the best-educated low-wage workers in America
May 31, 2016 8:25 PM Subscribe
For the past month Gawker has been sharing true stories from behind the front lines of adjunct-dom: The Educated Underclass.
The Misery of Adjunct Professors Keeps Higher Education Booming
True Stories from the Educated Underclass
"When I was a GTA, I felt like there was an expectation that all of us would go on to be tenured professors. When I transitioned to being an Adjunct, I realized that the expectation was that we had pretty much no future(.)"
Your Broke Adjunct Professors Would Like a Little Solidarity, Please
"We live closer to the poverty line than I’d prefer"
The Academics Who Are Treated as "Less Than Janitors"
"I tell people that when you’re an adjunct, you’re basically a whore. You take what they’re willing to pay you and you lie about what you’re able to teach."
The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market
"I could make more money per month as a Facilities Custodian at my school than I do as an adjunct professor."
"Don't Stay in School, Kids"
"Every dollar I make from teaching goes to paying my student loan."
The Scarlet Letter of Academia
"I made as much money delivering pizzas in high school as I make right now teaching college students, many of whom plan themselves to go on to be educators. "
The Misery of Adjunct Professors Keeps Higher Education Booming
True Stories from the Educated Underclass
"When I was a GTA, I felt like there was an expectation that all of us would go on to be tenured professors. When I transitioned to being an Adjunct, I realized that the expectation was that we had pretty much no future(.)"
Your Broke Adjunct Professors Would Like a Little Solidarity, Please
"We live closer to the poverty line than I’d prefer"
The Academics Who Are Treated as "Less Than Janitors"
"I tell people that when you’re an adjunct, you’re basically a whore. You take what they’re willing to pay you and you lie about what you’re able to teach."
The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market
"I could make more money per month as a Facilities Custodian at my school than I do as an adjunct professor."
"Don't Stay in School, Kids"
"Every dollar I make from teaching goes to paying my student loan."
The Scarlet Letter of Academia
"I made as much money delivering pizzas in high school as I make right now teaching college students, many of whom plan themselves to go on to be educators. "
There are exactly two situations in which adjuncting makes sense:
1) You have a flexible full-time job that pays all your bills, but you enjoy the challenge (and extra pocket change) of teaching a class or two every year.
2) You are retired, receive regular pension income, and you wish to supplement this income by teaching a subject you are interested in, as a kind of money-making hobby.
Literally every other possible situation in which you find yourself adjuncting is a death trap. I was mortified when I found out that many people are professional adjuncts. People that work semester-to-semester for slightly-above-minimum wage, teaching students who often make more money (as the articles say) delivering pizza.
To those people, the best advice I can give is to parlay their higher ed experience into some kind of administrative position. Unless you are directly out of a top-tier research institution, with an article or two (or book) under your belt, and a very impressive CV with lots of impressive names you've worked with, you will not be considered for any tenure-track position at any respectable institution. There are enough new PhD's meeting this description to supply the job market with tenure-track professors for decades. You are not among them.
Get a job as Assistant Director to the Director of Student Affairs or start delivering pizzas. Both are soulless, but being a hopeless adjunct is soulless in it's own, unique, miserable way.
posted by Tyrant King Porn Dragon at 8:50 PM on May 31, 2016 [39 favorites]
1) You have a flexible full-time job that pays all your bills, but you enjoy the challenge (and extra pocket change) of teaching a class or two every year.
2) You are retired, receive regular pension income, and you wish to supplement this income by teaching a subject you are interested in, as a kind of money-making hobby.
Literally every other possible situation in which you find yourself adjuncting is a death trap. I was mortified when I found out that many people are professional adjuncts. People that work semester-to-semester for slightly-above-minimum wage, teaching students who often make more money (as the articles say) delivering pizza.
To those people, the best advice I can give is to parlay their higher ed experience into some kind of administrative position. Unless you are directly out of a top-tier research institution, with an article or two (or book) under your belt, and a very impressive CV with lots of impressive names you've worked with, you will not be considered for any tenure-track position at any respectable institution. There are enough new PhD's meeting this description to supply the job market with tenure-track professors for decades. You are not among them.
Get a job as Assistant Director to the Director of Student Affairs or start delivering pizzas. Both are soulless, but being a hopeless adjunct is soulless in it's own, unique, miserable way.
posted by Tyrant King Porn Dragon at 8:50 PM on May 31, 2016 [39 favorites]
I dunno. I adjuncted for a while, and I didn't think it was that bad. It's basically like having a TA position, except without being in a degree program. It's probably better than some job that doesn't use your education at all, but it's definitely not a real job and you should run for the hills the second you can.
I'm not sure if making them real jobs would be better or not. It would certainly create some number of real jobs, but the universities probably wouldn't hire as many of them, the requirements would be higher, and they'd be long-term positions instead of temporary ones; good if you're good enough to get one, but a lot of people wouldn't be able to get them and would just be totally unemployable in their field.
posted by Mitrovarr at 8:50 PM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure if making them real jobs would be better or not. It would certainly create some number of real jobs, but the universities probably wouldn't hire as many of them, the requirements would be higher, and they'd be long-term positions instead of temporary ones; good if you're good enough to get one, but a lot of people wouldn't be able to get them and would just be totally unemployable in their field.
posted by Mitrovarr at 8:50 PM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
I know a few of consultants who adjunct teach classes in their area of expertise. It's a great way to prove on your CV that you're an "expert" in something, especially if it's at a prestigious institution. Of course, they usually don't have PhDs in the subject.
But for the people who actually need the money... it's a total bait and switch. No one goes to graduate school hoping to become an adjunct. The colleges have to keep a tiny number of full-time tenure-track positions available in order to motivate people to go to graduate school, but then they can just hire most of them as adjuncts for far below a living wage. It's a total scam.
posted by miyabo at 8:57 PM on May 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
But for the people who actually need the money... it's a total bait and switch. No one goes to graduate school hoping to become an adjunct. The colleges have to keep a tiny number of full-time tenure-track positions available in order to motivate people to go to graduate school, but then they can just hire most of them as adjuncts for far below a living wage. It's a total scam.
posted by miyabo at 8:57 PM on May 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
tldr:
“When I was a GTA, I felt like there was an expectation that all of us would go on to be tenured professors. When I transitioned to being an Adjunct, I realized that the expectation was that we had pretty much no future and were as a group really depressing to hang out with since we reminded people what an awful scam the humanities was and how it was basically a bunch of postmodernists and Marxists running a Dickensian workhouse.”
posted by storybored at 8:57 PM on May 31, 2016 [34 favorites]
“When I was a GTA, I felt like there was an expectation that all of us would go on to be tenured professors. When I transitioned to being an Adjunct, I realized that the expectation was that we had pretty much no future and were as a group really depressing to hang out with since we reminded people what an awful scam the humanities was and how it was basically a bunch of postmodernists and Marxists running a Dickensian workhouse.”
posted by storybored at 8:57 PM on May 31, 2016 [34 favorites]
I do think there should be salaried instructor positions because some people are damned good at teaching but have limited to no interest in doing research or presenting papers at conferences and honestly I'd rather learn from a committed instructor who feels a passion for teaching instead of a professor who is merely going through the motions in order to get back to the lab.
Adjuncts though seem to get completely screwed because they are being radically underpaid as a way of propping up an increasingly fragile ecosystem.
Having fewer people go onto get PhDs if they have no chance of actually getting a tenure track position is probably a good thing overall. That way we'd mint fewer PhDs and it would go back towards being something that you only steer the best grad students into getting. Increasingly I am seeing more and more academic areas develop non-PhD doctorates which seem to be focused more on the practitioner rather than the tenure track academic. I'm not sure that they are univerally useful but in many cases it seems like they generate a credential but don't have the issue of producing yet another competitor for the small number of tenure track positions that open up each year.
Yes you still probably need most of the sciences to depend heavily on postdocs (who also tend to be underpaid and overworked) but at least to my perspective most postdocs aren't abused at quite the level that adjuncts are abused.
posted by vuron at 9:04 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
Adjuncts though seem to get completely screwed because they are being radically underpaid as a way of propping up an increasingly fragile ecosystem.
Having fewer people go onto get PhDs if they have no chance of actually getting a tenure track position is probably a good thing overall. That way we'd mint fewer PhDs and it would go back towards being something that you only steer the best grad students into getting. Increasingly I am seeing more and more academic areas develop non-PhD doctorates which seem to be focused more on the practitioner rather than the tenure track academic. I'm not sure that they are univerally useful but in many cases it seems like they generate a credential but don't have the issue of producing yet another competitor for the small number of tenure track positions that open up each year.
Yes you still probably need most of the sciences to depend heavily on postdocs (who also tend to be underpaid and overworked) but at least to my perspective most postdocs aren't abused at quite the level that adjuncts are abused.
posted by vuron at 9:04 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I think more and more students should look seriously at getting their first 2 years done at a community college. Yes if you are attending an elite institution this advice probably doesn't apply but I kind of fail to see the value of paying a large sum of money to get taught by an underpaid adjunct at a four 4 year school when you can probably get a comparable experience at a fraction of the cost at a community college.
My son is a high-school senior here in California. A significant number of his peers are doing exactly that. Especially considering that many CSU schools are impacted and it's borderline impossible to graduate in 4 years anyway (SJSU's 4-year graduation rate is now 9.5%) why throw away money at a CSU when local community colleges have established fast-track paths to get you into a UC school after two years.
posted by GuyZero at 9:11 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
My son is a high-school senior here in California. A significant number of his peers are doing exactly that. Especially considering that many CSU schools are impacted and it's borderline impossible to graduate in 4 years anyway (SJSU's 4-year graduation rate is now 9.5%) why throw away money at a CSU when local community colleges have established fast-track paths to get you into a UC school after two years.
posted by GuyZero at 9:11 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
Reasons people should get an advanced degree:
The only problem with this is many non-CC institutions are getting wise to this strategy and are cracking down on the number and type of classes you can transfer. They don't want to lose those sweet, sweet tuition dollars. CC students have to be very careful to make sure the classes they're taking will transfer to the schools they want to go to.
posted by Anonymous at 9:15 PM on May 31, 2016
- It's in a professional program or giving you a very specific credential that you need to do your chosen career (like being a doctor), and the aforementioned positions are in high demand.
- It's in STEM, and after graduating you are a-OK with either being a staff scientist (i.e. not running your own lab), doing consulting, or taking some other position entirely unrelated to your research interests. Or if you do stay in your interests, doing something that may be anathema to your moral code, like getting out of your geology program and joining an energy company to help them frack. Also: this only applies to some varieties of STEM. You're getting a PhD in Zoology? Hope you picked a research area that taught you techniques you can transfer to working for a pharmaceutical company.
- You're independently wealthy and can afford to get that humanities degree, because fuck it, why not?
The only problem with this is many non-CC institutions are getting wise to this strategy and are cracking down on the number and type of classes you can transfer. They don't want to lose those sweet, sweet tuition dollars. CC students have to be very careful to make sure the classes they're taking will transfer to the schools they want to go to.
posted by Anonymous at 9:15 PM on May 31, 2016
You're getting a PhD in Zoology? Hope you picked a research area that taught you techniques you can transfer to working for a pharmaceutical company.
Ironically, the ones I see getting all the jobs are the people who did the wildlife stuff. I have a more biotech-centric degree and it was crazy hard to find a job.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:24 PM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
Ironically, the ones I see getting all the jobs are the people who did the wildlife stuff. I have a more biotech-centric degree and it was crazy hard to find a job.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:24 PM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
It's in STEM, and after graduating you are a-OK with either being a staff scientist (i.e. not running your own lab), doing consulting, or taking some other position entirely unrelated to your research interests.
