thing you talk about) when even unskilled people get work?
In my country you are dirt poor even if you work 8 hours a day. What you label poverty is not poverty at all. They show photos of poor Americans – eating a McDonalds hamburger.
I ate my first hamburger at a shop when it was my birthday. Poor people usually eat staple foodstuffs (not McDonalds).
> What happens if people stop doing their jobs? Shops close down, infrastructure fails, and no one can get any work done.
Shops stay open because the shop owner sells his goods for a profit. An open shop is not a gift from society; it is a shop-owner acting in self-interest by selling things for a profit. The same goes for people working in infrastructure (e.g. those employed by municipal roads agencies, etc…). As soon as people stop doing their jobs (as unionists often like to do) they stop getting paid.
Except in the basic income grant world that many of the left like to live.
> That's because the US put a lot of money into universities/research in the 1940s-60s, which attracted a lot of talent.
Not really. One reason is that the USA has high tuition fees that enable good universities. If people pay the tuition fees themselves they are more inclined to actually work (instead of the 4 years of party in many countries). You also have private universities (which are not government funded) which are very good.
The academic mathematician who wants to make more money can probably get a job in industry, or learn an in-demand skill such as programming, stats, etc. An assistant professor of Native American studies probably doesn't have the same capacity (to put it bluntly: is not as smart), so it was a much bigger gamble for her to take on so much debt to become a professor.
And, you know, this lady excels in the field of native american studies. That might seem frivolous and useless to other people, but suppose we pursue your thought to its logical conclusion and let that field die off because the economic benefits are not clearly quantifiable. Who will teach it if anyone wants to study it in the future? It's not like we can import people from Asian or Europe, is it? They don't mint scholars of our indigenous culture. I'm disturbed by your suggestion that the history and anthropology of a country's indigenous culture (even one that has been displaced) lacks any economic utility.
Perhaps one day we will become so wealthy that robots do all the work, and people don't have to do anything they don't like. Until then, most of us need to do work that benefits others in order to survive.
The implication (probably unintentional) of your suggestion is that we'd be better off as a society if this subject weren't even available for study (since people wouldn't be wasting their productivity on learning to teach it), giving rise to a curious paradox wherein ignorance is considered more valuable than knowledge. This concept only works as long as you assume a number of people with a surplus of economic assets who are willing to work at a net loss because they love teaching. Really, I don't think this is a sustainable path over the long term.
I'm saying that we'd be better off as a society if most people who want to become scholars in Native American Studies don't do it, and become nurses instead. Less fun for them, but great for those of us who want the services of a nurse more than the services of a professor. We compensate them for the lack of fun with money.
It's not cheap to participate in a program like this, especially not at a decent school. If there was very low demand, you would expect this to be cheaper, no? http://www.stateuniversity.com/program/05-0202/American-Indi...
I can't get with your thesis that she's being poorly paid because she's choosing to have more fun. It sounds as if she's worked extremely hard to get to the academic level she is at. And if you sample people, I imagine that most would expect that a professorship at an ivy-league university would pay well, since you have to be at or near the top of your field to land such a job.
As for my thesis that she's paid poorly because she is having fun, that's the situation for all academics (including myself). If she is truly underpaid relative to the fun of her job, why doesn't she quit and find higher paying work elsewhere? In fact, why do so many people apply for such jobs, when so few actually are accepted?
Hint: she likes her 3 months summer vacation, flexible work hours, relaxed environment, complete freedom to work on whatever she likes, and the possibility of never-get-fired-ever job security.
Why? Business is essentially just economics, which is history (macroeconomics) + philosophy (microeconomics with a little bit of sociology and psychology thrown in). The day YC News readers stop throwing their own feces at business majors will be a fascinating one indeed.
Studying history, philosophy, literature, art, etc. helps you learn how to think and communicate. Someone who knows how to think and communicate can pick up business or programming easily enough, and can consult formal training when they're ready for it (which is rarely at the age of 20).
