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Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

theguardian.com

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Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#201

Post by sigstoat »

vijayr wrote: post #139
dave_sullivan wrote: post #96

Earlier 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…

I think "Don't go to college" is the best advice today. 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.

considering the state of the legal job market, going to law school is its own brand of crazy, and certainly no ticket to wealth, as conventional wisdom would have it.

and getting into medical school is basically luck of the draw; there are far more overqualified applicants than necessary. thinning that herd a bit isn't going to hurt.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#202

Post by rayiner »

If someone had written an article about struggling actors turning to sex work and sleeping in cars, nobody would blink an eye. Acting pays little for the same reason being an academic pays little. Lots of people want to do it, but there is limited demand, hence only the really exceptional folks make any money doing it.

Obviously, people shouldn't need to sleep in cars. But the answer to that is a basic income. It's not treating a specific group of people specially just because they have college degrees and are more relatable to the elite than folks who work at Wal-Mart.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#203

Post by santaclaus »

gervase wrote: post #58
legitster wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Nope, still gotta pay rent. Attended Columbia for grad school, had to compete in the Manhattan real estate market on > They do currently include decent health insurance, at least.

Ehhhh, it was of the 'if I get hit by a car and I am in the hospital for two months, I won't go bankrupt' variety. Better than nothing, at least.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#204

Post by btilly »

cortesoft wrote: post #154
gerbilly wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most universities have moved to act more and more like for-profit entities. I think this reflects a larger trend. Most institutions are taking on the rituals of the dominant organizing principle in society: the corporation. I believe this is why church groups are having "annual general meetings" and that formerly not for profit institutions are mimicking the organizational structure of corporations: meetings, hiera…

Isn't that just how large organizations are run? How else would you run a large organization except with layers of hierarchy and meetings?

That is how large INCOMPETENT organizations are run. And yes, large organizations have a trend towards incompetency.

Walk into a meeting, look around. Add up everyone's per hour salary. That is what having that meeting costs. Now look around and consider what each talking about the relevant bits to everyone else would take until a decision was made without the meeting. That's potentially how much more not having the meeting costs.

You'll conclude two things. Meetings are crazy expensive for the organization. Meetings can be worth it when the alternative is even more crazy expensive. But the meeting should be as efficient as possible. And you want people to only be in them when there is positive value from doing so.

I just ran a standup. I do this every day. 8 people for 15 minutes. Let's suppose their average salary is $50/hour. That's a $200 meeting. I spend another 30 minutes per day summarizing it, making notes available, and elsewhere keeping a status page up to date so that other people don't have to ask about that meeting.

That extra work keeps another 5 people from showing up. That keeps me from having to have another set of meetings with those people. That keeps the meeting from ballooning to 30 or 45 minutes per day.

In a good organization you want everyone thinking about meetings like I just did. Yes, lots of meetings are needed. Yes, important people will spend most of their time in meetings. But make it efficient. And eliminate any meeting, and any person from any meeting, that doesn't pull its weight.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#205

Post by anonacct37 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #163
khawkins wrote: post #83

The 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.

That's true in software. Source: mid 6 figures principal engineer w/ high school diploma.

Other jobs are pickier.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#206

Post by cortesoft »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #182
cortesoft wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just how large organizations are run? How else would you run a large organization except with layers of hierarchy and meetings?

There’s a notion that much of the hierarchy that exists in the world is unnecessary, and perpetuated only because it’s the status quo. A university for example doesn’t strictly need to manage the professors - you could have a very large university where the professors primarily manage themselves, with only a small administrative group. An organization arranged in this way wouldn’t need many meetings.

How would you decide budgets for those professors? How would you determine which departments are growing and where you need more resources? How would you budget things like building expansion, maintenance, shared facilities?

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#207

Post by trendia »

chrisseaton wrote: post #163
khawkins wrote: post #83

The 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.

You can get any job, but it's going to be harder and you're probably not going to be compesated as highly [0].

[0] https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21646220-it-dep...

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#208

Post by virmundi »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #87
virmundi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Hou…

Good? A large percentage of my friends dropped out of college freshmen or sophomore year because they were there to have fun and were not focused on school. Hell I wasnt that focused on school because there was a gym, an event every night, and four or five extra curricular to choose from. The most focused I ever was in college was in a couple community college classes I took over a summer. I wasnt friends with the pe…

Interestingly, it's been found that Collaboration is the Key to education. While you can do well in college without knowing or befriending them, you should do better when collaborating within a community of learners.

Kreijns, K., Kirschner, P. A., & Jochems, W. (2003). Identifying the pitfalls for social interaction in computer-supported collaborative learning environments: a review of the research. Computers in Human Behavior, 19(3), 335-353. doi:10.1016/s0747-5632(02)00057-2

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#209

Post by awal »

empath75 wrote: post #35
qaq wrote: post #2

The 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.

Several years ago in the animation industry things like Animation Mentor, AnimSchool, etc. popped up to provide cheap(er) classes that were much higher quality than what was offered at almost any big 4-year institution. They were able to do this by paying working professionals side money to generate content and provide student feedback. Code bootcamps seem to be a continuation of this theme.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#210

Post by cortesoft »

Retric wrote: post #199
cortesoft wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just how large organizations are run? How else would you run a large organization except with layers of hierarchy and meetings?

Our largest organizations don't have pervasive hierarchy and meetings which break down at extreme sizes. Markets for example are self organizing around price. Countries may or may not be even larger scale organizations. You can find smaller scale versions that operate on similar principles. https://hbr.org/2013/11/hierarchy-is-overrated

A market isn't an organization, and how would a university organize itself like a market?
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