I may be reading sarcasm into your comment that's not there, but what's wrong with any of these things? I'm a post-doc. Have been for nine years now. The idea of "climbing the ladder" and becoming a tenured research academic, whose job consists mostly of dealing with internal university politics and bureaucracy, thrashing around desperately searching for funding to keep the wheels spinning, and maybe, maybe getting to do some actual science 10% of the time, looks horrific. On the other hand, I get to do practical science in a whole range of areas, changing constantly, often extremely distant from the topic of my PhD. And that feels like a good thing.
You're getting a PhD in Zoology? Hope you picked a research area that taught you techniques you can transfer to working for a pharmaceutical company.
By definition, if you deserved your PhD, you'd probably be fine. Science PhD's are supposed to teach you how to do research, not so much how to be a technician.
posted by Jimbob at 9:27 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I may be reading sarcasm into your comment that's not there, but what's wrong with any of these things? I'm a post-doc. Have been for nine years now. The idea of "climbing the ladder" and becoming a tenured research academic, whose job consists mostly of dealing with internal university politics and bureaucracy, thrashing around desperately searching for funding to keep the wheels spinning, and maybe, maybe getting to do some actual science 10% of the time, looks horrific. On the other hand, I get to do practical science in a whole range of areas, changing constantly, often extremely distant from the topic of my PhD. And that feels like a good thing.
You're getting a PhD in Zoology? Hope you picked a research area that taught you techniques you can transfer to working for a pharmaceutical company.
By definition, if you deserved your PhD, you'd probably be fine. Science PhD's are supposed to teach you how to do research, not so much how to be a technician.
posted by Jimbob at 9:27 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I'm trying to be really conscious not to victim blame, but I am a person considering grad school and the conventional wisdom that I have received from everyone (academics and otherwise) is do not get a grad degree unless it's funded. Obviously this wouldn't apply to Law/Med/Business school but those are professional degrees with no chance of being an adjunct.
I understand that the whole adjunct situation is a goddamned dumpster fire, but I don't quite understand how grad school debt even factors into these situations. If I can't get into a funded program, I'll go get a real job. It's as simple as that.
I'm not saying "man these stupid people shouldn't have went to grad school" but shouldn't the above advice be factored in to the public discourse about higher education?
posted by R.F.Simpson at 9:30 PM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
I understand that the whole adjunct situation is a goddamned dumpster fire, but I don't quite understand how grad school debt even factors into these situations. If I can't get into a funded program, I'll go get a real job. It's as simple as that.
I'm not saying "man these stupid people shouldn't have went to grad school" but shouldn't the above advice be factored in to the public discourse about higher education?
posted by R.F.Simpson at 9:30 PM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
Well, in STEM, it's pretty common to be carrying your student loans from your undergraduate years after graduating with an advanced degree. So, you don't necessarily accrue more student loans by going to grad school (although many people do; even funded grad school doesn't necessarily pay enough to live on), you might still graduate with some loans.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:34 PM on May 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:34 PM on May 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
In my own field, English, there's no pressure on universities to reduce the number of MAs and PhDs they produce, because English Lit grad students are an economical source of labor for teaching the required writing classes that every undergrad is required to take. At a big state school like the one down the street from me, that's 10,000 freshman every year. (This is in the US—I understand from a friend who teaches at a Canadian university that they don't have a comparable writing requirement.)
Every English lit grad students for the past 25 years has thought they were going to beat the odds: "I don't mind teaching at a small college," they might say. Or, "I'd be happy as a professor at a community college." As if the incredibly high unemployment or underemployment rates for English PhDs are because everyone is too proud to take jobs anywhere but the Ivy League and a handful of nationally-ranked public colleges.
I taught for years at the community college here, and it always amused me that many of my adjunct colleagues were grad students who'd used up their eligibility at Michigan State. This is one of the things that has made me an advocate for good community colleges: where I live, you can pay $452/credit hour to take the freshman writing requirement with a grad student who is in their first two years of teaching, or you can pay $88/credit hour to take it two miles down the road at Lansing Community College (or at LCC's satellite campus, conveniently across the road from MSU). At LCC, you'll be taught by long-term adjuncts or by grad students who have used up their teaching eligibility at MSU and have brought their several years of experience over to LCC.
In sign language, when I was studying it at LCC, you could take the same course, with literally the same instructor, at MSU or at LCC.
CC students have to be very careful to make sure the classes they're taking will transfer to the schools they want to go to.
This is very true. A friend of mine recently got screwed bigtime when she was badly misled about how her transfer credits would be handled.
Still, at our local community college they do have transfer agreements in place with a number of colleges.
A thing I haven't looked into in awhile is dual enrollment. I quit teaching almost ten years ago (woo-hoo!) but in my last couple of years, students who were attending 4-year colleges were increasingly signing up for 100-level courses offered online, like the ones I taught, to get some of their credits more cheaply. It's a good strategy, if the four-year college will let you get away with it.
I don't know what's even remotely fixable about this problem. It doesn't serve students well, and it definitely doesn't serve faculty well. But I don't know how you change it. It's like my other work, writing: there are so many people who want to do it and will do it for so little money (or no money at all) that there's no upward pressure on pay. Again, I don't know what it's like in other fields, but in English there seems to be no shortage of people who are willing to go into that system.
posted by not that girl at 9:34 PM on May 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
Every English lit grad students for the past 25 years has thought they were going to beat the odds: "I don't mind teaching at a small college," they might say. Or, "I'd be happy as a professor at a community college." As if the incredibly high unemployment or underemployment rates for English PhDs are because everyone is too proud to take jobs anywhere but the Ivy League and a handful of nationally-ranked public colleges.
I taught for years at the community college here, and it always amused me that many of my adjunct colleagues were grad students who'd used up their eligibility at Michigan State. This is one of the things that has made me an advocate for good community colleges: where I live, you can pay $452/credit hour to take the freshman writing requirement with a grad student who is in their first two years of teaching, or you can pay $88/credit hour to take it two miles down the road at Lansing Community College (or at LCC's satellite campus, conveniently across the road from MSU). At LCC, you'll be taught by long-term adjuncts or by grad students who have used up their teaching eligibility at MSU and have brought their several years of experience over to LCC.
In sign language, when I was studying it at LCC, you could take the same course, with literally the same instructor, at MSU or at LCC.
CC students have to be very careful to make sure the classes they're taking will transfer to the schools they want to go to.
This is very true. A friend of mine recently got screwed bigtime when she was badly misled about how her transfer credits would be handled.
Still, at our local community college they do have transfer agreements in place with a number of colleges.
A thing I haven't looked into in awhile is dual enrollment. I quit teaching almost ten years ago (woo-hoo!) but in my last couple of years, students who were attending 4-year colleges were increasingly signing up for 100-level courses offered online, like the ones I taught, to get some of their credits more cheaply. It's a good strategy, if the four-year college will let you get away with it.
I don't know what's even remotely fixable about this problem. It doesn't serve students well, and it definitely doesn't serve faculty well. But I don't know how you change it. It's like my other work, writing: there are so many people who want to do it and will do it for so little money (or no money at all) that there's no upward pressure on pay. Again, I don't know what it's like in other fields, but in English there seems to be no shortage of people who are willing to go into that system.
posted by not that girl at 9:34 PM on May 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
you can probably get a comparable experience at a fraction of the cost at a community college.
YMMV
posted by clorox at 10:23 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
YMMV
posted by clorox at 10:23 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
Hoo boy, am I glad I never even considered grad school, really. I used to love college but it is becoming a huge amount of money for little payoff these days.
"The only problem with this is many non-CC institutions are getting wise to this strategy and are cracking down on the number and type of classes you can transfer. They don't want to lose those sweet, sweet tuition dollars. CC students have to be very careful to make sure the classes they're taking will transfer to the schools they want to go to."
Well, at least in California you can check online to see what CCC courses will transfer to UC or CSU. So that's something you can figure out. Colleges also do agreements with people these days.
What's not so fixable are that even the community colleges are overloaded and broke and it's taking people years just to supposedly get out of community college. I've seen people who've gone to up to twelve different colleges (sometimes they've gone all over the US) and only now are they hitting a 4 year school. They're having to take classes piecemeal at whatever schools they can to try to cobble together all of their requirements.
College is just a mess. You can't quite tell anyone not to get a degree any more because the degree is the easiest thing to rule someone out for in job listings, but what payoff is there beyond that any more?
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:34 PM on May 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
"The only problem with this is many non-CC institutions are getting wise to this strategy and are cracking down on the number and type of classes you can transfer. They don't want to lose those sweet, sweet tuition dollars. CC students have to be very careful to make sure the classes they're taking will transfer to the schools they want to go to."
Well, at least in California you can check online to see what CCC courses will transfer to UC or CSU. So that's something you can figure out. Colleges also do agreements with people these days.
What's not so fixable are that even the community colleges are overloaded and broke and it's taking people years just to supposedly get out of community college. I've seen people who've gone to up to twelve different colleges (sometimes they've gone all over the US) and only now are they hitting a 4 year school. They're having to take classes piecemeal at whatever schools they can to try to cobble together all of their requirements.
College is just a mess. You can't quite tell anyone not to get a degree any more because the degree is the easiest thing to rule someone out for in job listings, but what payoff is there beyond that any more?
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:34 PM on May 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
I do think there should be salaried instructor positions because some people are damned good at teaching but have limited to no interest in doing research or presenting papers at conferences and honestly I'd rather learn from a committed instructor who feels a passion for teaching instead of a professor who is merely going through the motions in order to get back to the lab.
The university union here in Australia has done a fairly good job in the past few years of bargaining universities into creating new "teaching focused role" faculty positions that are (supposed to be) primarily advertised to internal people currently working as adjuncts, or even automatically awarded to such people after a certain number of years of adjuncting.
The problems I see with that, though, are:
(1) that people adjuncting aren't usually necessarily doing it because they love teaching so much and aren't interested in research, but rather because they couldn't yet find any other academic work. So they (if they are lucky) get one of these new TFR positions, and then find themselves on a contract with incredibly high face-to-face teaching requirements, and no time allocated for research at all. I'm on a selection panel hiring a new TFR in a couple of weeks, and the CVs I'm reading during the shortlisting process showcase some amazing research that will basically not "count" for anything once they are hired.
(2) because some universities have agreed in their Enterprise Agreements that after e.g. three consecutive years of employing the same person in the same adjunct role, that person will automatically get a continuing TFR position, the universities are responding by saying to these adjuncts, "Damn shame, but you've taught for us for two years now and so we can't employ you this year or we'd have to offer you secure employment". So the adjuncts are left with LESS work than before.
The one good thing is that adjuncting here in Australia is actually paid an almost-living wage. Teaching a whole course will net you around $10,000 at most institutions, and if you are lucky you can put together three or four of those a year.
posted by lollusc at 10:34 PM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
The university union here in Australia has done a fairly good job in the past few years of bargaining universities into creating new "teaching focused role" faculty positions that are (supposed to be) primarily advertised to internal people currently working as adjuncts, or even automatically awarded to such people after a certain number of years of adjuncting.
The problems I see with that, though, are:
(1) that people adjuncting aren't usually necessarily doing it because they love teaching so much and aren't interested in research, but rather because they couldn't yet find any other academic work. So they (if they are lucky) get one of these new TFR positions, and then find themselves on a contract with incredibly high face-to-face teaching requirements, and no time allocated for research at all. I'm on a selection panel hiring a new TFR in a couple of weeks, and the CVs I'm reading during the shortlisting process showcase some amazing research that will basically not "count" for anything once they are hired.
