<p>As for dorms, there are some students at some schools with required first year housing where parents pay for the dorm room as required and the kid lives elsewhere in far more sumptuous quarters. Horrifying to many of us, but, yes, it is happning. It happened with the cafeterias where parents were paying, but kids would not eat there forfeiting the meal payments, and now the rooms.</p>
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<p>True for the buildings when not donated bu generous donors. That SHOULD be true for a strong teaching faculty, if the faculty were in fact dedicated to … teaching. The current model of protecting tenured fat cats and let an army of adjuncts and, even worse, an army of indentured slaves aka GSI or TA do the heavy work is simply untenable. Just as the obvious focus on publishing and spending most of the time on research, if not on generous sabbaticals. </p>
<p>In the end, everything should be measured properly. In some cases, an adjunct position that requires 45 to 50 hours of teaching plus a bit of grading and supervision might be a good position for someone who can earn an income outside the school. When an adjunct has to make his or her entire living from a collection of small course assignments, it gets worse. The real question is how much should a reasonable wage be for each course. Is it 1,500 or is it 10,500? Should the economics not be driven by the tuition paid by the students? How much income does a class with 30 students generate for the same 45 hours? </p>
<p>All in all, the biggest problem remains the final objective of the aspiring teachers. It used to be to put up with years of sacrifice to land the plum job that will allow for the leisure life enjoyed by the tenured divas. It no longer works, and it SHOULD NOT work anymore. And because the basic problem is that the cost of maintaining the deadwood is simply too high a burden. Just as the burden of maintaining a bunch of extorted benefits in the public sector. </p>
<p>In the end, the money comes from the working people, even if indirectly through government subsidies or donors’ largesse. There is no free money, and the natural limit of paying for education via property taxes in the K-12 and via savings and income in the tertiary education has long be passed. </p>
<p>The issue is not finding more money; it is to force the educators to realize that their cost per educated capita has lost most of the correlation to value and outcome. Cutting the fat and the deadwood and forcing educators to spend more time in the classroom should be the agenda. And not the protection of a lifestyle that is no longer affordable.</p>
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<p>I’d add that the entire system would benefit from some courageous development people who might encourage those “generous donors” to consider endowing faculty chairs rather than more buildings.</p>
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<p>I have to tell you, I’ve worked in nonprofit development for many years, and there is nothing more difficult to raise money for than endowment funds. There are exceptions, of course, but people like to attach their names to things with wide visibility, like buildings. Big endowment gifts tend to come in the form of bequests. Two very different animals that require vastly different approaches. Donors who can do both are in very rarified company!</p>
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<p>I’ve worked for a few independent research institutes and among the perks used to lure top-flight faculty away from major research universities is the “freedom from the burden of teaching classes.” The horrors!</p>
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<p>The blind and deaf endowment of faculty is exactly what brought us where we are. The generous donors might actually consider forcing the schools to dispense the largesse in terms of hours taught and time spent with undergraduates. </p>
<p>The people at the pinnacle of our education system are NOT suffering. Far from it, as their representatives continue to extract plenty of flesh from the schools … they tend to control. The same cannot be said for the people at the bottom of the food chain, and especially for the people who happen to expect more from their educators.</p>
<p>Endowed faculty and tenure are archaic monsters that should be led to pasture. And they surely are no part of any solution.</p>
<p>I took a class online at a fairly well-known university last year. The professor was apparently either an almost or a new PhD. She omitted a few pages from a short story we were studying and it took her more than a week to get back to me, and she never managed to supply the missing pages (and we had an essay due for this story.</p>
<p>Her excuse, later, was that she was an adjunct, underpaid, and so she had to teach 70 students to get by financially. She confessed to being stressed and overstretched (the appropriateness of these comments made to a student is another question). Her teaching was the most minimal I have ever seen. Once a week, she would dip into the online course, make a few comments, and then disappear.</p>
<p>Was she one of the victims of academic serfdom, and I should blame the university? Or did the position of adjunct attract her as what she thought might be an easy stepping stone but teaching ended up being too much on top of her “real” work, in which case, should I blame her?</p>
<p>I paid hard-earned money for this class, and was shocked at the low quality of the teaching by this adjunct. I read the books and maintained whatever quality of writing I would have done anyway, but on the discussion board, I felt more like the teacher, to be honest.</p>
