When tenure never comes • Hacker News Board

Re: When tenure never comes

#91

Post by jerryhuang100 » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 1:23 AM UTC

quantumhobbit wrote: post #77

jerryhuang100 wrote: post #66

It's interesting to see this story on the front page at the same time with another one titled "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated" . It's easy to solve both problems (killing two birds with one stone?) by implementing protocols of purging scientists with track records of non-repeatable results from "personal opinions" and fraudulent scholars gaming publishing systems, including titles…

And while you're at it, hire some of those underemployed post-docs to reproduce new results full time.

I concur this with a proposition of a system named as repeatability evaluation and digital tracking, or r.e.d.d.i.t., with the crowd-sourcing efforts.

Re: When tenure never comes

#92

Post by brianwawok » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 1:23 AM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #53

throw_away_777 wrote: post #9

Every student considering going to graduate school should read this article. Professors are very misinformed about how likely someone is to get tenure (most of them got it > 20 years ago, in a much better academic job market). This misinformation trickles down to students. The simple fact is that right now the average professor is graduating more than 10 phd students, only 1 of which can become a tenured professor at…

I heard a professor with tenure encourage my friend to try to get PhD by saying things like "Find an out of the way small college, get tenure, once you get it you don't have to do anything, you'll always have a job, you'll have time to travel, go to the pool do whatever you want". In a way that mirrored what that professor was doing -- teaching stuff that was last relevant in mid 80's, doing absolutely the minimum re…

Oh tenure. I get why it existed but it also seems so easy to abuse.

I think most of my great profs did not have tenure. Maybe 1 or 2 did.

Re: When tenure never comes

#93

Post by twblalock » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

quantumhobbit wrote: post #75

pmiller2 wrote: post #19

I consider myself fortunate that I realized most of what was talked about in this article was true while I was about halfway through grad school. The fundamental realization that given the size of my classes, where my peers were competition for any academic job, combined with the fact that I would literally have to wait for someone to die before I could get one of those jobs, was enough to knock me right off of the a…

Me too. Sort of. I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it. The result was two years of depression and anxiety before I got everything straight and quit. I don't know if it was wasted time or not. It was a long time to not be in the workforce, but I learned a lot of skills while working on what turned out to be dead end research projects. I have a job now that requires merely a fraction of t…

> I think I realized this subconsciously before I was conscious of it.

This is grad school in a nutshell, in a lot of fields. I've seen three common responses to this cognitive dissonance:

1. Deny the brutal reality of the job market.

2. "But I couldn't ever be happy doing anything else!"

3. Leave.

One of the strangest things about my grad school experience was watching very intelligent people spend years of their lives, and sometimes borrowing money they could never pay back, to pursue a degree even though deep down, they understood that it was a really bad idea. The rationalizations they came up with were pretty transparent to anyone who wasn't also in the grad school bubble.

I suppose I sound harsh, but when people ask me if they should go to grad school in the field I did, my answer is always "not unless you are already independently wealthy and never need to work again."

Re: When tenure never comes

#94

Post by yeukhon » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 2:02 AM UTC

cpitman wrote: post #78

yeukhon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The market is very narrow for academia. I live in NYC. there are a handful of universes and colleges. If the large institutions are not hiring, you are left with the small fish normally just looking for teachers not professors. Also, to grow your career a healthy environment is collaboration. If you end up being a Professor at a small pond, your bet is external collaboration. If you don't like the small ponds, y…

> Should there be a policy to force retirement? Is it fair? No, artificially creating jobs does not seem like the solution. We should be requiring all schools, for all degrees, publish relevant employment figures for that degree. And for doctorates, that should mean giving percentages that have tenure after X years and the percentage employed in jobs that required their doctorate. Informing students lets them make th…

I agree we should publish the figure. But IMO this info is quite intuitive even without one. The market is small.

Re: When tenure never comes

#95

Post by mrb » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 2:08 AM UTC

Something doesn't add up. University education costs have been increasing over at least the last one or two decades. But universities keep reducing costs by hiring adjunct, sessional, or contract faculty who are presumably less well paid than full-time professors. So where is the universities' money going to? Are they losing it by mismanaging their endowment funds? Are they spending more in other areas?

