Earlier quoted context omitted.
true, the highest paid employee at most large universities are the sports coaches.
Most coaches are paid out of profits from sports, not from tuition.
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Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
51–60 of 449 posts
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#52You might be better off just throwing your college fund into bitcoin. The financial risk is about the same at this point.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#53Bernie can't come soon enough.
For Bernie to work, we have to restructure education to be more from the 1980s and 1970s. You won't have private rooms with private baths. You won't have school creating new pool and phsycial fitness megaplexes. You will have 2-4 people per room with a common shower.
I'm not saying this is wrong. I'm saying that the quality of life will have to go down. When you picture a Bernie school, you need to picture Animal House. School becomes focused on school. Anything else the students have to come up with.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#54There is only one academic who turned to sex work in this article right? Unless I missed some one else the article mentioned. This is a very specific example and paints with a broad paintbrush.
Are you arguing life for adjuncts is improving?
No, they're arguing that using a single anecdote which may not be representative. Coupled with the placement of that in the title of th article, it's a framing anecdote that's used to shock the reader into thinking the problem is more dire than it is (the situation is bad, but I claim that few academics are becoming sex workers to remain as academics).
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just the adjuncts, it is graduate students, too. I've got friends who are working on their PhDs while teaching 4-5 classes (at other locations). I considered being a TA a few years ago, but you couldn't have a second job. The stipend as a TA was $1300 a month + tuition for 40 hour weeks (may have actually been "20" hour weeks, not certain). Yeah, right. It's pretty screwed up. It's a privilege to be in highe…
If it includes room and board and some insurance plan, $1300 a month isn't bad? My brother had a something like that at his university and ended up saving most of it because you really don't have a lot else to spend it on. Sure, I wouldn't start a family on that, but it far surpasses what I lived off of right after college. EDIT: It looks like the article was about people late in their careers. I was assuming that ad…
It doesn't include room and board. It may include health insurance but you're going to pay your monthly fees out of the stipend.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#56For 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…
I'm a former academic. But I made a choice that all these folks can also make if they choose; I left. There are tradeoffs to any career path, and the huge glut of folks attempting to get a job in academia (even these bad adjunct jobs) are a great indication that the tradeoffs aren't particularly bad.
Similarly, the professors you describe have low wages because their compensation takes other forms (freedom and security). To understand this, ask an insurance company for the price of an annuity with payout equal to a tenured professor's wage + benefits. Tenure isn't cheap.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#57The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.
It seems like there should be a market for low overhead small schools with high paid teaching staff.
They were looking at doing this at my last job (small private university).
We already outsourced custodial and food service. Do student accounts and financial aid really define us as a university? Are they part of our core competency? Do we do them particularly well relative to competitors?
Of course not. So why not outsource them?
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just the adjuncts, it is graduate students, too. I've got friends who are working on their PhDs while teaching 4-5 classes (at other locations). I considered being a TA a few years ago, but you couldn't have a second job. The stipend as a TA was $1300 a month + tuition for 40 hour weeks (may have actually been "20" hour weeks, not certain). Yeah, right. It's pretty screwed up. It's a privilege to be in highe…
If it includes room and board and some insurance plan, $1300 a month isn't bad? My brother had a something like that at his university and ended up saving most of it because you really don't have a lot else to spend it on. Sure, I wouldn't start a family on that, but it far surpasses what I lived off of right after college. EDIT: It looks like the article was about people late in their careers. I was assuming that ad…
Graduate stipends almost never include room and board, as far as I know. This may be different if you're in a high-rent area (UCLA, Stanford, NYU, etc), but in general, your rent comes out of that $1300.
They do currently include decent health insurance, at least. No dental/vision, obviously.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reform the tenure system and place caps on university administrators pay.
Tenure's not the problem, the problem is that in their academic career, a PHD will produce X new PHDs. Where X is substantially greater than 1. Until this is fixed, it doesn't matter if academic jobs are for life, or are contracts that get renewed (or not) every 8 hours. This pyramid scheme was fine while demand for PHDs was increasing (By industry, and growth of academia), but now its really not (Industry doesn't wa…
Interesting to note grad students. My university found they could increase income by taking in more international students, but when those same students wanted paid GTA jobs, they had to find a way to pay for it. So they did what all universities do: They made the undergraduates pay for it, by requiring those students take paid "labs" for classes that never before had labs, for no course credit.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
true, the highest paid employee at most large universities are the sports coaches.
Most coaches are paid out of profits from sports, not from tuition.
Most Athletics programs do not return a profit, so this is demonstrably false.
Source from ncaa: http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...