The value of a college education has been vastly inflated. People have associated a college education, often in nebulous useless subjects, with upwards social mobility but the truth is most should never have gone to college - i.e. side step the debt, headed directly for work or vocational training and got a 4 year head start in the job market. It's sad when people wash up like this, and the fault isn't theirs, rather they've just been sold a false promise. Taken together with the free speech and ideological eco-chamber issues we're seeing on campus, along with the crazy town crippling debt, my prediction is we're going to start to see a rapid devaluation in the cultural collateral of a college education. Or at least in the national ambition for a democratised universal college education for all.
Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
161–170 of 449 posts
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#162The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.
I dated someone who worked an administrative position... she would complain of coworkers who would do nothing all day. She said her job was being done by three people when only one was needed. The lack of oversight and actual work being done was alarming. Who administrates the administrators? No one.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#163The fact that the article features an English professor is unsurprising. This is a supply-side problem--liberal arts degrees are in relatively low demand, but institutions continue to graduate students at unsustainable levels. No one is telling the students that they're spending 4-12 years getting an education which is worth less than what they're paying for it. For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English…
> For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools
This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#164Earlier 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…
I thought a TA appointment was 20 hours per week?
Why would you think something as specific as that would be standardised?
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you arguing life for adjuncts is improving?
It's reasonable to ask why the title is plural - "academics turn to sex work" - while the anecdote in the article is about a single person turning to sex work, and then there is no other information about how common this is. The closest it gets to statistics is: Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness. A quarter of part-time college academic…
I think it's safe to say that there is probably more than one adjunct who is doing sex work (somewhat based on my experience of having read this type of story before in the past years). But I agree that the headline and framing of this story deserves scrutiny. I don't think it's coincidence the way that the first sentence in your excerpt ("Sex work is one...") is immediately followed by a sentence that alludes to a statistic ("A quarter of part-time college academics") that ends up being unrelated. The close juxtaposition of the sentences could easily be misinterpreted as "25% of adjuncts are doing sex work").
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
We don't even know if "don't go to college" is good advice for the long term (15+ years) in software engineering, let alone the fact that you're completely forgetting about other fields. Seems incredibly short-sighted to me.
Unless maybe you are going to a top 1% CS program, there is little need for a degree in software engineering. Even if you go to a top 1% school, it's unlikely you will be taught by anyone remotely as good as this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdAfILoJWcI
And his lectures are available for free.
If you get a degree, lots of what you learn will be outdated fast. The most important things you learn will be on the job actually making things.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#167Universities treat adjuncts like they do because they can: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc... . When adjuncts stop accepting offers, prices will rise. I'm puzzled that more liberal arts profs don't teach high school: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo....
I teach as an adjunct because I like teaching and have a real job, so it works for me. But I worry about many others, especially the ones who are thinking about going to more grad school because they don't know what else to do.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#168The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.
The admin staff is a problem but does not seem to be the main problem: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m....
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#169For 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…
If anyone thinks getting through college is "hard-work", they are fooling themselves. It's literally designed for morons to pass.
Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
#170You might be better off just throwing your college fund into bitcoin. The financial risk is about the same at this point.
Most people can go to a junior college and get a two-year degree debt-free between working a part-time job and non-loan financial aid. Transfer into an inexpensive 4-year school to complete your undergrad degree and if you are careful you can graduate with less than $5,000 of debt...maybe no debt at all depending on how much financial need you have and how valuable your skills are.
I don't think that skipping college and putting the funds you have into bitcoin is anywhere as risk-free as going to college in the scenario I outlined.