Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the Ivys take around 65-70 percent, and a few places (admittedly with very specialised facilities) are over 100%--spend a dollar on research, spend another (edit: had written two) on admin.
To be clear, a 60%-70% overhead rate implies that the university is taking 37-42% of the money (for each dollar spent, another 0.60-0.70 goes to university). In addition, other expenses like tuition and equipment have no overhead taken out.
Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
131–140 of 449 posts
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#132There 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.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#133The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.
I wonder what percentage of the admin is dedicated to chasing money. While I was working as an undergrad assistant the grant writing process was insane and I rarely saw the professor overseeing research. He was walled off in his office writing grant proposals. I learned that for the budget of most research projects, 50% was administration. That is 50% wasn't for researchers, the lab, labor, or equipment. Part of the…
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#134For 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…
University of California salaries are shared publicly. I haven't actually crunched the numbers but it seems like an average salary is around 150k for professors in research based fields. That's well over half of the median salary in almost any profession.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#135In particular:
"SUMMERS: Not enough people are innovating enough in higher education. The place to start is, General Electric looks nothing like it looked in 1975. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford look a lot like they looked in 1975. They’re about the same size to within a factor of two, they’re about the same number of buildings, they operate on about the same calendar, they have many of the same people or some number of the same people in significant positions. The main thing to say is that, for something that’s all about ideas and for something that’s all about young people, the pace of innovation in higher education is stunningly slow. We’re still on a system where the break is in the summer. The reason we’re on that system is that when everybody went to pick the plants, that was the natural way to organize school, and it’s still going that way. The potential action in higher education is probably heavily through distance learning and artificial intelligence in learning technologies of various kinds because, if you think about it, the unique capacity that online education has is that, on the one hand, they’re huge economies of scale. Once the lecture’s filmed, 100,000 people can watch it at the same cost as 100 people watching it."
Not a favorable trend for the subjects of this article.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#136For 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…
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…
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#137http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=ellen+Pe...
For comparison's sake, here are what physical education teachers in Palo Alto Unified make:
http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-d...
Here's San Jose Unified teachers (they don't seem to have P.E. in the job titles):
http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-d...
Not singling out P.E. teachers or K-12 in general -- look up any Palo Alto area job type (police, technicians, etc), and they're all in the same range. And living in this area myself, I completely believe that scale of salary and benefits is needed if you want employees who can live within 50 miles of Palo Alto.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I very strongly doubt that. The market for a piece of paper is way too strong. That's why this stuff is expensive. Everyone can do this stuff, so the surest (and most advertised) way to get a leg up in the economy is by getting a piece of paper. That effect only seems to be growing. That said, certainly do agree with you in principle.
"The market for a piece of paper is way too strong." Penguin, PwC and EY have already dropped university degrees as a requirement. "The move comes just months after accountancy firm Ernst & Young, one of Britain’s biggest graduate recruiters , made a similar announcement, saying in August that it would no longer consider degree or A-level results when assessing potential employees" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2…
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
In parts of Europe there the expression: "That's Texas." It roughly means "That's crazy." but with a 'Murica flavor to it. Lately, I've been finding myself frequently thinking: "That's Texas." Let me get this straight. Take a course load of 4 double semester courses per year with 200 hours of class time total in the given year. Let's double it to 400 hours just to be safe to include exam marking and office hours. A s…
> How is the market so broken? Student debt. Look at the housing market: in the 70s you could buy a house for much less because houses cost less because people didn't have more money to overpay. With a thirty year explosion of the mortgage industry and the idea that anyone should qualify to own a home, suddenly consumers had extra money to outbid people on buying houses. This broadly increased property prices with no…
That only works in industries like software etc. If one wants to be a lawyer, doctor etc they have no choice but to go to college, right? Some American students are going abroad (Germany etc), that could be a short term option.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#140> an adjunct professor of Romance languages > precarious academic jobs > a teacher of English composition > teaches history > teaching English composition and critical thinking > began teaching English composition > published a poem > with one novel under her belt, is working on a second I see a pattern. I think those jobs are not much in demand.
> Critical Thinking
> English composition
> poem
> history
The good things in life are unpaid