(2) because some universities have agreed in their Enterprise Agreements that after e.g. three consecutive years of employing the same person in the same adjunct role, that person will automatically get a continuing TFR position, the universities are responding by saying to these adjuncts, "Damn shame, but you've taught for us for two years now and so we can't employ you this year or we'd have to offer you secure employment". So the adjuncts are left with LESS work than before.
The one good thing is that adjuncting here in Australia is actually paid an almost-living wage. Teaching a whole course will net you around $10,000 at most institutions, and if you are lucky you can put together three or four of those a year.
posted by lollusc at 10:34 PM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
Some of my favorite people in the world are adjuncts. Just kind, kind people, who are trying to use their brilliance to fulfill their responsibilities of scholarship, only to get crushed by the evil thumb of college neoliberalism. My friends currently in PhD programs, I send them alt-ac articles I read as reminders to have perspective outside of academia, since they talk about it and try to act really hard to not be terrified. This stuff makes me so, so sad.
posted by yueliang at 11:14 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by yueliang at 11:14 PM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I have known a lot of people who (mistakenly) thought that their years of adjuncting, after getting a less than totally prestigious PhD, would land them a tenure track position at a great place, and I don't think it worked out for any of them. I am sure there are success cases out there, but for the most part people are on one track, or they are on the other, and you don't easily move from one category to the other.
And there are so many other, more renumerative and honestly more interesting, things you can do with a graduate degree. I know that graduate programs these days are doing a much better job at helping people find alternate career tracks, but there is still so much willful disbelief.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:15 PM on May 31, 2016
And there are so many other, more renumerative and honestly more interesting, things you can do with a graduate degree. I know that graduate programs these days are doing a much better job at helping people find alternate career tracks, but there is still so much willful disbelief.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:15 PM on May 31, 2016
I may be reading sarcasm into your comment that's not there, but what's wrong with any of these things?
Absolutely nothing at all--those are the routes I'm planning on going myself (well, save the fracking). But I'm an older grad student, and the bulk of students younger than me came in with the assumption that they'd be working in academia in some capacity--if not research than in a teaching/research position. A job at the fantasy "small college" that not that girl wrote about.
My point is that if you're going to grad school with hopes of being a professor, well, don't count on it no matter what your area of study is.
By definition, if you deserved your PhD, you'd probably be fine. Science PhD's are supposed to teach you how to do research, not so much how to be a technician.
I guess we've been at different career fairs. Unless you're talking about generic consulting positions, most research/science positions I've seen in industry and government are looking for desirable skillsets and publication history. There are enough STEM doctorates being churned out these days that they can afford to be choosy and aren't necessarily taking anybody with a PhD. If your experience is studying the nesting patterns of finches, then you're going to have a hard time competing for a spot at Johnson & Johnson with someone who's got experience in organic synthesis and ligand design. Unless you're applying for more naturalist-based positions somewhere else, but those are few and far between and arguably do not pay what one would expect to be paid after getting a doctorate.
posted by Anonymous at 11:16 PM on May 31, 2016
Absolutely nothing at all--those are the routes I'm planning on going myself (well, save the fracking). But I'm an older grad student, and the bulk of students younger than me came in with the assumption that they'd be working in academia in some capacity--if not research than in a teaching/research position. A job at the fantasy "small college" that not that girl wrote about.
My point is that if you're going to grad school with hopes of being a professor, well, don't count on it no matter what your area of study is.
By definition, if you deserved your PhD, you'd probably be fine. Science PhD's are supposed to teach you how to do research, not so much how to be a technician.
I guess we've been at different career fairs. Unless you're talking about generic consulting positions, most research/science positions I've seen in industry and government are looking for desirable skillsets and publication history. There are enough STEM doctorates being churned out these days that they can afford to be choosy and aren't necessarily taking anybody with a PhD. If your experience is studying the nesting patterns of finches, then you're going to have a hard time competing for a spot at Johnson & Johnson with someone who's got experience in organic synthesis and ligand design. Unless you're applying for more naturalist-based positions somewhere else, but those are few and far between and arguably do not pay what one would expect to be paid after getting a doctorate.
posted by Anonymous at 11:16 PM on May 31, 2016
Last year I caught a glimpse of the miserable life as a sessional or adjunct. I work for a well-regard marketing agency in our city, and I was asked, along with several others, to help design a new applied marketing program at a local commuter school, which I would then help teach. I used to be a teacher, and I liked it, and, call me neoliberal, but I was excited to have the chance to give participants a chance to learn skills that would help them get a job.
We spent over a year designing the curriculum, and during that process I realized just how odd postsecondary culture can be. There were a lot of meetings, and the preference was to have me drive out to the commuter campus to attend them. I wasn't paid for travel time, and was offered only an honorarium for attending a bunch of meetings. When I suggested I could phone in, it was like I was speaking Klingon. There was absolutely no value placed on my time, likely because everyone else was on salary and also worked in the laid-back environment of a college.
Last September, when I actually started teaching the classes, everything changed. Even though I have a busy marketing practice and wasn't teaching as a sessional because I needed the work, the program coordinator started treating me like an employee. Even though I was paid by class-hour, there was a lot of paperwork, some of which I was unfamiliar with. When I asked for help with it, the coordinator basically shouted at me and tried to bully me. It was as if she was used to wielding tremendous power over the sessionals, and expected me to fall in line. I guess the logic was that I wanted a job at a commuter college more than anything else (in fact, while I still enjoyed a good relationship with the school it was suggested that if I do well I might be invited to teach a course on Microsoft Word... hoo boy).
The problem was, even before the attempt at bullying, the opportunity cost, both in terms of lost earnings from my day job (I'm self-employed) and my family life were too great. The poor work environment forced me to quit.
The ultimate irony was that the program coordinator, a highly paid administrator, took every summer off. Gold-plated pension. Benefits. Parking space was paid for. Nice office. Office staff.
I cannot imagine what life must be like for anyone who depends on adjunct or sessional work to pay the bills. How terrible.
posted by My Dad at 11:26 PM on May 31, 2016 [18 favorites]
We spent over a year designing the curriculum, and during that process I realized just how odd postsecondary culture can be. There were a lot of meetings, and the preference was to have me drive out to the commuter campus to attend them. I wasn't paid for travel time, and was offered only an honorarium for attending a bunch of meetings. When I suggested I could phone in, it was like I was speaking Klingon. There was absolutely no value placed on my time, likely because everyone else was on salary and also worked in the laid-back environment of a college.
Last September, when I actually started teaching the classes, everything changed. Even though I have a busy marketing practice and wasn't teaching as a sessional because I needed the work, the program coordinator started treating me like an employee. Even though I was paid by class-hour, there was a lot of paperwork, some of which I was unfamiliar with. When I asked for help with it, the coordinator basically shouted at me and tried to bully me. It was as if she was used to wielding tremendous power over the sessionals, and expected me to fall in line. I guess the logic was that I wanted a job at a commuter college more than anything else (in fact, while I still enjoyed a good relationship with the school it was suggested that if I do well I might be invited to teach a course on Microsoft Word... hoo boy).
The problem was, even before the attempt at bullying, the opportunity cost, both in terms of lost earnings from my day job (I'm self-employed) and my family life were too great. The poor work environment forced me to quit.
The ultimate irony was that the program coordinator, a highly paid administrator, took every summer off. Gold-plated pension. Benefits. Parking space was paid for. Nice office. Office staff.
I cannot imagine what life must be like for anyone who depends on adjunct or sessional work to pay the bills. How terrible.
posted by My Dad at 11:26 PM on May 31, 2016 [18 favorites]
I have a STEM PhD and some traditional university teaching experience at Big State School (BSS). I have a federal job that pays the bills and teach part time for an online (non-for-profit) school (OS) that mostly gets veterans into degrees. I do this entirely for the extra money, since little teaching is involved. I have mixed feelings about OS, getting guys coming out of the military a degree is a little rewarding, but it requires very, very little of them, and they can usually graduate with only a handful of classes after getting a bunch of credit for military training.
I can't believe OS's business model can hold up for long, courses are canned, and not that much cheaper than offerings at, for better or worse, real schools.
But real schools aren't so great either. As a graduate student I got tossed into teaching with basically no guidance at BSS. I like to think I did okay, but realistically, the students would have done better served by a longer serving professional. At R1 schools research is prioritized over students to a ridiculous degree and the current research environment encourages the publication of huge amounts of research that is no value to anyone, and not exclusively in the humanities and social sciences.
Things that would be helpful medium term:
- Tenured teaching jobs. All but the best and most innovative researchers stand a much better chance of improving the world through teaching than through putting out a least publishable unit of their pet topic. There should be a research/graduate training track, but it should be HARD.
- Accreditation bodies should push for requiring a PhD to teach. There aren't a shortage of them and it would act to push the salaries up.
- Professional societies should try to clamp down hard on the number of graduate slots in their disciplines. Follow the MD model and not the JD model, limit slots!
- Schools should not admit anyone they won't make a reasonable commitment to fund.
But I'm not sure these would have any effect. Longer term, but probably not that far away, higher education has got to be headed for drastic changes. Costs are unsustainable and the system generally sucks for pretty much everyone involved.
MOOCs and something similar seem to have lost momentum recently, but some sort of MOOC-like system could and probably should decimate the vast majority of higher education in the US. - One really good lecturer/instructor
- A really good presentation (not the computer narrated powerpoints of OS...)
- A horde reasonably well paid specialists to answer questions and grade homework
- Contracts with testing companies to systematize anti-cheating controls
- Transferable credit from a reputable institution
Something like this should be able to be done cheaply at scale, and would be vastly better for most students not at a few rare institutions. You could even keep many campuses open and keep the undergraduate experience alive and have some faculty-ish jobs doing tutoring and mentoring in support of these courses. Unfortunately this vision is even less rosy for most faculty than the current one. Not a lot of instructors will be needed, and research slots associated with universities would probably be dramatically reduced.
STEM research could carry on at places like the national labs and I would argue should be greatly expanded there. They could expand into graduate-only degree granting institutions offering the opportunity for research and mentorship. Humanities research could carry on at remaining highly selective high status schools that will probably survive any upheaval in the general high education market.
It's scary out there. I'm grateful for my government job.
posted by Across the pale parabola of joy at 12:14 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I can't believe OS's business model can hold up for long, courses are canned, and not that much cheaper than offerings at, for better or worse, real schools.
But real schools aren't so great either. As a graduate student I got tossed into teaching with basically no guidance at BSS. I like to think I did okay, but realistically, the students would have done better served by a longer serving professional. At R1 schools research is prioritized over students to a ridiculous degree and the current research environment encourages the publication of huge amounts of research that is no value to anyone, and not exclusively in the humanities and social sciences.
Things that would be helpful medium term:
- Tenured teaching jobs. All but the best and most innovative researchers stand a much better chance of improving the world through teaching than through putting out a least publishable unit of their pet topic. There should be a research/graduate training track, but it should be HARD.
- Accreditation bodies should push for requiring a PhD to teach. There aren't a shortage of them and it would act to push the salaries up.
- Professional societies should try to clamp down hard on the number of graduate slots in their disciplines. Follow the MD model and not the JD model, limit slots!
- Schools should not admit anyone they won't make a reasonable commitment to fund.
But I'm not sure these would have any effect. Longer term, but probably not that far away, higher education has got to be headed for drastic changes. Costs are unsustainable and the system generally sucks for pretty much everyone involved.
