<p>You need to be careful about those numbers, though. You list one research university alongside 7 LACs. These are just very different animals. For one thing, a research university like the University of Chicago has a law school, a medical school, and a business school. These professional schools usually have some core full-time, tenured/tenure-track faculty, but they also tend to have significant numbers of highly respected professionals teaching part-time as adjuncts or, especially on the medical side, as non-tenured clinical faculty who are actually practicing physicians and surgeons in the university medical center who also teach some as part of their overall responsibilities. So that’s going to skew the numbers. Also, in university medical centers there may be significant numbers of full-time researchers who may or may not have “faculty” status, depending on the institution, but who may do small-numbers focused teaching at the graduate/professional level. At some institutions these researchers may have tenure, at others, not. But none of this has anything to do with who is teaching your undergraduate child–unlike at a LAC, where pretty much all the instructional faculty are responsible for teaching undergraduates.</p>
<p>The other thing that distinguishes research universities from LACs is that the research universities have graduate students in core academic disciplines. LACs generally don’t; that’s what makes them LACs. A large percentage of the graduate students do some teaching, mostly as lab instructors or discussion section leaders. They are counted in the “non-tenure track instructors” total in the IPEDS data and in the AAUP analyses of these data, which is probably what you saw.</p>
<p>Just to put the University of Chicago numbers in some perspective, a 2006 AAUP survey based on IPEDS data showed the University of Chicago at 61.7% non-tenure track. But it also showed Harvard at 76% non-tenure track, Yale at 72%, and Princeton at 59.9% (despite Princeton lacking a law school, a medical school, or a business school). So I suspect the University of Chicago is well within the norm for its peer institutions.</p>
<p>I’d also like to point out that cobrat’s point about failure has a lot of truth to it, though it seems to have been misunderstood. It’s not that the world at large places a low value on the kinds of occupations that refugees from academia might take. Rather, when you have invested the first 10 years of your adult life in academia, with dreams of staying there for the rest of your career, anything else can feel like failure or selling out. Worse, a lot of the professors you’ve studied under and come to admire have that same attitude. There is a move lately to change those attitudes, but it comes too late for those who entered academia 10+ years ago, and many of the “old guard” just aren’t listening.</p>
<p>Harvard, at least when I was there, had a position called lecturer. They didn’t have tenure, but they were full-time teachers with benefits and as far as I know, reasonable pay. An example of this was the teacher of the beginning drawing teachers, one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. He had no PhD so no tenure track for him
Just checked looks like lecturers probably get around $56,000. <a href=“The Harvard Crimson”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/10/harvard_salaries_numbers/</a></p>
<p>Pretty much untrue among those with whom I associate - maybe your problem is that you’re getting your feedback from grad students and then extrapolating that impression too widely. Believe me, the world at large does not necessarily disrespect K-12 education to this extent, and just because some people look down on “ed-school counterparts,” well, everyone looks down on somebody.</p>
<p>I just left a career in the public sector to become a high school chemistry teacher. My former colleagues in the non-academic world have been uniformly supportive. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they “admire” what I’m doing and that they would “love to do the same thing.” Most (if not all) of my associates and friends in the “real” world seem to feel the same way.</p>
<p>Now - anybody need a high school chemistry teacher?! I’m ready and employable! </p>
<p>And to add to BC’s fine post- a top ranked business school (Chicago’s for example) is going to skew the results even further. Part of what contributes to the environment will be the mixture of practitioners and theorists (i.e. the adjuncts and the researchers). So a student will learn first year’s accounting (the basics and the theory) from a professor (either tenured or tenured track) but an advanced accounting seminar on “Current issues in Valuation and Corporate Finance” may be taught by a partner at a Big 4, a former employee of FASB who now works for the SEC, etc. At a business school the presence of adjuncts is a positive and not a negative.</p>
<p>Slightly different mixture but same end result at a law school (and Chicago’s, once again, is a top tier law school.) Big law firms encourage teaching (and it can be used to satisfy the Firm’s pro bono/community service requirements), and some of the required classes at a law school are almost always taught by working lawyers and not faculty members. </p>
<p>So you can’t compare Kenyon to Chicago and come up with anything meaningful.</p>
<p>Adjuncts at my two year school are paid $1500 per 3 credit hour class. It’s also what the college pays full-time faculty who teach an overload course. The pay is terrible, but many full-time faculty have taken overloads in recent years, particularly as we went a stretch between 2007-11 without a raise. Our state legislature has just cut the higher ed budget again and I see little opportunity for any respectable increase in adjunct pay in the near future. I think it’s been this rate for about 10 years.</p>
<p>The difference between 2 and 4 year adjunct pay is ridiculous. In NJ, it’s twice as much at a 4 year state school than at a community college–teaching essentially the same course.</p>
<p>So, I know cobrat got a lot of flak for saying that going into education/corporate america was seen as a failure. Yeah, of course that’s not generally true. It would be silly seeing how many more people work in something corporate than in higher ed. The point is that those who go through the path needed to get to higher ed live in a subculture wherein that attitude is present. In most places, you don’t consider random people failures if they’re not a doctor, but if someone went through med school, and then interned/was a resident, then couldn’t find a job…they’d probably feel pretty bad about it…</p>
<p>Someone whose gotten all the way through a PhD program in a lot of fields will basically have been doing the equivalent of vocational training for that specific area of academia. Is it any surprise that in that subculture what cobrat describes might be present?</p>
<p>But from my experience—in the social sciences—that’s NOT the case. Especially as funding at many institutions has shifted away from humanities and social sciences to STEM programs, academics who have been able to make the jump into the corporate sector are often sought out as role models and mentors for graduate students…and as adjunct faculty to teach applied courses. </p>
