Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
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Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#2So, you will be taught only by people who do not need to earn money to live. I.e., aristocrats. This is by design, I suppose.
Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#3This is the foundation of all academia currently. It’s a nice pyramid scheme while you’ve got it, I just finished witnessing my youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is on Tuesday.
Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#4This is the foundation of all academia currently. It’s a nice pyramid scheme while you’ve got it, I just finished witnessing my youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is on Tuesday.
> It’s a nice pyramid scheme...
Before I became aware of criticisms likening universities to pyramid schemes, I recall hearing a Stanford professor managing a large research team say something like: "For this project, we have around 150 PhD students exploring it further in many directions". I was astonished by the sheer scale of their capabilities, especially because I liked the subject and had hoped to explore it as a hobby with just a few like-minded friends.
Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#5Higher education doesn’t want to shed its clergy status. It’s like they can’t figure out if education is truly a pure pursuit or just this crazy godly thing that is priceless but somehow has this exorbitant real world price that the clergy seems to value …
They sell indulgences at this point, and I don’t think it’s a false analogy. Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. How do you question the price of something that’s equated to a gift from god or certainly using the same language - more or less.
Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#6This is the foundation of all academia currently. It’s a nice pyramid scheme while you’ve got it, I just finished witnessing my youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is on Tuesday.
Yep! Ask any PhD candidate in America how they love those poverty level wages!
Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#7This is the foundation of all academia currently. It’s a nice pyramid scheme while you’ve got it, I just finished witnessing my youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is on Tuesday.
Yep! Ask any PhD candidate in America how they love those poverty level wages!
Academia can be criticized as unsustainable as the OP does because the number of graduate students exceeds the number of secure employment positions available after one defends one’s dissertation or does a postdoc. However, the American model of PhD students being impoverished while studying isn’t the only one. In several European countries, the norm is for PhD students to be university employees under contract that receive a pretty standard middle-class salary. In various other countries, decent middle-class funding may have to come from outside the university, but it’s a semi-automatic process for anyone whose research plan was solid enough to get accepted as a PhD student in the first place.
Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#8I took a position at a prominent London university to teach one of their courses and I did it for the love of it, because it was less than two days contracting for an entire term of lecturing and marking. Forget that coming into college to teach was effectively an entire day of my time for a two hour lecture or seminar, I think I was paid by the hour. This practice goes on everywhere and the real losers are the students/customers.
Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#9All UK universities do this. Not necessarily a bad thing unlike how the article portrays it. PhD students (and depending on the institution, postdocs) in the UK get a stipend that has no mandated teaching hours. Teaching allows PhD students to earn some extra income within the university.
We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia. Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn £30-40k as a postdoc when earning £150k+ in big tech or finance isn't unusual. However, PhD students earning a little side income by marking lab reports or programming assessments isn't necessarily bad.
Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms
#10what do the people who make and manage money learn, and could clever people be taught this skill too? maybe instead of spending their afternoons on the golf course like wealth managers they could pursue research and teach. how difficult could it be?