MOOCs and something similar seem to have lost momentum recently, but some sort of MOOC-like system could and probably should decimate the vast majority of higher education in the US. - One really good lecturer/instructor
- A really good presentation (not the computer narrated powerpoints of OS...)
- A horde reasonably well paid specialists to answer questions and grade homework
- Contracts with testing companies to systematize anti-cheating controls
- Transferable credit from a reputable institution
Something like this should be able to be done cheaply at scale, and would be vastly better for most students not at a few rare institutions. You could even keep many campuses open and keep the undergraduate experience alive and have some faculty-ish jobs doing tutoring and mentoring in support of these courses. Unfortunately this vision is even less rosy for most faculty than the current one. Not a lot of instructors will be needed, and research slots associated with universities would probably be dramatically reduced.
STEM research could carry on at places like the national labs and I would argue should be greatly expanded there. They could expand into graduate-only degree granting institutions offering the opportunity for research and mentorship. Humanities research could carry on at remaining highly selective high status schools that will probably survive any upheaval in the general high education market.
It's scary out there. I'm grateful for my government job.
posted by Across the pale parabola of joy at 12:14 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
A PhD on the nesting patterns of finches? You mean making statistical models of the relationship between resourcing, individual variation, and success? That person will end up performance-managing a team full of synthetic chemists.
posted by cromagnon at 12:36 AM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by cromagnon at 12:36 AM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
What's not so fixable are that even the community colleges are overloaded and broke and it's taking people years just to supposedly get out of community college.
There's been the opposite problem at the community college I went to (in California). The administration has changed things so that the school is focused almost exclusively on being a gateway to a university, rather than a college in its own right. They've changed the rules about how many classes you can take, they've eliminated non-transferrable courses from departments, and they have - as one of my professors there put it - taken the "community" out of community college. For a lot of students this makes sense, but it didn't take into account the variety of backgrounds in the student body, or the variety of reasons that people would have for going to community college besides just trying to get to take care of their lower-divison classes.
posted by teponaztli at 1:00 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
There's been the opposite problem at the community college I went to (in California). The administration has changed things so that the school is focused almost exclusively on being a gateway to a university, rather than a college in its own right. They've changed the rules about how many classes you can take, they've eliminated non-transferrable courses from departments, and they have - as one of my professors there put it - taken the "community" out of community college. For a lot of students this makes sense, but it didn't take into account the variety of backgrounds in the student body, or the variety of reasons that people would have for going to community college besides just trying to get to take care of their lower-divison classes.
posted by teponaztli at 1:00 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
I'd rather learn from a committed instructor who feels a passion for teaching instead of a professor who is merely going through the motions in order to get back to the lab.
So much this. I just mentioned in another thread how in the Netherlands so many of our exams, even for masters degrees, are multiple choice, but this is one big reason why. Classes are taught by people who would much rather go back to their "real work". It's often clear that professors don't enjoy teaching at all. It's so sad to pay so much money to realize that you're not really paying for an education, you're paying so that the professors can continue to do research.
It does seem challenging to find people who honestly love teaching because of the problem that lollusc describes: that people apply for those positions because they cannot find any other/better academic work.
posted by blub at 1:25 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
So much this. I just mentioned in another thread how in the Netherlands so many of our exams, even for masters degrees, are multiple choice, but this is one big reason why. Classes are taught by people who would much rather go back to their "real work". It's often clear that professors don't enjoy teaching at all. It's so sad to pay so much money to realize that you're not really paying for an education, you're paying so that the professors can continue to do research.
It does seem challenging to find people who honestly love teaching because of the problem that lollusc describes: that people apply for those positions because they cannot find any other/better academic work.
posted by blub at 1:25 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
This is one of the things that has made me an advocate for good community colleges: where I live, you can pay $452/credit hour to take the freshman writing requirement with a grad student who is in their first two years of teaching, or you can pay $88/credit hour to take it two miles down the road at Lansing Community College (or at LCC's satellite campus, conveniently across the road from MSU). At LCC, you'll be taught by long-term adjuncts or by grad students who have used up their teaching eligibility at MSU and have brought their several years of experience over to LCC.
you do realize you are advocating taking advantage of adjuncts and desperate grad students to save money? because that's why CC is cheap.
one of the nice things about adjuncting at CC is your warm collegial relationship with the "permanent" faculty, whose salaries depend on squeezing you as hard as they can. /sarcasm my local CC has started, in addition to a basic rate which is lower than being a grad student, and no guarantees of getting a class to teach, making pay dependent on the number of students in your class... which, if you can believe it, is not about paying adjuncts more for teaching overloaded sections. and these positions are unionized, which is an extra $300 in inion dues per year, no matter if you only get one class.
the best part is everyone at the CC is "do-gooding" liberal, voted for Bernie Sanders, etc.
posted by ennui.bz at 2:59 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
you do realize you are advocating taking advantage of adjuncts and desperate grad students to save money? because that's why CC is cheap.
one of the nice things about adjuncting at CC is your warm collegial relationship with the "permanent" faculty, whose salaries depend on squeezing you as hard as they can. /sarcasm my local CC has started, in addition to a basic rate which is lower than being a grad student, and no guarantees of getting a class to teach, making pay dependent on the number of students in your class... which, if you can believe it, is not about paying adjuncts more for teaching overloaded sections. and these positions are unionized, which is an extra $300 in inion dues per year, no matter if you only get one class.
the best part is everyone at the CC is "do-gooding" liberal, voted for Bernie Sanders, etc.
posted by ennui.bz at 2:59 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
You're independently wealthy and can afford to get that humanities degree, because fuck it, why not?
I had free tuition and living expenses paid for my masters degree, because I was enrolled in a PhD program. I wish I'd left earlier, to avoid the opportunity costs of the following years. But I can't say that I regretted going in the first place: I have had opportunities I would never have had without starting grad school.
Now I'm working at a job that does require a masters - and because I also did 1/2 a PhD, I have skills that have led to my promotion.
It's not all a bed of roses - but if you work the system, maybe it could work for you.
My main advice for people is to work for a while first - and then do a graduate degree in a field where you have some work experience, when you know more about it.
posted by jb at 3:31 AM on June 1, 2016
I had free tuition and living expenses paid for my masters degree, because I was enrolled in a PhD program. I wish I'd left earlier, to avoid the opportunity costs of the following years. But I can't say that I regretted going in the first place: I have had opportunities I would never have had without starting grad school.
Now I'm working at a job that does require a masters - and because I also did 1/2 a PhD, I have skills that have led to my promotion.
It's not all a bed of roses - but if you work the system, maybe it could work for you.
My main advice for people is to work for a while first - and then do a graduate degree in a field where you have some work experience, when you know more about it.
posted by jb at 3:31 AM on June 1, 2016
as for professors who hate teaching: so long as universities refuse to tenure on teaching excellence, even breaking their own rules to do so, there is absolutely no reward structure for teaching. Universities are doing this to themselves.
posted by jb at 3:33 AM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by jb at 3:33 AM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
"as I am sure you know, it is only recently that the issue has exploded all over the internet"
AKA over a decade, it was a huge topic of conversation among grad school bloggers while I was in grad school (during the Invisible Adjunct era).
posted by jeather at 4:09 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
AKA over a decade, it was a huge topic of conversation among grad school bloggers while I was in grad school (during the Invisible Adjunct era).
posted by jeather at 4:09 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
The huge variation in how much adjuncts get paid per course always shocks me. At U of Toronto, I think sessionals get about $15K per course. I have a friend who taught as a sessional there for years; with the courses he taught plus some admin work he made close to six figures, with good benefits. It always seemed like a pretty sweet deal to me. It's amazing to realize that he might have earned a third as much or less for the same job at a different institution.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 4:19 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by sevenyearlurk at 4:19 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
The huge variation in how much adjuncts get paid per course always shocks me. At U of Toronto, I think sessionals get about $15K per course.
as of about 5 years ago, my local massachusetts CC paid just under $3000 per course, if the adjunct had a PhD. I was offered an adjunct position at a nationally well known private 4 year college for about $5000 per class.
but, that's of course if they give you a section. many places use a "teaching pool" from which they give course sections to adjuncts on a totally contingent basis. I remember a nice young faculty member on a hiring committee, after rejecting me for a tenure track STEM teaching position (fuck you very much) offering me a "position" in such a pool as if it were an opportunity.
posted by ennui.bz at 4:38 AM on June 1, 2016
as of about 5 years ago, my local massachusetts CC paid just under $3000 per course, if the adjunct had a PhD. I was offered an adjunct position at a nationally well known private 4 year college for about $5000 per class.
but, that's of course if they give you a section. many places use a "teaching pool" from which they give course sections to adjuncts on a totally contingent basis. I remember a nice young faculty member on a hiring committee, after rejecting me for a tenure track STEM teaching position (fuck you very much) offering me a "position" in such a pool as if it were an opportunity.
posted by ennui.bz at 4:38 AM on June 1, 2016
sevenyearlurk: I also know people who adjunct at UofToronto. They were lucky to pass $20k.
UofT sessionals are paid about $6500 per semester (the American course rates are all for semester courses; UofT has a mix of half and full-year courses). Most tenure track professors teach 2-3 classes per semester; teaching track (tenure track focused on teaching) teach 4 classes. So, if an adjunct had the very full pay for 4 classes, for both semesters -- they would come out to $52,000.
BUT, teaching track are often on programs where they can teach the same material every year, so preparing courses is not that much of a burden. Whereas adjuncts are hired year to year, and may be in a program like history, where they are expected to write the entire course from scratch. One $13,000 year long class can take 30-40 hours per week to prepare and teach. If you get the same course next year, you're in luck; you'll only have to spend 10-15 hours teaching and advising students for your $13k. But you never know when your class will be cancelled or given to someone else with more security.
Some departments may pay more per course - it sounds like your friend is. As well, some adjuncts are recent (or not so recent) PhDs without another career, while others may be ex-politicians or people in business who can command rates above the standard rate.
posted by jb at 4:41 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
UofT sessionals are paid about $6500 per semester (the American course rates are all for semester courses; UofT has a mix of half and full-year courses). Most tenure track professors teach 2-3 classes per semester; teaching track (tenure track focused on teaching) teach 4 classes. So, if an adjunct had the very full pay for 4 classes, for both semesters -- they would come out to $52,000.
BUT, teaching track are often on programs where they can teach the same material every year, so preparing courses is not that much of a burden. Whereas adjuncts are hired year to year, and may be in a program like history, where they are expected to write the entire course from scratch. One $13,000 year long class can take 30-40 hours per week to prepare and teach. If you get the same course next year, you're in luck; you'll only have to spend 10-15 hours teaching and advising students for your $13k. But you never know when your class will be cancelled or given to someone else with more security.
Some departments may pay more per course - it sounds like your friend is. As well, some adjuncts are recent (or not so recent) PhDs without another career, while others may be ex-politicians or people in business who can command rates above the standard rate.
posted by jb at 4:41 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
Oh, and the benefits for those in the adjunct union are not great. They exist, which is a credit to how hard the union has fought. But they fall well short of extended health benefits available to full-time university employees.
You can make far more money with a BA as an admin at a university than as a teacher with a PhD.
posted by jb at 4:44 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
You can make far more money with a BA as an admin at a university than as a teacher with a PhD.
posted by jb at 4:44 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
you do realize you are advocating taking advantage of adjuncts and desperate grad students to save money? because that's why CC is cheap.
