Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
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Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#2The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#3So, where's the $150K per student in tuition going?
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#4Students exchanging their body for a place to stay during university years seem to be a commonplace thing today. I guess economic hardships move upwards, so it's time for university staff too.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#5How does the academic bubble in the U.S. break? Knowing quite a few career adjuncts, I have to wonder if their situation will only be getting worse.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#6Reminds me of the former Eastbloc countries where you will find scientists as janitors and living in terrible conditions. Not that people who are not scientists don't live in terrible conditions but you would never expect a maths or physics professor to be unemployable.
Even here in NL there are niche websites that pretend to be dating sites but that actually are sites where students are hooked up with 'sugar daddy's' effectively prostituting themselves to be able to finish their academic education.
This is a hot topic in the news here right now.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#7How does the academic bubble in the U.S. break? Knowing quite a few career adjuncts, I have to wonder if their situation will only be getting worse.
Reform the tenure system and place caps on university administrators pay.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#8How does the academic bubble in the U.S. break? Knowing quite a few career adjuncts, I have to wonder if their situation will only be getting worse.
I believe there's a limit:
I'm a programmer, and a PhD student's time is worth a certain amount to me -- at least, as a tutor on subjects I never got to learn but have an interest in. After all, most of the graduate students, adjuncts, etc have worked as tutors and instructors. Presumably, this is true of some fraction of other programmers. So you can support a community of some size by selling lessons -- it just requires substantially adjusting the business arrangement, eg, teaching evening advanced math classes that I can easily take 1 at a time of.
It's actually near that point -- for what I would pay for lessons, you'd only really need 10-15 students to have an okay job (def: median household income where I live). So there my be some sort of actual logistics problem we can solve with technology here. (As an off-the-cuff idea: Kickstarter an evening class; prepay with limited refunds, etc. It wouldn't cost much for adjuncts to try.)
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#9For those who have university degrees, this should be a difficult read. Next time you say to yourself, "Sure, I went to college. I know that's a privilege, but I worked hard there and made it because of my hard work and nothing else!" Remember this article.
This isn't a new phenomenon, but it's a phenomenon that's becoming more acute. Even if we ignore the adjuncts, the brilliant folks who taught us all what we know subsist on less than half of the median wage for our professions, with increasingly mediocre benefits.
These are the same folks who's amazing research work is powering our industry, often with a 10 year lead time.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#10Bernie can't come soon enough.