<p>@xiggi, you have to consider that many of the “tenured fat cats” you are talking about could actually be making a lot more money if they took corporate jobs. I’m curious what you would consider to be a “fat cat” salary for a research University professor whose job is not just to teach undergraduates but also graduate students and also to participate in managing the operation of the University (eg. recruiting, interviewing, and hiring new faculty). In some fields, they are also expected to compete for large research grants, discover new things, oversee a laboratory, perhaps get patents, in others, to write books, some of which brings in huge amounts of money to the University and pays for many facilities, and all of which bring prestige to the University and attract students and more top faculty. </p>
<p>Yet if you look at small colleges, where the faculty have a much heavier teaching load, I’m thinking 3 courses per semester, and where much less of the aforementioned activities are expected of the faculty, the cost to students isn’t much different. That might be maybe 12 contact hours per week, as compared with more like 20 per week for a high school teacher. But consider that the college professor may be creating their own original teaching material and making up their own exams, compared with the high school teacher who can probably rely much more heavily on canned material from the educational company which supplied their text. Also, generally information is delivered at a much faster pace in college than in high school, so the total amount of material being prepared may not be as different as it might seem. And the college prof always needs to keep up with developments in their fields, not just wait for a new edition of the text to be put out by the companies.</p>
<p>Demand for luxe dorms outstrips supply.</p>
<p>[Out</a> with old UW dorm, in with the new, plus private bathrooms | Local News | The Seattle Times](<a href=“http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2022511257_residencehallsxml.html]Out”>http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2022511257_residencehallsxml.html)</p>
<p>Um people, as fascinating as this discussion is, there is something called a “Labor Market”. It helps explain why nursery school teachers make less money than dermatologists among other useful exercises, or why people who drive school buses make less than airline pilots. (although the gap is closing).</p>
<p>Yes, there are distortions in the marketplace (which can explain why teachers in NYC make more money than in neighboring cities-- a powerful union can help disrupt the natural ebb and flow of a market). But in general- if there were not qualified people who were willing to take a job, either an employer would figure out a substitute for that employee, or raise the salary.</p>
<p>This market also explains why there is a wide distribution of salaries even among adjuncts. A top tier law school will employ adjuncts. They teach many of the practical, court room skills which the faculty either don’t know or don’t want to teach and those adjuncts will typically make significantly more than an adjunct who is teaching a section of first year French to undergrads. That’s not because there is anything magical about legal adjuncts vs. French adjuncts. It’s because if you offered a partner at a law firm the job of an adjunct at a law school for the same salary as you are paying your French adjuncts, the job would remain empty for a very long time.</p>
<p>Now as a law school, you could find a very cheap lawyer to teach that class for sure. But your students don’t go to Top Tier Law School and pay Top Tier tuition to have some third year immigration attorney or a cheap lawyer who does document review by the hour to teach. So you need a TOP TIER lawyer to teach those classes, and in order to make it economically viable for the instructors you need, you have to offer more money.</p>
<p>That’s why it’s a market. Supply and Demand.</p>
<p>You could argue (and for sure, I’d agree in part) that universities have been complicit in creating this oversupply of PhD’s, which has helped drive down the cost of adjunct instruction. And economically speaking, it’s surely been in their best interests to do so. But I would also look at the very long line of young people who are hell bent to get a PhD- despite ample evidence suggesting that THEY WILL NEVER GET A JOB IN THEIR FIELD, and also suggest that young people, their parents, and society have also been drinking some collective Kool Aid.</p>
<p>If colleges turned the adjunct jobs into full time positions, there will be a lot of totally unemployed adjuncts as each full time position will cannibalize at least two, or three other courseloads. Not sure how that would go over.</p>
<p>I ve seen bad profs all over the place from the world renowned researchers to the bad attitude adjunct. And great ones as well. The guy who taught my son a few summers ago was absolutely top notch. Loved teaching, and one course a term was all he could manage with his full time job that was what paid the bills and paid more than most full time profs would make. He was an example of doing and teaching. Friends of mine spent their mom years teaching as adjunct and many of the say that kept them in the job market and they were able to ease back in with less trouble as they had that on their resumes. Some of them did find full time teaching jobs at colleges.</p>
<p>Where I sat on a board, the symphony musicians all tended to be adjuncts and they were highly sought for classes. One had to audition for master classes with them. There were definitely two tracks of adjuncts there and each fiercely wanted to hold onto those part time positions, Many were k-12 teachers or private teachers full time and they did the adjunct work to bring lustre to their resume and credentials. I know several who were offered full time university positions and turned them down. What they made in the public schools with all of their tenure and from private students could not be made up in a full time professor position in a music dept of that college. The adjunct position was all they wanted. </p>
<p>So there are a lot of issues in this situation… Where there is overuse and abuse, it should be addressed, IMO, but to throw out the whole system makes no sense to me.</p>