It seems to me that as a student your choice is to support a parasitic layer of well paid administrators and tenured faculty on a campus filled with fancy buildings or go to community college. You get taught by underpaid adjuncts either way.
posted by zymil at 5:05 AM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
It seems to me that as a student your choice is to support a parasitic layer of well paid administrators and tenured faculty on a campus filled with fancy buildings or go to community college. You get taught by underpaid adjuncts either way.
posted by zymil at 5:05 AM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
Unless you are directly out of a top-tier research institution, with an article or two (or book) under your belt, and a very impressive CV with lots of impressive names you've worked with, you will not be considered for any tenure-track position at any respectable institution.
An article or two? You need to look at the recent tenure track hires at schools you are interested in. My wife's estimate (she's a tenured psych prof) for a tier 1 school is 5-8 articles for newbies.
Basically, stop and smell a rose during your schooling and you are either out or on the adjunct track.
posted by srboisvert at 5:11 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
An article or two? You need to look at the recent tenure track hires at schools you are interested in. My wife's estimate (she's a tenured psych prof) for a tier 1 school is 5-8 articles for newbies.
Basically, stop and smell a rose during your schooling and you are either out or on the adjunct track.
posted by srboisvert at 5:11 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
My freshman roommate is now a tenured science professor but the road to get there was so ridiculously difficult and tortured that I can't imagine anyone wanting to go through that. He's in his early fifties now but he didn't actually get a real professorship until his mid-forties after over twenty years of undergrad, grad school, post-docs and instructor jobs along with scores of publications in well-known journals and multiple teaching awards. He ended up at a school that was probably his hundredth choice and makes less than I do as a stupid software QA engineer.
I don't know why anyone would want to travel that path.
posted by octothorpe at 5:24 AM on June 1, 2016 [5 favorites]
I don't know why anyone would want to travel that path.
posted by octothorpe at 5:24 AM on June 1, 2016 [5 favorites]
I don't know why anyone would want to travel that path.
at some point you realize that you are a racehorse and your options are: a) run in any race, b) pull a cart until you are only good for horsemeat (adjuncting) c) they shoot horses don't they?
posted by ennui.bz at 5:49 AM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
at some point you realize that you are a racehorse and your options are: a) run in any race, b) pull a cart until you are only good for horsemeat (adjuncting) c) they shoot horses don't they?
posted by ennui.bz at 5:49 AM on June 1, 2016 [7 favorites]
From what I gather talking to professors at non R1 institutions the demands tend to be reduced to a degree. Yeah you still want to get a good amount of research in and go to conferences and get on community boards because more and more tenure track positions require community involvement but if you are in a STEM field and you went to a decent R1 school and did well there and got some decent postdoc work in you can probably expect to get a position somewhere at a R2 school. Humanities professors are of course completely fucked but that's be the reality since the 80s because there is a massive population of PhDs that came out of WW2, Korea and Vietnam that are still holding tons of positions even though they have often quit publishing anything of note a long time ago.
And of course if you want a pretty much guaranteed job then go ahead and go into a nursing PhD or DNP program because while you might not always be able to get a R1 nursing teaching job you can almost certainly get some sort of very well paid position. That or maybe get a Business Management PhD because it seems like there is a general lack of PhD credentialed B-School professors. Yeah you might be stuck selling snake oil the rest of your days but at least you aren't having to fuck around trying to string together adjunct positions.
posted by vuron at 6:05 AM on June 1, 2016
And of course if you want a pretty much guaranteed job then go ahead and go into a nursing PhD or DNP program because while you might not always be able to get a R1 nursing teaching job you can almost certainly get some sort of very well paid position. That or maybe get a Business Management PhD because it seems like there is a general lack of PhD credentialed B-School professors. Yeah you might be stuck selling snake oil the rest of your days but at least you aren't having to fuck around trying to string together adjunct positions.
posted by vuron at 6:05 AM on June 1, 2016
I don't know why anyone would want to travel that path.
At least he's in show business!
posted by thelonius at 6:15 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
At least he's in show business!
posted by thelonius at 6:15 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
sevenyearlurk: I also know people who adjunct at UofToronto. They were lucky to pass $20k.
Fair enough; I know my friend's situation was atypical, and it seems like U of T itself is pretty atypical. Here's a recent posting for a summer sessional position in the English department there, for reference.
I guess I always mentally compare to my own first job, when I left academia after my PhD. I got paid a little over $30K for 40 hours a week of shitty, low-status, soul-destroying work in a cubicle farm with an hour-long commute. Adjuncting doesn't seem so bad by comparison as long as it's a very temporary thing. The real problem is when people get trapped by it because they hope a tenure track or permanent teaching stream job is just over the horizon. Schools are exploiting that hope, and it sucks.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 6:57 AM on June 1, 2016
Fair enough; I know my friend's situation was atypical, and it seems like U of T itself is pretty atypical. Here's a recent posting for a summer sessional position in the English department there, for reference.
I guess I always mentally compare to my own first job, when I left academia after my PhD. I got paid a little over $30K for 40 hours a week of shitty, low-status, soul-destroying work in a cubicle farm with an hour-long commute. Adjuncting doesn't seem so bad by comparison as long as it's a very temporary thing. The real problem is when people get trapped by it because they hope a tenure track or permanent teaching stream job is just over the horizon. Schools are exploiting that hope, and it sucks.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 6:57 AM on June 1, 2016
The Misery of Adjunct Professors Keeps Higher Education University Administrators Booming
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:19 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:19 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'd rather learn from a committed instructor who feels a passion for teaching instead of a professor who is merely going through the motions in order to get back to the lab.
So, yeah, that can be a real problem.
But -- and I am more sensitive to this and related issues because of systemic problems in undergraduate poli-sci programs -- it's also a problem when the thing being taught to undergraduates by committed instructors is fundamentally divorced from the actual discipline, or when what's being taught is the state of the discipline 20 years ago. And there's nothing so good at keeping you up to date, at least, as both doing your own research and having to to graduate instruction.
Reasons people should get an advanced degree:
There's also a fairly broad swath of government and related workers who will see a pay boost if they have a graduate degree in anything, and getting an MA -- even paying money for one -- can be a smart long-term bet there. And of course it can also be a bad bet.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:57 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
So, yeah, that can be a real problem.
But -- and I am more sensitive to this and related issues because of systemic problems in undergraduate poli-sci programs -- it's also a problem when the thing being taught to undergraduates by committed instructors is fundamentally divorced from the actual discipline, or when what's being taught is the state of the discipline 20 years ago. And there's nothing so good at keeping you up to date, at least, as both doing your own research and having to to graduate instruction.
Reasons people should get an advanced degree:
There's also a fairly broad swath of government and related workers who will see a pay boost if they have a graduate degree in anything, and getting an MA -- even paying money for one -- can be a smart long-term bet there. And of course it can also be a bad bet.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:57 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
Something like this should be able to be done cheaply at scale, and would be vastly better for most students not at a few rare institutions.
Sadly, the technophilic scam of MOOCs is not vastly better for students. Online education is a pretty mixed bag, especially for younger students who have not learned how they learn yet. MOOCs are vastly worse than "traditional" online teaching. Then only people who boost for them anymore are administrators desperate to cut salaries and entrepreneurs who want to "disrupt education." Capitalists have been panting to industrialize education for decades, and in the face of the evident impossibility of that task (it takes lots lots of well-educated people to do it well), they have settled on burning down the system. Fantasies of technological efficiencies are just a scrum to hide the smoke.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:39 AM on June 1, 2016 [9 favorites]
Sadly, the technophilic scam of MOOCs is not vastly better for students. Online education is a pretty mixed bag, especially for younger students who have not learned how they learn yet. MOOCs are vastly worse than "traditional" online teaching. Then only people who boost for them anymore are administrators desperate to cut salaries and entrepreneurs who want to "disrupt education." Capitalists have been panting to industrialize education for decades, and in the face of the evident impossibility of that task (it takes lots lots of well-educated people to do it well), they have settled on burning down the system. Fantasies of technological efficiencies are just a scrum to hide the smoke.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:39 AM on June 1, 2016 [9 favorites]
As the spouse of someone caught in the adjunct trap, your best course is to be supportive as your SO goes through this horror, and remain supportive in the search for a way out.
posted by No Robots at 8:45 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by No Robots at 8:45 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
The only problem with this is many non-CC institutions are getting wise to this strategy and are cracking down on the number and type of classes you can transfer. They don't want to lose those sweet, sweet tuition dollars. CC students have to be very careful to make sure the classes they're taking will transfer to the schools they want to go to.
This mostly depends on how good, and informed, your counselors were. The ones at my CC were fucking doofuses(so was everyone who worked in the admin and financial aid offices holy shit FUCK those assholes), the ones at an ex partners CC were amazing, she coasted right in to UW, and graduated perfectly on time without having to take any prereqs that should have been covered etc etc.
There are definitely some CCs that should only be recommended if you're willing to completely figure out this ever changing stuff alone(and probably even be given conflicting/bullshit/out of date advice) or for AAs/certificate/vocational programs, which they can be very good for.
posted by emptythought at 9:04 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
This mostly depends on how good, and informed, your counselors were. The ones at my CC were fucking doofuses(so was everyone who worked in the admin and financial aid offices holy shit FUCK those assholes), the ones at an ex partners CC were amazing, she coasted right in to UW, and graduated perfectly on time without having to take any prereqs that should have been covered etc etc.
There are definitely some CCs that should only be recommended if you're willing to completely figure out this ever changing stuff alone(and probably even be given conflicting/bullshit/out of date advice) or for AAs/certificate/vocational programs, which they can be very good for.
posted by emptythought at 9:04 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'm so naive that when I chatted with a comp sci (full) professor at a local engineering school recently, I was appalled when he said he didn't like teaching students and preferred research. Maybe colleges should hire separate staff called "researchers" and have them not teach classes but I mean "professor" ... The title strongly implies that teaching is job 1, plus maybe other stuff.
posted by freecellwizard at 9:30 AM on June 1, 2016
posted by freecellwizard at 9:30 AM on June 1, 2016
I don't mean to be a dick, but that's never been true. Not at any point in the around 1000 years of what is recognizably higher education; it's always been the case that the first role is that of scholarship. This doesn't excuse bad instruction.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:55 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:55 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
Maybe colleges should hire separate staff called "researchers" and have them not teach classes but I mean "professor" ... The title strongly implies that teaching is job 1, plus maybe other stuff.
Some do. But as mentioned above, only active researchers can teach up-to-date classes, so pretty much all graduate classes and preferably 300-400 level ones should be taught by research professors.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:58 AM on June 1, 2016
Some do. But as mentioned above, only active researchers can teach up-to-date classes, so pretty much all graduate classes and preferably 300-400 level ones should be taught by research professors.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:58 AM on June 1, 2016
Not that only active researchers can, but that more purely instructional faculty aren't given the work time to keep up and don't have a concrete incentive to do so.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:14 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:14 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
One of the major problems in English is that by a huge margin, the classes that are offered/required are your basic Intro to Composition courses, where the grading and commenting load is huge and the students are often totally ambivalent about "learning how to write". The majority of English/lit/comm/etc PhDs out there would rather not teach Intro to Comp the rest of their lives. It is exhausting and repetitive. But that is overwhelmingly what's available. I do absolutely think adjuncts should be paid better, but even if there were more full-time, decent-paying positions for teaching 6-8 sections of Intro to Comp a year... that's not really what most of these PhDs were hoping for, either.
posted by nakedmolerats at 10:20 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by nakedmolerats at 10:20 AM on June 1, 2016 [4 favorites]
I have known a lot of people who (mistakenly) thought that their years of adjuncting, after getting a less than totally prestigious PhD, would land them a tenure track position at a great place, and I don't think it worked out for any of them. I am sure there are success cases out there, but for the most part people are on one track, or they are on the other, and you don't easily move from one category to the other.
