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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

#241

Post by School-Cotton »

glonq wrote: post #225
chrisseaton wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree Then why do they require a degree at all? What specific skills will a degreed applicant have that a high school grad won't?

Statistically higher IQ and various other variables that positively correlate with work performance.

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

#242

Post by Top19 »

rayiner wrote: post #202

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 n…

I want to comment that academics provide such an incredible amount to the world we live in.

In a time of bullshit thought leaders and companies like Equifax who will tell you obvious lies, the academic discipline with its rigor, criticalness, and policing against self-promotion is a kind of last-bastion for intellect in the West. And even that is sort of cracking.

BTW one country has already tried the “you can only get useful degrees that have immediately available needs route”. It was the Soviet Union, in which everyone was an engineer, to such absurd levels Gorbachev got his degree in “Steel Metallurgy of Ball Bearings”.

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

#243

Post by giggles_giggles »

dragonwriter wrote: post #188
chrisseaton wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 be a soldier without ant college education (and qualify for a direct path to Officer Candidate School with a two-year degree or equivalent credits, IIRC), so giving “soldier” as on option with 4-year English degree is literally suggesting that it is worth the same as no college education at all.

You can only enlist without a degree. With a college education you can be an officer. In that case, the degree would almost certainly be worth it.

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

#244

Post by _rpd »

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…

> 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.

I think that some fault lies with unrealistic expectations. Every liberal arts graduate student knows that there are only enough positions for 1 in 10 of their cohort, but each firmly believes that they will be in that 10%. Worse, many who are talented enough to actually be in that 10% self-sabotage by being unwilling to move to locations they perceive as less than desirable.

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

#245

Post by maccard »

glonq wrote: post #225
chrisseaton wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree Then why do they require a degree at all? What specific skills will a degreed applicant have that a high school grad won't?

If you have a pool of applicants for a job, all with no relevant experience, it's an easy filter. You filter out all the people who haven't proven they can do something they agreed to do for 3/4 years.

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

#246

Post by throwaway613834 »

aphextron wrote: post #236
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…

There's nothing wrong with getting an English degree. Practically any uneducated person would benefit greatly from four years of college level writing courses no matter the level of "usefulness". The problem is the overarching mentality of the culture which says "you have X degree, so you must now try to use it for X". If you judge English degrees on the same level of a job training course it doesn't make sense. They…

> There's nothing wrong with getting an English degree. Practically any uneducated person would benefit greatly from four years of college level writing courses no matter the level of "usefulness".

I think you entirely missed what the comment said. The statement wasn't about there being anything "wrong" with getting an English degree. It was that there aren't enough jobs for English PhDs and comparably too many students getting them, hence driving the salary down:

>> 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

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

#247

Post by anonacct37 »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #96
3pt14159 wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

> The problem is, for many, there is no alternative. "I'm the first one in my family to be able to go to college." "Not going to college makes it impossible to find a job." "I have to get an education." When "No thanks, that's crazy, I'll do something else" is not an option, prices are going to do crazy things. Perfect example being healthcare costs.

That's not always true. Most people seem to think they "need" a car, yet the price of cars isn't astronomical.

But you're right that even though the cause is noble (education available for everyone) our current mechanism of funding it results in runaway prices and for-profit scams.

I don't think everyone should not go to college and learn to code though. I think in the near future coding will be a basic piece of literacy, but only one piece. I think it's reasonable to imagine a future where just like people study english and learn to do some writing in english 101, they will also learn the skills to munge a csv file or write an sql statement in programming 101, and both will be part of a well rounded education.

The last thing this industry needs is a flood of high school graduates creating shitty insecure websites. I say this as someone without a degree, who knows first hand that although it's possible to make it w/o a degree, it shouldn't be anyone's first choice.

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

#248

Post by wfo »

msla wrote: post #231
wfo wrote: post #91

Say it with me friends and colleagues, Union. This is the future for all of us, when programming becomes commoditized just as teaching has. When our salaries are pushed to the bottom. We are not owners, we are not capitalists, we are not bosses, we are people with a skill you can learn on the internet and a corresponding talent for it. Either a) this will happen to us as programmers, b) we have credentialing and gate…

Unions are great at establishing entrenched interests. If you need to qualify to join a union, or to do a specific job in a union, the qualifications will be owned by the companies which are politically powerful. Imagine being unable to qualify as a C++ programmer unless and until you've qualified on Microsoft Windows and Visual C++. Imagine being unable to qualify as a Perl programmer at all , because Perl isn't one…

>Unions are great at establishing entrenched interests.

s/Unions/Companies/g

Unions can be for unskilled labor. They can exist without qualifications and gatekeeping. That's why I presented that as a distinct option, separate from them. All they need to do is bargain with employers to make working conditions better. That's it. Unpaid overtime "just this once because we're all part of the team, guys" every month? We strike and make a deal that says you have to pay us OT. 80 hour weeks on salary for 40? ops strikes and your system goes down and nobody fixes it until you make a deal and cut hours. Employer tries to put a clause in your contract that says they own your side projects? They have to go through the union first, and programmers vote hell no.

The rest of the stuff you've cooked up inside your head are sure things I can imagine but they have nothing to do with unions; they are imaginary FUD.

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

#249

Post by sureshv »

danso wrote: post #137

It's fitting that the lengthiest non-anonymous example is the English teacher at San Jose state. Her salary might seem normal in other parts of the country, but it's very skimpy in San Jose/Silicon Valley/Peninsula http://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/…

I'm not sure this is sustainable for either PAUSD or SJUSD given the pension obligations.

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

#250

Post by ProTurist »

Tuition and fees keep going up, but the quality of education is heavily determined by the quality of professor. We aren't getting the best professors, because somehow despite record profits for universities, their pay doesn't seem to go up. An adjunct professor, which I personally know people who have been adjuncts for 10 years, average $42k. That's so ridiculously low as every university that I know of is having huge buildings erected.
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