These aren't absolutes, of course - there are plenty of philosophy majors who can't think their way out of a cardboard box, and plenty of business majors who think really well.
I understand that you believe her field of study to be an unwise economic choice, such that the cost of acquiring her expertise exceeds the commercial potential. To me the problem is that even though students are paying more than ever for school, the perceived value of educators continues to fall. a story like 'girl starts out poor, gets PhD and job at top university' ought to be an inspiration, but now apparently we have to tack on '...stays poor because she picked some frou-frou field of study I don't approve of'.
MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly.
Agree. The idea that you need to be part of an elite, well-connected, largely hereditary caste to do "business" is ridiculous. People much less educated than us, with minimal social connections, have been "doing business" for centuries, and succeeding at it (although not at great scale).
Most people (outside of that caste) are doing support work with minimal importance, crunching data or filling out paperwork for people who, because of their caste status, get to have their mediocre ideas implemented. Of course this is inefficient; they're bored sick.
That's a major problem with the attitude in our country. Greed has overtaken our senses and everyone thinks they are entitled.
Even when you look at the number of students in each major, you will see a very disproportionate number of students majoring in subjects just for the money with a disregard for their talent in the field.
He meant "Since both of us come from backgrounds which requires us to work to get through school, we need to pick areas of study that will pay enough to support us."
I could go on, but I won't...I don't want this to turn into a Reddit-style argument. My basic position is that undervaluing teaching as a service undermines our educational productivity and long-term economic growth, through excess focus on short-term dividends at the expense of cumulative value.
But I have to disagree with your first point. I point out elsewhere in this thread that there is a $30k gap between starting salaries for CS and History. Your conclusion may be true (wages have not tracked inflation), but it is not supported by the point you made.
Also keep in mind there are two kinds of professors: professors with research expectations, and professors with only teaching obligations. All professors at my school will have research expectations. Some colleges (often referred to as "teaching colleges," which is sadly not redundant) have no research expectations of their professors, but will pay less.
For what its worth, I have a cultural studies degree that cost me six figures. (They had a buy one, get one free deal when I got a degree that had typically results in a career.) I'm going to punt on the question of whether Native American studies is valuable or not. Its sort of like ballet dancing -- I don't have any need for it myself, but don't have any malice in my heart for people who like it. (The question of whether it is commercially valuable or not is an empirical one. Empirically, it just isn't.)
I understand that she did a lot of work to get her degree in a commercially suboptimal field and lifestyle career in churning out more holders of degrees in the same field. She thinks that, rather than having to have slaved so hard for that, I should have to slave so hard for that -- read her last paragraph where she wants society to recalibrate its priorities (i.e. tax folks to pay her to get the schooling to do the job that too many people want to do and too few people want to pay for).
I live in the MidWest, and cleaning "ladies" want $20-$25/hour under-the-table. Perhaps she should take on such work on Saturdays to reduce her debt load.
[As an aside, I can't understand how bad America can be if one can make this much cleaning houses. Some of these people aren't even all that good at it!]
Also this person seems to have studied a fringe subject that would have a far weaker demand.
Even after you obtain your degree you will start out as an Adjunct Professor. These jobs pay about 2-4K per course.
After you have done that for about 10 years or so you might land a job as a professor at a community college.
Now you're making about $40-55K. Teach there for another 5-10 years until you finally get a job at a University to make that $80K.
Compare this (if you will) to the same person who leaves college with Ph.D and starts at $75K.
The difference in earnings over a lifetime is huge.
See: http://www.collegiatetimes.com/databases/salaries/salary?nam...
The colleges don't pay very well and the degree required to get the job is very expensive and time consuming.
Realistically, if an hour of free time is worth $25 (and to many people it seems that it is), you should go for it.
It's worth it, but I question why the market clearing price isn't lower.
Anyone can clean. Only some people can be trusted.
This is the same reason that bank tellers are paid a lot more than Wal-mart cashiers.