At both community colleges I taught at, whenever a full-time position opened up it was eventually given to a new Ph.D. who could "bring fresh ideas" to the department, over people who'd been loyally teaching there for 10, 15 years.
posted by not that girl at 10:25 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
At both community colleges I taught at, whenever a full-time position opened up it was eventually given to a new Ph.D. who could "bring fresh ideas" to the department, over people who'd been loyally teaching there for 10, 15 years.
posted by not that girl at 10:25 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
Well, yeah. The adjuncts have already demonstrated their willingness to teach for almost-nothing, why not take advantage of it?
posted by miyabo at 10:28 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by miyabo at 10:28 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
Maybe colleges should hire separate staff called "researchers" and have them not teach classes but I mean "professor" ...
A friend of mine teaches at a Big 10 university. Tenure-track faculty there can "buy out" their teaching commitment, using outside grant money they've raised for research, which is to say the pay the university for the privilege of not teaching. The university then hires people like my friend, who are full-time non-tenure track instructors, usually but not always of lower-level courses. It's not a terrible deal—it's a full-time job, it pays something like 65k/year, and it comes with benefits. For her, it feels like a good way to balance an academic career and parenthood.
posted by not that girl at 10:29 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
A friend of mine teaches at a Big 10 university. Tenure-track faculty there can "buy out" their teaching commitment, using outside grant money they've raised for research, which is to say the pay the university for the privilege of not teaching. The university then hires people like my friend, who are full-time non-tenure track instructors, usually but not always of lower-level courses. It's not a terrible deal—it's a full-time job, it pays something like 65k/year, and it comes with benefits. For her, it feels like a good way to balance an academic career and parenthood.
posted by not that girl at 10:29 AM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
MOOCs and something similar seem to have lost momentum recently, but some sort of MOOC-like system could and probably should decimate the vast majority of higher education in the US.
I taught online classes for the community college for years, and also took classes online a few years ago when I was in a post-baccalaureate program. Students really struggle with online classes; they find it challenging to manage their time and keep track of deadlines, and don't feel like they know how to seek out help if they need it. When I was teaching, the attrition rate was very high. When I was taking classes, I'd show up at the testing center to take the required in-person exams, and I think every single time I was there I waited in line with someone who said, "I am never taking an online course again."
posted by not that girl at 10:33 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I taught online classes for the community college for years, and also took classes online a few years ago when I was in a post-baccalaureate program. Students really struggle with online classes; they find it challenging to manage their time and keep track of deadlines, and don't feel like they know how to seek out help if they need it. When I was teaching, the attrition rate was very high. When I was taking classes, I'd show up at the testing center to take the required in-person exams, and I think every single time I was there I waited in line with someone who said, "I am never taking an online course again."
posted by not that girl at 10:33 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I feel like the fundamental problem here is that we have a glut of people with postgraduate degrees, caused by (among other things) universities needing to generate MS and PhD graduates in order to justify the existence of their research programs. The model is totally broken and it would be a Herculean undertaking to fix it even if the will for that kind of radical restructuring of academia existed, which it most emphatically does not.
However, even in a best-case scenario where we immediately and wholeheartedly start the restructuring process this very afternoon, we are going to be dealing with that glut for a generation and it's going to basically ruin the employment prospects of most people who have or are working toward a postgraduate degree, rendering their long, arduous, and expensive educations a liability rather than an asset. I don't know what there is to be done about that.
Don't get a PhD, kids. If you have even a shred of doubt about whether it will be worth it, don't. And if you do, don't do it because you want to be a university professor. You might as well play the lottery instead. Go do almost anything else.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 10:54 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
However, even in a best-case scenario where we immediately and wholeheartedly start the restructuring process this very afternoon, we are going to be dealing with that glut for a generation and it's going to basically ruin the employment prospects of most people who have or are working toward a postgraduate degree, rendering their long, arduous, and expensive educations a liability rather than an asset. I don't know what there is to be done about that.
Don't get a PhD, kids. If you have even a shred of doubt about whether it will be worth it, don't. And if you do, don't do it because you want to be a university professor. You might as well play the lottery instead. Go do almost anything else.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 10:54 AM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
This is terrifying to me. My SO is currently completing her PhD (in a non-STEM field) at a top-tier program (it's at an Ivy and one of the best for her area of study). This gives her a fighting chance for a non-adjunct job, but it's no sure bet. She's told me that if she ends up on the adjunct treadmill she'll get out, but her dream is to teach and research. It just frustrates me that even after all the hard work she's put in, after going to such a good school, she's still playing the lottery with this.
posted by Hactar at 10:55 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Hactar at 10:55 AM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
I wasn't implying that research isn't important. I'm just suggesting that if you ask a lay person what a college professor does they might think something more like "college teacher" than the reality. And that when those people then go to get a university education themselves they might be surprised by who is or isn't teaching the classes. Teaching well is hard, maybe as hard in its own way as being part of cutting edge research. So I think the people doing the teaching are deserving of more than bargain basement wages . That's all.
posted by freecellwizard at 11:26 AM on June 1, 2016
posted by freecellwizard at 11:26 AM on June 1, 2016
My general feeling is that a decent amount of Ivy League PhD candidates will still be able to get Tenure Track positions. They might not be able to get them in ideal locations but assuming that you networked well and have a decent number of published articles I think you can probably get into a decent if not stellar tenure track position unless you are talking something truly daunting like a PhD in a dead language or maybe Philosophy.
I think it's sometimes easier to find work in a STEM field but it's not always guaranteed that you can get into a R1 institution and increasingly in a lot of STEM areas the R1 schools seem like they are the only ones with the underlying infrastructure to actually pursue high end grants and even then even top level researchers are increasingly seeing their grant proposals fail to get approved. We've dropped state and federal funding to the point where even really good ideas are no longer getting funded.
posted by vuron at 11:38 AM on June 1, 2016
I think it's sometimes easier to find work in a STEM field but it's not always guaranteed that you can get into a R1 institution and increasingly in a lot of STEM areas the R1 schools seem like they are the only ones with the underlying infrastructure to actually pursue high end grants and even then even top level researchers are increasingly seeing their grant proposals fail to get approved. We've dropped state and federal funding to the point where even really good ideas are no longer getting funded.
posted by vuron at 11:38 AM on June 1, 2016
These are people who could be earning a living wage doing something else with their lives. Yes, they maybe enjoy teaching physics, literature, etc., but mostly they're simply stuck there. I think they mostly know they need out, but they need that push that people in bad situations frequently need.
As a society, we desperately need a special bread of tech recruiters who go talk to adjuncts, figure out what the adjunct needs to get out, gives them good pointers, and finds them a solid entry level job in industry. For that, we might need more tech recruiters who were formally academics first.
If you've any control over recruiter, HR, etc. hiring, then please consider advertising to under employed PhDs teaching adjunct classes. At bear minimum, they can read students' transcripts with a critical eye.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:46 PM on June 1, 2016
As a society, we desperately need a special bread of tech recruiters who go talk to adjuncts, figure out what the adjunct needs to get out, gives them good pointers, and finds them a solid entry level job in industry. For that, we might need more tech recruiters who were formally academics first.
If you've any control over recruiter, HR, etc. hiring, then please consider advertising to under employed PhDs teaching adjunct classes. At bear minimum, they can read students' transcripts with a critical eye.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:46 PM on June 1, 2016
I'm up to my elbows in four grant proposals, realizing that I'll be fortunate if one of them is funded. The STEM funding rates are so, so low these days.
posted by wintermind at 1:42 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by wintermind at 1:42 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
yeah surely no one has ever gotten a misleading picture of the job market or ended up taking piecemeal a work for poverty wages after talking to a tech recruiter
posted by Krom Tatman at 3:12 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Krom Tatman at 3:12 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
Relevant to all these people who are talking about opportunity cost and graduate school: "Low income is in the eye of the learner"
posted by hydropsyche at 4:49 PM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:49 PM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I am not sure I totally believe that someone has to be a researcher to be a good college professor. ROU, obviously you have a million times more insight as someone who actually is a professor, but here's what I wonder: do the benefits that come from being a researcher outweigh the benefits that could come from having a corps of college professors who are hired, and paid decently, for their ability to teach?
I mean, I have had professors who were really good teachers (and some who were really bad), and I have had professors who were renowned researchers, and others who barely researched at all, and I can't see a correlation in my own experience between quality of research and quality of teaching. And to be honest, some of the best teachers I've had were at the high school, not post-secondary, level, and they didn't do any research at all.
I can definitely see how professors at the graduate level (at least in academic programs) should be researchers, and probably at higher-level undergrad as well, especially in courses geared towards students interested in academia. But most students at universities are not in academic graduate programs, or headed that direction. Does someone who is going to be, say, a marketing manager or a software engineer actually need a professor who is actively engaged in research, and may or may not be a good teacher? Wouldn't that student be better served by a professor who is up on the latest relevant research but whose focus is on teaching?
I wonder similar things about tenure. I get why it's valuable, but it also seems like it's such a bottleneck and creates such a stratified system. There's so little middle-ground between "has (or is on the road to having) a job for life" and "has no job security from one quarter to the next."
posted by lunasol at 4:57 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
I mean, I have had professors who were really good teachers (and some who were really bad), and I have had professors who were renowned researchers, and others who barely researched at all, and I can't see a correlation in my own experience between quality of research and quality of teaching. And to be honest, some of the best teachers I've had were at the high school, not post-secondary, level, and they didn't do any research at all.
I can definitely see how professors at the graduate level (at least in academic programs) should be researchers, and probably at higher-level undergrad as well, especially in courses geared towards students interested in academia. But most students at universities are not in academic graduate programs, or headed that direction. Does someone who is going to be, say, a marketing manager or a software engineer actually need a professor who is actively engaged in research, and may or may not be a good teacher? Wouldn't that student be better served by a professor who is up on the latest relevant research but whose focus is on teaching?
I wonder similar things about tenure. I get why it's valuable, but it also seems like it's such a bottleneck and creates such a stratified system. There's so little middle-ground between "has (or is on the road to having) a job for life" and "has no job security from one quarter to the next."
posted by lunasol at 4:57 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
I teach at a public, undergraduate, commuter college. All of us have teaching as our primary job. "Scholarship" makes up 15-30% of our job (proportion determined by the faculty member), and that can include Scholarship of Teaching and Learning rather than scholarship within the discipline. I love doing research in my field with students, and will likely always do a substantial amount of that. I think I'm a pretty good teacher. There are excellent teachers among us whose research is entirely focused on SoTL. They stay current on biology by reading the literature, the same as any researcher.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:19 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by hydropsyche at 5:19 PM on June 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
My wife is in academia, she's lucky enough to have avoided adjuncting, but we've moved 6 times in the last 7 years. It's so exhausting, I can't imagine anyone with children possibly living this life.
posted by Ferreous at 5:22 PM on June 1, 2016
posted by Ferreous at 5:22 PM on June 1, 2016
Relevant to all these people who are talking about opportunity cost and graduate school: "Low income is in the eye of the learner"
posted by hydropsyche 2 ¾ hours ago [1 favorite +] [!]