Re: When tenure never comes

#96

Post by mbreese » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 2:15 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #95

Something doesn't add up. University education costs have been increasing over at least the last one or two decades. But universities keep reducing costs by hiring adjunct, sessional, or contract faculty who are presumably less well paid than full-time professors. So where is the universities' money going to? Are they losing it by mismanaging their endowment funds? Are they spending more in other areas?

For public (state-funded) universities, they receive a large percentage of their operating budget not from tuition or endowments, but directly from the state. In many cases, over the past 10+ years, this direct support has been slashed. So, for these institutions, even as tuition has been increasing, their total budget was likely dropping. Tuition hasn't been able to keep up with the loss of state funding, so the universities try to make the numbers work in a variety of ways... one of which is to limit the number of professors.

Re: When tenure never comes

#97

Post by adamweld » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 2:16 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #95

Something doesn't add up. University education costs have been increasing over at least the last one or two decades. But universities keep reducing costs by hiring adjunct, sessional, or contract faculty who are presumably less well paid than full-time professors. So where is the universities' money going to? Are they losing it by mismanaging their endowment funds? Are they spending more in other areas?

They use it to pay administrators. My university has one admin for every two students and they make $150k on average...

Re: When tenure never comes

#98

Post by protomyth » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 2:36 AM UTC

dharmon wrote: post #60

eximius wrote: post #51

Many people have pointed to an overpopulation being the root cause for this, but I believe that ignores the increasingly inflating administrative staff at universities. That is, it is also a budget problem. The budget for the increase in professor staff is being diverted into additional administrative positions that do... something, apparently. I'm not convinced that the administrative bloat is worth a fraction of wh…

You'd be appalled at how much overhead universities take out of research grants (from NSF, DARPA, NIH, etc.) to maintain these administrations (along with legitimate uses, like paying utility bills). 40-50% is not uncommon.

How in the heck do they get away with that? Each grant we have has an indirect rate that you cannot exceed and its not 40-50%.

Re: When tenure never comes

#99

Post by gravypod » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 2:47 AM UTC

jccalhoun wrote: post #89

gravypod wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was a job in research and development? I know people in private companies that do this. If your work is so crazy that it is completely inexplicable to another person and you cannot articulate it's value, then how are you going to find people to help you? This seems like a really really uncommon situation. In my college, there are professors who are in a nontenured position who do this sort of work. The…

I'm in the humanities and at least in my situation (and that of the people I know who are in similar situations) is that I have no time to do research. I'm paid to teach 5 classes a semester. Last semester I had 5 classes with 3 different topics, one I had never taught before, 3 classes with 24 students each, one with 32, and a lecture with 70. After the first couple weeks of the semester I got zero writing done. So…

I think the problem is not being solved by the existence of tenure. It's masking the problem.

Shouldn't everyone be hired with the intention that they do research in their field?

It's not like universities don't have the money to have you teach 4 classes a semester and give you teacher assistants.

The profit margins have room for expenses like this.

I think my big issue is that I'm on the brunt of what happens when tenure gets to run wild.

I'd also love it if you could email me some information about your research, I'd like to understand what topics there are available for study in the humanities realm.

Re: When tenure never comes

#100

Post by twblalock » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 2:52 AM UTC

yeukhon wrote: post #46

throw_away_777 wrote: post #9

Every student considering going to graduate school should read this article. Professors are very misinformed about how likely someone is to get tenure (most of them got it > 20 years ago, in a much better academic job market). This misinformation trickles down to students. The simple fact is that right now the average professor is graduating more than 10 phd students, only 1 of which can become a tenured professor at…

Yes. The market is very narrow for academia. I live in NYC. there are a handful of universes and colleges. If the large institutions are not hiring, you are left with the small fish normally just looking for teachers not professors. Also, to grow your career a healthy environment is collaboration. If you end up being a Professor at a small pond, your bet is external collaboration. If you don't like the small ponds, y…

Many universities did have forced retirement policies for professors above a certain age. I don't think those policies are common anymore. I'm not sure how much they would help anyway. A few more jobs would open up, but not nearly enough. It would be a drop in the bucket.

The bottom line is that there are way too many graduates for the size of the academic job market, and even if the number of newly minted PhDs dropped by half, there would still be too many. In some fields, the number of new PhDs could drop nearly to zero before it made sense to get one.