The decline in universities here in Australia is on a similar track. Salaries are okay, but many universities are running structural deficits. I spend my time telling students *not* to get a job as an academic.
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Michael Roberts is categorically not building machetebots@vivtek.com
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My wife has a PhD in theoretical physics. She is *scary* good at math. She sometimes manages to get adjunct teaching work, and that's the lifetime limit to her ROI.
The pandemic was good - she had employment teaching remotely. The university figured since she was "only" teaching remotely,
54k is criminal
I agree politicians don't want an educated populace. I've been saying that for years. They all treat education as something they begrudgingly support but in action constantly undercut
As someone who was in a PhD program a little over a decade ago, I was kind of seeing inklings of this. It has definitely gotten so much worse.
Now I teach high school. The abandonment of public education has trickled up.
Shy of guillotines, what is the solution?
I agree with everything but would add the importance of endlessly growing endowments.
We don’t serve students in academia, we serve a pile of money that must always grow and grow. Even in a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic it can not be touched.
I’m in a STEM department at a flagship university, and the C-suite is cutting our budget, too. The money goes to debt service on previous bad deals, adventures in real estate, a losing football team, union-busting, legal settlements, and executive compensation
It wasn’t until I started TAing that I started to see the trends. Multimillion dollar athletics while some of the rooms I teach in are holdovers from the 50s. Our History dept bldg was over a 100 years old, torn down and we were moved to an office bldg off campus.
As a retired HS teacher, I can verify that every word is true! Sadly the MAGAs standing behind TFG applauding the destruction of public education (which I believe started in earnest w/Reagan) will be the ones who will be most affected by it and most pissed off about it.
Useful idiots
In NY, I watched Pataki spend his entire term gutting SUNY. As a 20 yo, I could see the downward spiral, and remember people telling me I was being hysterical
In 20+ years since, I've watched my school ramp up fundraising and alum donations to cover the gap, and I'd rather that I wasn't vindicated
I earned my PhD overseas before moving back to the States. It took about three years adjuncting to realize I had no interest whatsoever in remaining an academic.
I'm sure there are people that will stop reading when they see the writer's insistence on teaching remotely, which is of course totally not the point. Thanks for posting.
I remember reading/writing articles 20+ years ago about how reduced state funding directly led to larger student tuition. It just keeps escalating -- let everyone else shoulder the weight.
My son is going to college to get a soul-less finance degree to become an oligarch, to him & much of society this is just a step to the big money
I'm hoping my daughter will attend university because she loves learning
Well that was terrifying. It tracks with what I see from my professor/lecturer friends, though. I recently heard the salary of a friend at a fancy private university and my jaw dropped--it was less than my starting salary in software almost 20 years ago.
This shouldn’t be as much if a shock as the headline implies. Lots of us have quit tenured prof jobs because there are more important priorities than the status and supposed job security of a tenured faculty position.
I have a kid in college and he was going to go straight through for his masters and then his college suspended the program in his major because they can't get the teachers. (It's Electrical and Computer Engineering....not exactly obscure.)
“Everyone thinks we have summers off. No, that's not how it works. We don't get paid during the summer.”
The infuriating thing is when my colleagues hear me say we don’t get paid for summer, they always respond that we get pay checks in summer. As if spreading out a 9 mo salary is the same thing.