Reading those tweets - he's wrong. Students from poor families can afford less to take the hit that grad school can be. I was the first in my family to go to college. If I had started work right after my BA, I could be making 50-60k now - which isn't great, but is a lot better than the 17k I managed last year. I now have a good job - I might break $30 or 40k this year. But I'm 15 years behind in saving for retirement -- and I'm not in the line to inherit any property (since no one in my family owns any).
If you can't get a job out of your undergrad, then it really does make sense for a poor student to go to grad school. My living expenses scholarship - $15k - felt so generous at the time; I wasn't complaining - I felt rich because I could afford to eat take-out regularly for the first time. But you really do give up a lot of earning time. I had good opportunities and interesting experiences I wouldn't have had otherwise, but I'm also 15 years behind my peers who didn't go to grad school.
posted by jb at 7:49 PM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche 2 ¾ hours ago [1 favorite +] [!]
Reading those tweets - he's wrong. Students from poor families can afford less to take the hit that grad school can be. I was the first in my family to go to college. If I had started work right after my BA, I could be making 50-60k now - which isn't great, but is a lot better than the 17k I managed last year. I now have a good job - I might break $30 or 40k this year. But I'm 15 years behind in saving for retirement -- and I'm not in the line to inherit any property (since no one in my family owns any).
If you can't get a job out of your undergrad, then it really does make sense for a poor student to go to grad school. My living expenses scholarship - $15k - felt so generous at the time; I wasn't complaining - I felt rich because I could afford to eat take-out regularly for the first time. But you really do give up a lot of earning time. I had good opportunities and interesting experiences I wouldn't have had otherwise, but I'm also 15 years behind my peers who didn't go to grad school.
posted by jb at 7:49 PM on June 1, 2016 [3 favorites]
I had good opportunities and interesting experiences I wouldn't have had otherwise, but I'm also 15 years behind my peers who didn't go to grad school.
How'd you get 15 years behind? Even a consecutive masters and doctoral program doesn't take 15 years.
posted by Mitrovarr at 8:33 PM on June 1, 2016
How'd you get 15 years behind? Even a consecutive masters and doctoral program doesn't take 15 years.
posted by Mitrovarr at 8:33 PM on June 1, 2016
lunasol: Wouldn't that student be better served by a professor who is up on the latest relevant research but whose focus is on teaching?
Sure, but that doesn't exist. Nobody will ever be up on the latest research as much as a current researcher in the field. Continuing educational requirements are good, but they don't have even close to as much power as a need to get funding, do current research, and publish does. Hell, even that isn't foolproof; a lot of professors use outdated methods to do research.
posted by Mitrovarr at 8:39 PM on June 1, 2016
Sure, but that doesn't exist. Nobody will ever be up on the latest research as much as a current researcher in the field. Continuing educational requirements are good, but they don't have even close to as much power as a need to get funding, do current research, and publish does. Hell, even that isn't foolproof; a lot of professors use outdated methods to do research.
posted by Mitrovarr at 8:39 PM on June 1, 2016
How'd you get 15 years behind? Even a consecutive masters and doctoral program doesn't take 15 years.
They can - especially if grad school gives you a serious mental illness.
I'm turning 39 this year, and starting my first career job (though still hourly, no benefits). Since I graduated my BA at 25 (didn't start until 21, I needed to work to pay for it), I suppose one could say it was only 14 years. I rounded up.
posted by jb at 8:47 PM on June 1, 2016
They can - especially if grad school gives you a serious mental illness.
I'm turning 39 this year, and starting my first career job (though still hourly, no benefits). Since I graduated my BA at 25 (didn't start until 21, I needed to work to pay for it), I suppose one could say it was only 14 years. I rounded up.
posted by jb at 8:47 PM on June 1, 2016
I can only imagine how long your dissertation must be. Must be nice to be out and having found an actual career job.
I'm planning on going back myself for my doctorate at some point. I decided to take a while between my master's and doctorate so I could have a couple of years when I'm neither poor nor old. It's been fun, but I had a much, much harder time finding a real job than I thought I would (fortunately I seem to have gotten lucky) and thus it doesn't feel like a tenable long term proposition to stay at the master's level. I think master's degrees in biology are getting ruined by programs using them as consolation prizes for poorly performing doctoral students.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:02 PM on June 1, 2016
I'm planning on going back myself for my doctorate at some point. I decided to take a while between my master's and doctorate so I could have a couple of years when I'm neither poor nor old. It's been fun, but I had a much, much harder time finding a real job than I thought I would (fortunately I seem to have gotten lucky) and thus it doesn't feel like a tenable long term proposition to stay at the master's level. I think master's degrees in biology are getting ruined by programs using them as consolation prizes for poorly performing doctoral students.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:02 PM on June 1, 2016
I went to grad school and received a masters in Information Science. This led to a high-paying job in engineering. But over the last few years I've seen science twisted to take away rights and trump values so many times. I no longer want to lead in this field. I'm tired of watching passionate voices and things I care about be co-opted. I kind of just want to minimize my impact on the world now. No mentoring, no teaching. My research and power will just be used to push conservative values.
posted by formless at 9:19 PM on June 1, 2016
posted by formless at 9:19 PM on June 1, 2016
Sure, but that doesn't exist. Nobody will ever be up on the latest research as much as a current researcher in the field. Continuing educational requirements are good, but they don't have even close to as much power as a need to get funding, do current research, and publish does. Hell, even that isn't foolproof; a lot of professors use outdated methods to do research.
Right, but that's my point. I'm not saying this person would be as up on the research as a researcher - I'm talking about trading research expertise for teaching expertise. So for instance, would your average undergrad be better off with a professor who is an excellent researcher and teaches well enough to not get in trouble, or an excellent teacher who stays up to date enough on the researcher to not look like an idiot?
I mean, there are lots of fields where non-researchers are expected to stay up-to-date on the latest research and innovations without actually being researchers themselves. It's definitely a thing that is possible.
It just seems so weird to me that there is this huge number of students out there, spending years of their lives and a ridiculous amount of money to learn from people whose primary responsibility is not to teach them. And the people for whom that is their job are disrespected and underpaid. Seems backwards.
posted by lunasol at 10:28 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
lunasol: So for instance, would your average undergrad be better off with a professor who is an excellent researcher and teaches well enough to not get in trouble, or an excellent teacher who stays up to date enough on the researcher to not look like an idiot?
You know, I think it varies based on the class. For classes you're expected to be able to practically apply later, I honestly think it might be the first. It would be more worthwhile to be taught an up-to-date technique in a mediocre way than to be taught an obsolete technique well. Also, there is a lot of value in having actually applied what you're teaching; it gives you a different perspective that you just can't get any other way.
For others, it could be the second - this is probably true in early classes (where recent developments in the field are less important, and students aren't as good at being students yet), and possibly classes heavy in theory.
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:47 PM on June 1, 2016
You know, I think it varies based on the class. For classes you're expected to be able to practically apply later, I honestly think it might be the first. It would be more worthwhile to be taught an up-to-date technique in a mediocre way than to be taught an obsolete technique well. Also, there is a lot of value in having actually applied what you're teaching; it gives you a different perspective that you just can't get any other way.
For others, it could be the second - this is probably true in early classes (where recent developments in the field are less important, and students aren't as good at being students yet), and possibly classes heavy in theory.
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:47 PM on June 1, 2016
I am not sure I totally believe that someone has to be a researcher to be a good college professor
They don't. It just conduces to staying current, which isn't related to other aspects of teaching. And maybe helps keep undergraduate teaching connected to the real discipline, which is probably not much of an issue to most fields but is an area where my own field does quite poorly. Having a strongly teaching oriented faculty isn't totally costless, is all.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:00 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
They don't. It just conduces to staying current, which isn't related to other aspects of teaching. And maybe helps keep undergraduate teaching connected to the real discipline, which is probably not much of an issue to most fields but is an area where my own field does quite poorly. Having a strongly teaching oriented faculty isn't totally costless, is all.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:00 PM on June 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
I was mortified when I found out that many people are professional adjuncts. People that work semester-to-semester for slightly-above-minimum wage, teaching students who often make more money (as the articles say) delivering pizza.
I did this right out of grad school. I taught 7 classes every fall and 6 classes every spring, and 3-4 classes over the summer semester. My pay varied, depending on the institution: community college was a steady $605 a credit hour (so about $1800 per class), while I was making $3000 per class at the large state university by the end of the 3 years I did this. On a sidenote, this was almost 8 years ago, so when I read the salary ranges in the articles, I assumed that adjunct salaries had risen recently, but then I remembered teaching a summer class last year at the adjunct rate in North Carolina, and I made $1300 for that course, so I don't know where these people are teaching.
Anyway, after 3 years my body was falling apart and I had little to no social life, but I had paid off all my student loans and saved over $10,000. I don't know how people could do it if they were older or had children. It's funny (funny strange, not funny haha) to this day that when I tell people the city in which I used to work, and they ask me what's fun to do there or what restaurants I liked, I always have to say, "Uhhhh, I don't know? I never went out. Like, no, seriously, I never went out. I have no idea what one does for fun there."
On the other hand, since the articles are making a point they are extremely fatalistic and hyperbolic, especially when it comes to getting a tenure-track position. "If you don't get a TT position right out of grad school, you never will", and "If you haven't been published at least 3 times, you won't be considered for a TT position", and "Real-world experience in your field makes no difference to getting a full-time job" are all just . . . false. None of those statements are true. My husband has a TT job at the regional campus of an R1 institution, which he got having been published once back in grad school, which incidentally was 6 years before he landed this job. I also got my first full-time job (NTT) after returning from a year in Spain, which the hiring committee chair openly said was what made them move my application to the interview stage.
posted by chainsofreedom at 12:06 PM on June 2, 2016
I did this right out of grad school. I taught 7 classes every fall and 6 classes every spring, and 3-4 classes over the summer semester. My pay varied, depending on the institution: community college was a steady $605 a credit hour (so about $1800 per class), while I was making $3000 per class at the large state university by the end of the 3 years I did this. On a sidenote, this was almost 8 years ago, so when I read the salary ranges in the articles, I assumed that adjunct salaries had risen recently, but then I remembered teaching a summer class last year at the adjunct rate in North Carolina, and I made $1300 for that course, so I don't know where these people are teaching.
Anyway, after 3 years my body was falling apart and I had little to no social life, but I had paid off all my student loans and saved over $10,000. I don't know how people could do it if they were older or had children. It's funny (funny strange, not funny haha) to this day that when I tell people the city in which I used to work, and they ask me what's fun to do there or what restaurants I liked, I always have to say, "Uhhhh, I don't know? I never went out. Like, no, seriously, I never went out. I have no idea what one does for fun there."
On the other hand, since the articles are making a point they are extremely fatalistic and hyperbolic, especially when it comes to getting a tenure-track position. "If you don't get a TT position right out of grad school, you never will", and "If you haven't been published at least 3 times, you won't be considered for a TT position", and "Real-world experience in your field makes no difference to getting a full-time job" are all just . . . false. None of those statements are true. My husband has a TT job at the regional campus of an R1 institution, which he got having been published once back in grad school, which incidentally was 6 years before he landed this job. I also got my first full-time job (NTT) after returning from a year in Spain, which the hiring committee chair openly said was what made them move my application to the interview stage.
posted by chainsofreedom at 12:06 PM on June 2, 2016
I feel like the fundamental problem here is that we have a glut of people with postgraduate degrees, caused by (among other things) universities needing to generate MS and PhD graduates in order to justify the existence of their research programs.
I don't even think that reason would crack the top 5. There are a glut of post-grad degrees because of the interaction of multiple factors:
-A higher proportion of people in general are going to college. This creates a larger base of people who have the opportunity to go to grad school.