<p>Supply and demand is one principle, but the idea that a person should be given fair compensation for work performed is another. Teenagers who want a babysitting job are a dime a dozen, but that doesn’t mean it is OK to actually pay them ten cents for an evening’s work. That’s why we have minimum wage laws that apply to most jobs more serious than a babysitting gig.</p>
<p>Adjunct jobs may not be falling afoul of minimum wage laws, but I think are often still incommensurate with the level of education and expertise required and the amount of time necessary to do the job well, not to mention with the amount that the university is making off of the course.</p>
<p>Teenager who want a baby sitting job are not a dime a dozen around here. We pay prime prices for child care. Yet there are places where they are paid little or nothing to do such work. It is a supply and demand model. So it is with many jobs. </p>
<p>Where my brother lives, baby sitters, nannies, get more than a lot of adjunct professors. Supply and demand!</p>
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<p>Back in the day, adjuncts taught “night school.” But now, how can a school even pretend that their adjuncts have a different primary source of income if they are teaching in the middle of the day, 5 days a week? </p>
<p>My sister is an adjunct, teaches composition (so spends a LOT of time reading/grading), definitely makes less than minium wage and receives food stamps. Yes, a person with a masters degree who works full time but gets paid for teaching 3 courses a week receives so little compensation that she qualifies for food stamps.</p>
<p>It is indeed horrible to have a masters degree, to be working, and to be on food stamps.</p>
<p>But my point was that if folks like Missypie’s sister stopped teaching as an adjunct (and for the sake of argument, got a job as an English teacher at a private HS) she would not be eligible for food stamps. Moreover, if everyone who was qualified to teach composition at this college stopped taking adjunct jobs for starvation wages… the salary scale for adjuncts would quickly rise.</p>
<p>You can’t just look at the salary in a market. The supply of labor is the other critical factor. Why WOULD someone with a Master’s degree be working full time and be eligible for food stamps???</p>
<p>Someone with experience in composition, teaching at the college level, could get a job editing technical publications, writing press releases for a PR firm, etc. All of which pay more than adjuncting.</p>
<p>So there is clearly something going on- the appeal of having a college on your resume as an employer-- which is paying some sort of psychological premium for the folks who, all things being equal, could be making much more money working elsewhere. Or, the job pays much less than the adjunct could earn elsewhere, but the hours means that he or she doesn’t have to pay for childcare (which raises the imputed wage of adjuncting.) Or, the job doesn’t require working in the summer which is “worth” money. Etc.</p>
<p>When someone works in a garment factory in Pakistan for 8 cents an hour, I am ready to believe that there is exploitation going on, since the other employment options (likely the sex trade or its ilk) either pay even less or have actual danger associated with them. The employee literally has no other options. When I hear about a highly educated person who is working for less than minimum wage in the US, I wonder why that person doesn’t simply opt for a different employment arrangement. Surely that person knows what they are guaranteed under the law; there is no compulsion associated with teaching at a university, nobody is going to burn their house down if they don’t agree to teach. So again- a market involves both the need on the employers side (the job) and the willing supply of labor at a certain price where the market clears.</p>
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<p>We live in an economy where underemployment versus unemployment has become the norm for a certain class of well-educated youngsters. Why would there be a difference between someone who teaches a couple of course and the next recent graduate (or not so recent) who is applying at non-profit organizations or wants to work in the media or the arts? And how does the “forced” internships fit in your equation of minimum wages? </p>
<p>For what is worth, if there is one argument I will not buy is that perennial claim of educators not making minimum wages. It takes 100 hours to get to 725 dollars at minimum wages. I do not buy because I happen to think that the claims of spending enormous hours in grading and preparations are pure figmentx of one’s vivid imagination, and that it is a result of thinking that repeating it enough makes it magically come true. They have no clue what working 50 hours in a factory means and a very loose concept of what working 12 hours straight really feels like. </p>
<p>I have enough friends and family who happen to make a living as educators to know what the demands are on their time, and how much they can “contribute” to discussions on Facebook or on social media and how much time off they get during the three sacred Easter, Summer, and Christmas holidays. </p>
<p>A sure way to demonstrate how wrong someone like me could be is simple. Schools should NOT expect or demand that ANY grading or preparation be done outside the work environment and that no “dinner” disturbance takes place at home. Schools should pay every minute worked. No less and … no more! </p>
<p>What are the chances that the unions or the teachers might accept such simple proposal? How about between zero and nil!</p>
<p>Professional athletes often have no college education (or have not graduated from college) and can out-earn a pediatrician (four years in college, four years in med school, internship, residency, etc.) by many, many multiples. So arguments that say, “Oh adjuncts have so many years of education and they are not being paid commensurate with that education” is again- to ignore the reality of how a market operates. Whatever dude who helps his team win the Superbowl is NOT being compensated for all those years of higher education he did or did not participate in!</p>