<p>It seems to me that the article itself explains why some adjuncts will continue doing it even if the pay and conditions are bad–they’re still hoping that a tenure-track position will open for them. If they go to K-12 or business, that’s never going to happen.</p>
<p>My future brother-in-law has been looking for high school science teacher jobs for a year now. No bites. He was originally just chem and now can teach all high school sciences. Still no luck. He’s a sub with a Master’s. </p>
<p>Would unemployed-in-law law school graduates be a more relevant comparison?</p>
<p>Or just about any graduate with a pre-professional degree (at either the bachelor’s level or post-bachelor’s level) who is not able to find a job that the degree is intended to prepare one for?</p>
<p>“It seems to me that the article itself explains why some adjuncts will continue doing it even if the pay and conditions are bad–they’re still hoping that a tenure-track position will open for them.”</p>
<p>Sadly, this rarely happens, and most adjuncts figure that out early on. There is no hard evidence of this explanation that I’m aware of, but the consensus seems to be that adjuncts get increasingly “tainted” the longer they are adjuncts. It’s as if hiring committees hear an unconscious voice that says, “Obviously they’ve been on the market for a while and no one else hired them. Must be something wrong with them.” Most schools would rather take a chance on a freshly minted PhD than someone who’s been kicking around for a few years.</p>
<p>Note. It’s fruitless to join this conversation if you don’t recognize the difference between two different kinds of adjuncts. On on hand, you have experts who are active in a profession like business or law or nursing, say, who bring “real-world” experience into the classroom. On the other hand, you have folks who want a tenure-track position and simply can’t get it. These make up the majority. At a lot of urban community colleges, for example, an English department may be made up of 85% adjuncts and a handful of full-timers who’ve been there for 10 years or more.</p>
<p>My point was that it’s fruitless to compare statistics on a research university like Chicago with top ranked law, business and med schools (and public policy- another grad school which makes wonderful use of adjuncts) with the LAC’s used in the comparison which have zero professional schools and therefore, zero need for professionals who introduce real live/real world thinking into the classroom.</p>
<p>I recognize the distinction- the statistics don’t.</p>
<p>Romani - that’s odd and a little frightening, since i know we live in the same geographical area. I have had some promising leads so far from networking and my supervising teacher has passed along some info about open positions in SE MI (one that just opened up this week…)</p>
<p>PM me if you want further info for your bil.</p>
<p>A tenured faculty member at a research university can mentor perhaps 20 to 40 PhD students to PhD graduation over his/her career. This is obviously far more PhD graduates than will be needed to replace the faculty member when s/he retires.</p>
<p>Obviously, there are other tenure-track positions at LACs, community colleges, and other non-PhD-granting colleges and universities, but would that be 20 to 40 times as many as at research universities?</p>
<p>If not, then the “extra” PhDs would need to find work elsewhere:</p>
<ul>
<li>Non-academic (industry or government) – demand depends on the major, of course.</li>
<li>High school teaching – requires teaching credential.</li>
<li>Adjunct teaching.</li>
<li>Work unrelated to degree.</li>
</ul>
<p>It looks to me like there is a surplus of PhD’s. I can recall this having happened and been noted by Ivy League professors in the past, but I don’t know if it goes in cycles or whether its just been this way forever. You’d think there would be some self-correction to this, but maybe not.</p>
<p>@cobrat was speaking specifically about the thought process in academia, and he’s not wrong. With few exceptions, generally in a doctoral program the expectation is that you are going to go to do an academic position after you finish - preferably an academic position at another research-intensive institution. A teaching institution is, in your professors’ eyes, okay but not ideal. And a non-academic position is a betrayal. Teaching in K-12 is viewed as a non-academic position, and yes, it is looked down upon by doctoral professors at research institutions. Nobody’s saying that’s the way that the world at large views it, but @cobrat wasn’t referring to the world at large, just the atmosphere within most departments.</p>
<p>And while some universities are starting to make the shift towards viewing some applied research jobs as an okay alternative, at the moment they are still the exception rather than the rule. My university is actually really excellent about this - our career center has some folks who focus solely on getting PhDs into non-academic careers. A lot of our PhD alumni go on to prestigious consulting firms, hedge funds, investment banks, think tanks, and other kinds of successful and often very well-paid non-academic positions. But the career center is disconnected from the departments, and the folks who run the program joke about how you have to slink around and sneak into these events as if you were afraid someone else from your department may “catch” you being there. The professors are still very much focused on trying to get their students into academic positions, preferably professor positions at research-intensive institutions that they consider to be on par with our university. That’s considered a “success” on the professor’s part.</p>
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<p>No. It’s difficult to explain, but the culture is different in academia. If you go to HLS, none of your law professors are going to care if you use your JD to go be a highly paid consultant at Bain. Or if you get an MPA in health care admin, no one will care if you decide to go work for the foreign service instead. If you get a PhD in art history at Harvard and go to Bain to be a consultant, you’re labeled a sell-out and are made to feel a lot of guilt about it.</p>
<p>It’s also different because in PhD programs you do sustained work for many years with one or two close advisors. My advisor has been working with me for 6 years, so I feel this funny sense of obligation to please him as well as myself with my career choice (although I’m not going to let that stop me from choosing what’s best for me). You don’t get that in law or professional school, where you may not work intensively with one person and even if you do, it’s for 2-3 years.</p>
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<p>But it flies in the face of reality. I could see thinking that for maybe 3-4 years, although if you open any periodical about higher education (the Chronicle of Higher Ed; Inside Higher Ed; etc.) you can see that everyone thinks this and it’s not true. But one of the women in the article has been doing this for 20 years. Surely she can see by now that this isn’t going to happen for her.</p>