-Recession causing those who would have entered the workforce with a BA/BS to continue their education due to a lack of jobs.
-Decrease in both research funding and higher education funding increases pressure on colleges to enroll more students for that sweet tuition cash.
-Increase in availability of student loans make it possible for more people to attend graduate school.
posted by LizBoBiz at 5:31 AM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
I don't even think that reason would crack the top 5. There are a glut of post-grad degrees because of the interaction of multiple factors:
-A higher proportion of people in general are going to college. This creates a larger base of people who have the opportunity to go to grad school.
-Recession causing those who would have entered the workforce with a BA/BS to continue their education due to a lack of jobs.
-Decrease in both research funding and higher education funding increases pressure on colleges to enroll more students for that sweet tuition cash.
-Increase in availability of student loans make it possible for more people to attend graduate school.
posted by LizBoBiz at 5:31 AM on June 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
In fact, if you're quite successful, then "15 years behind" can still mean 5 years of grad school plus 10 years of postdocs, even prestigious ones, but no realistic faculty job prospects and an uphill battle to transition to another field. It's always about mental retooling, but even smart people find that tricky, especially as they get older.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:17 AM on June 3, 2016
posted by jeffburdges at 7:17 AM on June 3, 2016
I don't think it's really fair to count postdocs as part of your education. They don't pay that badly, for one thing (in my field the post-docs I looked at paid about as much as you could expect to get with a bachelor's degree, assuming you were lucky enough to find a job with it). Also, they're only really relevant if you're going for a faculty position. I don't think they're considered as important if you go for industry instead.
Also, 10 years of post-doc is lunacy. If you can't get a faculty position after 3-4 years of adjuncting or post-docs, it's time to at least think about going over to industry.
posted by Mitrovarr at 5:06 PM on June 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
Also, 10 years of post-doc is lunacy. If you can't get a faculty position after 3-4 years of adjuncting or post-docs, it's time to at least think about going over to industry.
posted by Mitrovarr at 5:06 PM on June 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
you assume a field has an industry option. There is no "development of capitalism and how it screwed poor people" research industry. The capitalists already figured out how to do it very well by the 17th century.
/actually, it's more complicated than that. It's always more complicated.
posted by jb at 7:31 PM on June 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
/actually, it's more complicated than that. It's always more complicated.
posted by jb at 7:31 PM on June 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
A consistently good way to make money is to have a lots of small-scale, disorganized suppliers to buy from, and a bunch of individual consumers to sell to. If you can make yourself a large-scale distributor in between those two disorganized groups of people, you can scrape the money off. I just finished reading The Coming of the Book, and you can see how the publishers became huge and wealthy this way. I work in the film industry, and you can see how the big distributors suck up most of the money this way. And now universities are doing the same thing: They're acting as large-scale distributors of education, with individual adjuncts supplying the product and individual students paying for it and the university sitting in the middle, well-organized, with access to a complete picture of supply and demand that neither suppliers nor consumers have, scraping the money off the top.
posted by clawsoon at 4:07 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 4:07 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]
So while you are not wrong clawsoon, having hundreds of thousands of individual students try to sort through thousands of lecturers would be a mess. They make money because they produce value.
posted by GuyZero at 10:33 PM on June 5, 2016
posted by GuyZero at 10:33 PM on June 5, 2016
At least in mathematics and physics, there are many people who work in subfields with no super-direct transition to industry, Mitrovarr. In principle, they could apply their overall knowledge for many many things, but many factors stand in the way, like just convincing a prospective employer that yes you're done with academia and you want to do their thing.
Also, you take an intellectual hit during transition. Imagine a string theory PhD or a statistics PhD who transition to doing web analytics. We'd imagine the string theory PhD to be more highly educated by some metric, but they'll land doing less interesting work than the statistics PhD.
There are plenty of people who spend ten years in postdoc positions, think maybe three years of working hard towards whatever subject got you really inspire during PhD, a year or even two figure out you need to do something else while still working hard, maybe a postdoc or two in fields with more applicability to try to give yourself a nicer transition.
It takes folks quite a while to change career, regardless of whether your teaching all day or reading and writing about statistical mechanics. And making that easier would benefit everyone, well except for the university administrators who might need to pay postdocs and adjuncts more.
I think academia should work harder to identify and push PhD students to gain a basic understanding of more areas with greater applicability, and to learn about the more interesting real applications of their field.
I'll describe the situation in my former field of group theory : We actually do push some students into doing computational group theory, especially students doing finite groups, which benefits them because their programming improves, and they can get non-academic jobs. We do not however push them to learn about areas of group theory with more applications like applications of representation theory to probability and association schemes. It's tricky though because cryptography sounds like a great field for group theorists too, and the NSA hires many, but group-based cryptography contains some snake oil, like braid group cryptography.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:28 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Also, you take an intellectual hit during transition. Imagine a string theory PhD or a statistics PhD who transition to doing web analytics. We'd imagine the string theory PhD to be more highly educated by some metric, but they'll land doing less interesting work than the statistics PhD.
There are plenty of people who spend ten years in postdoc positions, think maybe three years of working hard towards whatever subject got you really inspire during PhD, a year or even two figure out you need to do something else while still working hard, maybe a postdoc or two in fields with more applicability to try to give yourself a nicer transition.
It takes folks quite a while to change career, regardless of whether your teaching all day or reading and writing about statistical mechanics. And making that easier would benefit everyone, well except for the university administrators who might need to pay postdocs and adjuncts more.
I think academia should work harder to identify and push PhD students to gain a basic understanding of more areas with greater applicability, and to learn about the more interesting real applications of their field.
I'll describe the situation in my former field of group theory : We actually do push some students into doing computational group theory, especially students doing finite groups, which benefits them because their programming improves, and they can get non-academic jobs. We do not however push them to learn about areas of group theory with more applications like applications of representation theory to probability and association schemes. It's tricky though because cryptography sounds like a great field for group theorists too, and the NSA hires many, but group-based cryptography contains some snake oil, like braid group cryptography.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:28 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
GuyZero: They make money because they produce value.
And you are not wrong either, GuyZero, but: They make part of their money because they provide value, and part of their money from taking advantage of rent-seeking and information and power asymmetries. There are few unions to re-balance the power asymmetry, and some of the stories in the links make it clear that it's easy for universities to keep their adjunct workforce fragmented in a way that makes union organizing extremely difficult. Universities are able to use their information asymmetry to (among other things) create an adjunct labour surplus. And they've been able to use their political power to keep adjuncts exempt from overtime (and even pay-them-for-every-hour-they-work time) regulations.
posted by clawsoon at 5:06 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
And you are not wrong either, GuyZero, but: They make part of their money because they provide value, and part of their money from taking advantage of rent-seeking and information and power asymmetries. There are few unions to re-balance the power asymmetry, and some of the stories in the links make it clear that it's easy for universities to keep their adjunct workforce fragmented in a way that makes union organizing extremely difficult. Universities are able to use their information asymmetry to (among other things) create an adjunct labour surplus. And they've been able to use their political power to keep adjuncts exempt from overtime (and even pay-them-for-every-hour-they-work time) regulations.
posted by clawsoon at 5:06 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well if I could figure out where to draw the line between value creation and rent-seeking then I'd probably win a Nobel prize. And certainly there's a feedback loop in that universities have no disincentive to crank out as many academically-oriented graduates as possible which in turn drives down the cost of adjunct lecturers. Similarly there's no disincentive to rein in the size of their administrative staff since university students have shown themselves to be remarkable price insensitive - higher education is practically a Veblen good these days.
I would say the lack of unionization among adjunct lecturers is more a result of governments moving away from making it easy for unions to form. I don't think there's any incentive under any sort of circumstances where a university would want sessional lecturers to form a union. No employer wants their employees to unionize AFAIK. I blame the universities less for it than swings in state/provincial governance to be more anti-union.
posted by GuyZero at 9:47 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
I would say the lack of unionization among adjunct lecturers is more a result of governments moving away from making it easy for unions to form. I don't think there's any incentive under any sort of circumstances where a university would want sessional lecturers to form a union. No employer wants their employees to unionize AFAIK. I blame the universities less for it than swings in state/provincial governance to be more anti-union.
posted by GuyZero at 9:47 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well if I could figure out where to draw the line between value creation and rent-seeking then I'd probably win a Nobel prize.
Aye. But even if you can't draw a line or state a dollar value, you can often look at a situation and say, "Yup, I bet there's some rent-seeking going on there."
university students have shown themselves to be remarkable price insensitive
A lot of that is because of student loans, isn't it? How much are universities involved in lobbying for more student loans? (I don't know the answer; I'm curious, because you'd think they'd have more of an interest in lobbying for my direct funding for themselves.)
I would say the lack of unionization among adjunct lecturers is more a result of governments moving away from making it easy for unions to form.
Those two factors are definitely part of it. But time and space make a difference for union organizing, too. It's easiest when the workers are all going down into the same coal mine or all taking breaks in the same teachers' lounge. It's hardest when the workers rarely or never meet. It's not insurmountable, but it's harder, and the universities (as you point out) have an interest in making it harder.
posted by clawsoon at 5:03 PM on June 6, 2016
Aye. But even if you can't draw a line or state a dollar value, you can often look at a situation and say, "Yup, I bet there's some rent-seeking going on there."
university students have shown themselves to be remarkable price insensitive
A lot of that is because of student loans, isn't it? How much are universities involved in lobbying for more student loans? (I don't know the answer; I'm curious, because you'd think they'd have more of an interest in lobbying for my direct funding for themselves.)
I would say the lack of unionization among adjunct lecturers is more a result of governments moving away from making it easy for unions to form.
Those two factors are definitely part of it. But time and space make a difference for union organizing, too. It's easiest when the workers are all going down into the same coal mine or all taking breaks in the same teachers' lounge. It's hardest when the workers rarely or never meet. It's not insurmountable, but it's harder, and the universities (as you point out) have an interest in making it harder.
posted by clawsoon at 5:03 PM on June 6, 2016
The adjunct conversation in fine arts education gets even crazier because the standard masters degree in that field only technically opens doors to teaching in university settings, but it is also a logical step in a serious artist trying to make a leap into an increasingly flooded gallery market. It is super easy to put in that time/capital investment and emerge a still struggling artist.
A former professor was one of the few to rally what would become a successful unionization at the art school I went to, but the arts education field is going to run into a crisis in the not too distant future.
posted by Tamagotchi at 6:08 PM on June 17, 2016
A former professor was one of the few to rally what would become a successful unionization at the art school I went to, but the arts education field is going to run into a crisis in the not too distant future.
posted by Tamagotchi at 6:08 PM on June 17, 2016
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The challenge of course is that because adjuncts are typically paid such a low amount they have to scramble to get classes in order to make ends meet which can result in being overcommitted in terms of instruction hours and consequentially lower quality instruction. Of course I've also seen full professors completely mail in lectures as well and had some very high quality adjuncts but the question still remains "are students actually getting what they paid for" and increasingly it seems like at least undergrads at many schools tend to be taught primarily through GTAs and adjuncts until you become an upper classman. Increasingly this is why I think more and more students should look seriously at getting their first 2 years done at a community college. Yes if you are attending an elite institution this advice probably doesn't apply but I kind of fail to see the value of paying a large sum of money to get taught by an underpaid adjunct at a four 4 year school when you can probably get a comparable experience at a fraction of the cost at a community college.
posted by vuron at 8:48 PM on May 31, 2016 [8 favorites]