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<p>That is not an argument I am buying. It also appears when people are trying to justify the benefits given to officers in the armed forces. Oh yes, they could make more money outside the forces, and usually by joining companies and advisors that milk the government. A racket. </p>
<p>The fat cats have rarely to leave their sinecures to pursue the lure of corporate compensation. They can and do take the time off to consult all the while maintaining their academic perks. </p>
<p>As far as the research versus teaching, perhaps one model could start to separate the two functions and let both operate their own set of books. And along the way, perhaps, stop the charade about the fat cats caring to teach undergraduates. Let them chase the grants, write their books, and make sure they balance their own books. The other side could worry about paying their deserving teachers a bit better. </p>
<p>Research universities operate one the crassest employment models ever designed.</p>
<p>I think ther should be a lot of attention put on the adjunct figures at a school. They should affect the ratings, and they should be something that the media can make an issue for parents and students to ask about. Some well placed articles on the drawbacks of adjuncts might make this a real issue for colleges competing for the students. Those schools that are using adjuntcts in a positive way have to make that case. </p>
<p>The cost of college rising as been due to a number of reasosn. Yes, the buildig but also the size of the administration. This is not just in colleges but in schools. When i went to elementary school, there was a principal, the teachers, the librarian, the school nurse, the school secretary, and the list of any others was quite small. When one goes to my local public elementary school, I think there are more support personelle than there are teachers, or close to it. Not to mention a whole building full of admiinstrators at the district level. At colleges, it’s even worse. My dear friend who is in a non teaching, non research, purely administrative position at a major univerisy tells me that the infrastructure is just enormous, more than I can imagine. And I can imagine pretty big. More than she had imagined. That’s scary to me that the funds are being so diverted.</p>
<p>As for adjuncts, what about cutting the number down to just a few swing personelle, and coveted “celebrities” and other part timers who bring panache to the school? Would this really be supported? Or would the screams of pain be even louder and more agonizing? </p>
<p>The person working as an adjunct, under paid with too few hours to make a go of it, after a period of time, may well be one that cannot find anything better. That was the case of the adjunct that made the news and a lot of brougha at Duquesne when she died. The sad truth was that she long was unable to find other work and so clung to the one job she had and that the college did not cut her off a long time ago, was the shame. They could have easily replaced her with someone more able. I think that she was just there too long to let go, not incompetent enough to fire, not good enough to hire at full time. </p>
<p>As for the time grading papers, Xiggi, I’m not a teacher. Have no dog in this fight, but I have worked in that capacity for short time periods when I had to read many, many papers, correct many math problems with the emphasis on the work. To do it right, and yes, I did do it right, it took me a lot of time. I can tell you that too many papers written by kids go uncorrected because to do it properly is alot of work. My idea of one of the jobs of hell by the way. I did it for 8 weeks a few summers, once for sub par high school students and another for a bunch of middle school boys, and it sure took any desire to be a teacher out of me. My kids did learn because I was right on top of them insisting on rewrites and corrections and a “breakfast club” for those who weren’t getting it, and it just about did me in. Being on top of my own kids that way was no pleasure either, and I can tell you that very few teachers correct and insist on redos and recorrect in a way that I define as teaching. To do that takes a lot of time. I did it, and I’m pretty quick at these things Yeah, I sure did make a lot less than minimum wage when I did it right and I was being paid a primo rate for the classroom time.</p>
<p>I get that adjuncts aren’t entitled to be making the big bucks just because they have fancy degrees. I do think that if a university doesn’t value the people it has teaching core academic classes enough to pay them a decent salary - especially when they often seem to be able to find the money for everything but academics - there’s a real problem. CCs sometimes pay their adjuncts less than $2000 a course. Does that really seem like fair compensation for teaching a course to you? Sure, you could probably find someone desperate enough to do it for 500 bucks and a lottery ticket, but that doesn’t mean that would be right.</p>
<p>Again, I agree that adjuncts bear part of the blame. I have no intention of doing it myself for more than a year before cutting my losses and teaching high school. But that doesn’t mean it is acceptable for universities to take advantage of these people, especially given that the people paying adjuncts paltry salaries are the same people who have made the job situation so dire by admitting too many students to PhD programs and cutting off tenure lines.</p>
<p>I’m not at all defending how the Universities pay or treat their non-tenure track faculty, but many of xiggi’s assertions are just plain wrong. If the reason for the cost of higher education is the research mission of research universities then undergraduate-only colleges would be far more affordable. And we know they’re not.</p>